What are Backlinks? How They are important in SEO?

by Vishal Kaushik Digital Marketer

If you have read about SEO somewhere or you are a newbie blogger, then you must be a little familiar with the term 'Backlink'. You also must have thought what is the backlink and what is its importance in SEO. You use the on-page SEO techniques like keywords, meta description etc. to increase the traffic of your websites, but in the absence of more information, you may ignore the importance of backlinks.

Backlinks are very important for your blog because on the basis of backlinks, search engines check the authority of any website. Backlinks are an important factor in determining the search rank of a website by search engines.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks, as the name suggests itself, are links that connect your web page to an another web page. The link that appears on any other page, when visitors click on your page, are called backlinks. They are also called Inbound Links (IBLs). These are called Backlink because they point back to your page from another page.

Backlinks which are located in our own domain are called Internal Links and Backlink located on another website is called External Link. Proper use of Quality Backlinks greatly improves the Search Engine Ranking of your website.

Backlinks also help Search Engine in finding links to your website and accessing your website through them. Especially for a new website or blog, creating Quality Backlinks is even more important as it makes quick search and indexing of your site easy for Search Engines. At the same time, they send referral Traffic to your website or blog, which is Targeted Traffic and its Bounce Rate is very low.

Importance of Quality Backlinks:

Quality Backlinks are those backlinks that are obtained from a high Page Rank website and a website which is related to the content of your blog. For example, if you are blogging on Health Niche, then it is important for you the backlinks that you are getting from other high page rank Health Websites.

A High Quality Backlinks can be thousand times more effective than any Normal Backlink. Quality Backlinks are very important to improve the Search Rankings of our website. If your content is getting organic backlinks from a website with a good and high page rank, then the chances of getting a higher position in search engine rankings than other pages of that page or content increases manifold. So it should be your goal to create quality backlinks to your homepage and other pages.

6 Ways to Build Quality Backlinks:

Many times, bloggers do not get any benefit in SEO even after creating a lot of backlinks to their blog or website. The only reason for this is that their backlinks do not have quality backlinks. For example, suppose your website is about Technology Reviews and you have created your backlink on a website related to Dog Care. Such backlinks will not benefit your search engine optimization in any way. Because along with Search Engines Quantity, we also see similarity of both Backlink Hosting Site and Targeted Site.

Before making backlinks, keep in mind that any blog post you are making links to should be of high quality content in that blog post and if the user clicks and reads your blog post then it should benefit. The other important thing is that do not make Backlink everywhere but only on such Relevant Websites on which the user will benefit from leaving the link.

To create quality backlinks you can use the following Ways-

Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to generate Quality Backlinks. This is the most commonly used method. You have to find some such famous blogs related to the topic of your website which accept guest posting. Then write an Attractive and Informative Post on those blogs and include a link to your blog in that post. Not only will you get a good backlink, but the visitors of that website will read your post and will be attracted towards your website.

Comment on other blogs:

Commenting on other blog posts is also a good way to get backlink. It should be noted that the blog supports Do-Follow Links. Do-Follow Links means those links from which we get the benefit of Backlinks. All Blogs do not support Do-Follow Links and hence we do not get any referral from the comments made on them. Therefore, we should comment on more and more Do-Follow Blogs. Leave only a small comment, comment also add some value only then you will get the benefit.

Use Discussion Platforms:

Some discussion platforms are also very helpful in generating Quality Backlinks. The most prominent among them are Quora.com and Yahoo Answers. Take part in the discussion related to your Blogging Niche running on these Discussion Platforms, answer the questions logically and leave the link of your website there. People will visit your website after being impressed by your answer there.

Use Blogging Community:

Make full use of Blogging Communities like Indiblogger, DoSplash, Inbound and Blog Engage. Post the content of your website on them. If your content is good and informative then you will receive Upvotes. This will not only improve your search engine ranking, as well as the backlink of your website on these communities will also increase your website traffic in a huge amount.

Exchange links with other bloggers related to your Niche:

Exchange links with other bloggers related to the area of your website. With this, your website will get backlinks. In Link Exchange, two bloggers place each other's links in their own blog post, both of which get quality backlinks. This is a free and easy way to get Quality Backlinks and it also has guaranteed SEO Boost. But keep in mind that it should not only be for backlinks, your links should benefit the user, otherwise this link can harm the search engines.

Use internal links:

Internal links are the quality backlinks that we use to give a link to another post in one post of our website. If they are used properly, the search engine ranking can improve significantly. Search Engine Ranking is determined by your keywords, visitors and the time they spend on your website. The biggest advantage of internal links is that they are helpful in moving Visitor from one post to another post, this allows the visitor to spend more time on your website. This way your Search Rankings improve.

Apart from these methods, you can also use Social Media, Blog Directories and Public Forums to get quality backlinks. Quality Backlinks always prove to be useful in increasing traffic and SEO.