Forget Organic Search Engine Rankings–Start Building Backlinks

If you want to show up in search, you need to be building backlinks

Imagine you’ve just launched a new website for your business and are eager to watch it climb the search engine rankings. You’ve published good quality content on your website, used the right keywords, and done everything you can to make it SEO-friendly. But despite your efforts, your website is still not landing on the first page.

It is where link building comes in. You can significantly improve your website’s ranking on SERPs by obtaining high-quality backlinks from trustworthy and authoritative websites. A recent study found that websites with multiple backlinks ranked higher on Google than those with fewer links.

These are some key link-building statistics that you need to know from Search Logistics

What are backlinks?

Backlinks, often called incoming or inbound links, are links on one website that take you to another. These backlinks are a crucial component of organic SEO and may significantly raise your website’s traffic, authority, and trustworthiness.

Backlinks, in other words, act as “votes of confidence” for a website’s content, suggesting that other websites value the material enough to link to it. A considerable number of high-quality backlinks from reliable websites can boost a website’s search engine rating and attract more visitors.

Types of backlinks

Backlinks are of two main types, i.e., dofollow backlinks and nofollow backlinks.

• Dofollow Backlinks: Dofollow backlinks carry “link juice” or “authority” from one website to another, making them a vital part of SEO and organic search engine optimization. These links boost a website’s search engine rating, attract traffic, and are essential for efficient link building.
• Nofollow Backlinks: Nofollow links do not convey “link juice” from one site to another. Nofollow links do not influence a website’s ranking or organic search engine optimization.

These two types of backlinks are further classified into several other types, e.g., guest blogging backlinks, editorial backlinks, directory links, etc.

Why are backlinks important for SEO?

Backlinks play a significant role in improving a page’s ranking by bolstering its authority, relevance, and credibility in the eyes of search engines. However, that’s not it. Backlinks prove beneficial to sites in other ways, as well.

• Backlinks are profitable for new websites as links from a reputable website to your website will help the crawlers recognize you as a trustworthy source. It will also signal the search engine that your website deserves a high spot in the search engine results page (SERP).
• Backlinks improve SEO ranking and help establish a website as a trustworthy and reliable source of information. Backlinks help drive referral traffic to your website from other sites, improve brand exposure, and help create high-quality, shareable content. Moreover, if a credible site links to your website, the audience will see you as a reliable source of information.
• A solid link-building strategy can significantly improve a website’s overall online presence and increase its chances of success in organic search engine optimization.

How to build backlinks for your website?

When building backlinks, knowing which keywords to target is essential. You must learn to identify keywords relevant to your website and niche. After you’ve completed keyword research, here are some easy strategies that you can use to build high-quality backlinks for your website:

Reaching out to other bloggers in your niche

Outreach involves contacting other website owners or bloggers in your niche or industry to establish a relationship and request a backlink–build backlinks! It is an effective link-building strategy, allowing you to build relationships and gain links from high-authority websites.

You need to identify websites relevant to your industry and have the high domain authority to use outreach for link building. Once done with that, you need to provide them with a product that’ll deliver value to their audience, and in return, they will link back to your website.

Try a broken link-building strategy

Broken link building is a link-building strategy in which you look for broken or dead links on other websites and then contact the owners to suggest they replace the broken link with a link to your content.

A broken link building strategy is an effective way to build high-quality backlinks to your website and improve your search engine rankings. However, finding relevant broken links and creating valuable content to replace them requires time and effort.

Guest posts are an integral part of building backlinks

Guest posting on other websites is an easy way to build backlinks. You can find websites relevant to your niche and offer to write guest posts for them. In exchange, you can ask for a backlink to your website. Ensuring that the content you are writing for the other website is valuable and worthy is crucial. Otherwise, your effort will be wasted.

Something else to keep in mind. High quality posts means long-form content. 1500-3000 words. 

Replicate your competitors’ best backlinks

Replicating your competitors’ best backlinks means analyzing the websites currently linking to your competitors and identifying the most valuable and relevant links. SEO link-building tools can help you identify your competitors’ backlinks and examine their quality.

Once you’ve identified the most valuable links, you can obtain similar links for your site. It might involve creating similar content or reaching out to the same websites to pitch your content or resources that would fit their audience well.

Using infographics as part of your link-building strategy

Infographics are a powerful tool for link building. To use infographics for link building, create a high-quality infographic and share it on your website and social media channels. You can also reach out to relevant websites or blogs in your niche and offer to provide the infographic as a resource they can share with their audience. You can request a link to your website in return for the infographic.

Building linkable assets

Linkable assets are in-depth guides, data-driven studies, interactive tools, infographics, and videos. They are excellent ways to build backlinks to your website. Reach out to relevant websites or blogs and offer your linkable asset as a resource for their audience.

By consistently creating high-quality linkable assets and promoting them through targeted outreach efforts, you can build a strong backlink profile that improves your website’s authority and visibility in search engines.

What to avoid when backlinking?

Although backlinking is an essential part of SEO, there are some practices you should avoid to prevent getting penalized by search engines. Some such techniques are:

• Low-quality links: Links from low-quality sites or sites irrelevant to your website’s content can harm your website’s ranking. Search engines consider such links spam and can become critical of your website.
• Keyword stuffing: It is best to avoid using the exact anchor text for all of your backlinks because doing so might be interpreted as an attempt to deceive search engines.
• Link exchanges: Link exchange was a common strategy in the past. However, nowadays, search engines have become incredibly smart and increasingly disapprove of it.
• Paid links: Paying a site to get links from that site is another example of black-hat SEO practices. Paying any site for links is considered a violation of the SE protocol, and it can result in severe consequences.

Conclusion

Link building is an integral part of SEO that can help boost your website’s rankings. 

• Organic SEO alone is insufficient to gain a competitive edge in the SERPs.
• To get ahead of the competition, you need to use link-building techniques to increase your website’s visibility and authority.
• In this post, we have discussed link-building, its different types, and how you can effectively use it for organic SEO. 
• By using organic SEO and the link building strategies mentioned in this blogpost, you can secure a position on the first page on SERP. So make sure to read the whole post to uplevel your SEO game.