As we are headed into the digital era, it is way more important to understand the factors that tend to affect the Internet traffic and ranking factors that might help in landing your website on the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Out of all the strategies to increase the overall site rankings and traffic organically, backlinking turns out to be one of the most effective ways of ensuring the same. Backlinks are considered as one of the most vital ways in which search engines tend to rank a particular website. While backlinks are important, it might be difficult to understand its working at the same time.
What is a Backlink?
A backlink is simply referred to as a link available on the Internet that tends to lead back to your site. A backlink can be any link or page on the Internet. It is simply a link that establishes a connection from one page to the other and is responsible for linking back to the specific page of your site.
Backlinks are also referred to as IBL (Inbound Links) and serve to be the building blocks to ensuring effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your site. The number of backlinks your site has turns out to be an indicator of the site’s popularity or its importance with the leading search engines. Search Engines, including Google, are known to give more importance to sites that reflect the presence of a higher number of backlinks. The search engines also regard such websites as more credible and relevant in the specific search query.
Why are Backlinks Important?
While the total number backlinks are important, it is also important to ensure that just the number of backlinks will do no good to your site performance. It is also vital to ensure that you are making use of high-quality backlinks for boosting the overall ranking for your site. The quality of the inbound links with respect to the content of the site plays a vital role when the search engines are looking forward to analyzing the credibility of your website. The content of the site that you have backlinks with needs to be rich in quality & relevant to the content of your site. The more relevant backlinks you have linking to your site, the better it helps the search engines in determining the credibility of your online presence.
The experts suggest that it is easier to ensure higher rankings for your site by making use of rich-quality backlinks or inbound links. As the algorithms of the leading search engines tend to get updated and complex from time to time, the importance of backlinking your site only skyrocketed. The more authoritative your site is, the higher will be its ranking from the backlinks that you choose to lead back to your site. Backlinks are known to provide a realistic avenue for the site visitors to come across your site. For instance, if the visitor is going through some informative blog online, and he or she comes across a link that points back to your site, it leads to the incoming traffic from backlinking. For the visitors to find interest in your site, it is important to establish the inbound link to some relevant page or content on your site. The process is referred to as “referral traffic,” and it tends to have an affirmative impact on your website’s online reputation.
Tips to Create Relevant Backlinks for Improved Ranking
Now that you know the importance of backlinks or inbound links for your site’s ranking and traffic generation, you should also know about the effective ways in which you can create a strong, relevant backlink. While creating backlinks might appear to be an overwhelming task, you can still come across a myriad of ways to create relevant backlinks for your site. Here are some:
- Online & Local Directory Submission: You can consider listing your site in some online or local directories. It will help you in achieving a strong backlink. However, it might be a no-follow backlink. Irrespective of the fact, some of the leading online directories like Yelp, Four Square, Yellow Pages, and others try making it simpler for the potential customers to search for your site. Moreover, using the local, online directories, the end users can also access your site to go through the products or services that you have to offer.
- Guest Blogging: When you wish to achieve high-quality, high-ranking backlinks for your site, guest blogging is one of the best strategies out there. When you are looking forward to implementing guest blogging, you should perform in-depth research on the high-quality sites in the given industry to search for the ones that accept guest blogs. Then, you are required to create and post high-quality content that fit the guidelines of the respective guest portals. You must make sure that your content contains relevant links to certain pages and services on your site. This would help the end readers to get to your site directly through the links present on the guest blogs.
- Blog Comments: Another way in which you can garner backlinks or inbound links for your site is to visit some of the leading, authoritative sites and go through their blogs. When you come across a blog that is delivering great results with respect to the readers’ attention, you can comment on the same by appreciating the quality or information of the blog. As you leave a comment on the blog, you should not forget posting the link to your website or pages at the same time. While these might serve as the no-follow backlinks, they can still help you in building a reliable relationship with other authoritative sites as well as businesses in the given industry. It is important to ensure that you leave the comments on relevant, appropriate posts or blogs in the given industry.
Make the most of high-quality, relevant backlinks to generate more traffic and improve the overall site rankings.