What are backlinks?
Backlinks, inbound links or incoming links, are an important segment of your off-page SEO strategy. These are created when one website leads (links) to another. The link from an external website, leading to your page is what is called a backlink.
The importance of backlinks?
Backlinks play an important role in the page ranking of your site and should be an essential part of your SEO strategy. The reason behind its great importance is because each backlink creates a certain amount of trust factor, that the content they’re leading to is valuable with quality content.
Another way of looking at it is, backlinks to your website are a statement to search engines that others vouch for your content. If more than one site, link to the same webpage or website, search engines can deduce that content present on that page has some valuable content, and hence worth surfacing on a SERP.
Earning and giving backlinks
Link earning or link building is the process of “earning” these backlinks that lead to your website. This is an essential component of off-site SEO.
A website may have more than one backlink, and each of those may be inherently more valuable than others. It’s a no brainer that followed backlinks from high-authority and well-recognised sites will have a higher value than non-recognised or low traffic pages. Example: Imagine a backlink from a recognised site like Mercedes Benz. The relevance of the main domain linking to your website also plays a vital role in your page ranking. Sometimes even being mentioned on high-quality websites can boost your brand.
Just as the backlinks you earn will differ in value than others, the value you offer and generate to different sites will always differ. When deciding to link to an external site, there are certain choices you should make regarding the page from which you link. These include its page authority, content, search engine accessibility, and so on. Whether you choose to follow or nofollow the link, the anchor text along with any other meta tags associated with the linking page may have a heavy impact on the value you present.
Competitive backlink research
This goes without saying that thorough research is important for winning the complex backlinking game. Hence backlinks can be time-consuming to earn. When it comes to link building, new site owners who wish to expand their reach and incoming traffic may find it confusing to know where to start.
You can carry out a competitive backlink research here by examining the backlink profile and the assortment of pages and domains linking to a website to a fellow competitor that’s already ranking well for your target keywords, you can gain insight concerning the link building that may have helped them.
When building a competitive keyword strategy, put some amount of research into online tools that will assist you to uncover the right links so you’ll be able to target those domains in your own link building campaigns.
