Backlinks Explained: The Traffic Building Power of SEO Backlinks

By Mike Cynar

Backlinks don’t have to be as elusive as you think, but SEO backlinks are vital to boosting your traffic. Find out how to get backlinks in our essential guide.

You’ve heard that backlinks are important for your SEO, mainly to drive traffic to your website. But have you given up because the articles you read about backlinks are so dense and confusing?

In 2020, SEO backlinks are vital to building your business. And we don’t want you to miss out on all the opportunities waiting for you.

So we’ve simplified the process so it doesn’t sound like rocket science. Because it isn’t. In this post, you’ll discover how to get SEO backlinks the easy way. Let’s get more traffic!

What Are Backlinks?

Before we talk about how to get backlinks, let’s discuss what these links are. Backlinks, also called incoming or inbound links, are links from one company’s website to another.

Search engines place a lot of value on good backlinks. If your page has a fair amount of links going back to your site, it gets better organic search engine rankings.

Why Are Backlinks Important to Search Engines?

Think of a backlink as a vote. The more votes your website has in backlinks, the higher you will rank in search. Here’s why they’re important:

• Each vote informs Google that your content is valuable
• The more of these votes you earn, the higher your website will rank.
• They remain high on the list of determining page rank

Google has used backlinks to measure the quality of page ranking for years. And no matter how many times Google or other search engines change their algorithm, quality backlinks still remain high on the list when determining page rank.

What Is a High-Quality Backlink?

If you want to rank high in search, your backlink needs to be a quality backlink. Just any backlink won’t do.

In fact, one high-quality backlink is better than having a thousand backlinks with low quality. Let’s look at the difference and the qualities that matter.

They Come From Authoritative Websites

Would you rather get a degree from Columbia University or some other small-town community college no one has ever heard of? Backlinks work in the same way.

And Google notices the difference between a little-known website and a domain authority. The more domain authority a website has the more value it can bring to your company website.

If you link to a high domain authority website like Moz, and you get a link back to your site, you’ll very likely see a spike in your organic website traffic that day.

That’s because Google, or your preferred search engine, considers Moz as a high domain authority website.

They Contain Your Target Keyword In the Anchor Text

Right now you might be wondering “what the heck is anchor text?” Or maybe you know. Anchor text is the word you click on that links to the website link.

Make sure your anchor link has your primary keyword in the visible text. There’s a direct connection between high keyword ranking and keyword-rich anchor text. But be careful.

If you do this too frequently, Google catches on and will consider your website as one that uses a black hat linking strategy which is not good. Google penalizes sites with the “exact match” anchor text as one of these strategies and can penalize your site.

They Link to a Site That Covers the Same Topic

Google checks that the sites you link to correlate to the subject of your article or web page. Google’s goal is to provide the reader with the most relevant information to their queries.

This means if you published an article on home decor and the site you link to is a quality home decor site like Elle Decor, this will improve your rank.

Does the page you’re linking to have little or nothing to do with your article topic? Don’t do this. It can work against you and negatively affect your SEO. Google needs to see there’s a relationship between your site and your backlink.

They Contain a Dofollow Link

There are two types of link tags in relation to backlinks: dofollow links and nofollow links. To put it simply, here’s the difference:

• Dofollow links tell search engines to follow them. And nofollow link tags tell them not to.
• If your link has a nofollow tag, Google, Yahoo, and Bing will ignore it.
• The majority of backlinks are dofollow links
• Nofollow links don’t hold too much weight in SEO.

What are examples of nofollow link tags? They include these examples:

• Paid ads
• Comments on blogs
• Press releases

These link types weren’t intended for SEO purposes. However, you can easily change them in your website’s CSS.

They Haven’t Linked To Your Website Before

For the best result, you want a backlink from a site that has not linked to you in the past. Google determines ranking by the number of different sites that link back to you. Not the number of backlinks.

Follow these SEO backlink best practices to help your SEO:

• Post something worth linking to on your website like a cool video or infographic
• Connect with reporters and the media and send them a press release
• Promote your videos quality websites can find it
• Consider writing a guest post that will link to your website

These best practices help your SEO. They make people want to link to your website.

Taking the Mystery Out of SEO Backlinks in 2020

As you can see, SEO backlinks aren’t rocket science. With a little knowledge of backlinks, you can drive more organic traffic to your website and turn your leads into customers.

Short on time but still want the benefits of organic traffic? Contact us today and begin earning more trusted links to your company website.