What is a Backlink and How to Build One
Many people do not understand what is a backlink. The World Wide Web is an enormous place where millions of new pages are added every day. If you are one of the many adding contents on the internet, you have to find a way to stand out. After all, to generate an audience base and followers, your content needs to be accessible and visible. So how can one go about it? One of the techniques that you can use to get more eyeballs is by creating ‘backlinks’.
What is a Backlink?
Before going into the explanation of backlinks, let’s understand how the concept came into existence.
One can find numerous web pages and directories online. Most webpages try to establish a connection with other pages in order to draw audience traffic. In other words, different pages ‘converse’ with each other in order to draw the attention of the audience. This happens when one website provides a link to another website. Hope you understood what is a backlink.
Consider this example:
A fashion brand XYZ has uploaded an article about fashion trends for Summer 2020. In the article, one will find a lot of information on the kind of apparels that trend during the season.
Now, you have a website where you write articles on the latest trends of fashion and recently, you wrote a blog on what colours remain trendy during the summer season. In short, your article is an extension of XYZ’s article. If such is the case, the article on XYZ’s website can provide a link to your blog, suggesting its audiences to head over to your article to know more about trending colours during the summer season. In this scenario, you have a backlink from XYZ’s website.
Why are Backlinks Important?
As explained above, backlinks help direct traffic to your website from other websites. If you have a backlink from another website, audiences find it easier to discover your webpage and read your content. This means that websites can direct audiences to other websites where they can find more information.
In a way, backlinking is a way for websites to recommend other websites. And this is extremely important for visibility. Based on the number and quality of backlinks, Google and other search engines decide whether your page should be shown to other people. This means that higher the backlinks and better the quality, greater the chances for your webpage to rank higher on ‘Search Engine Result Page’ or SERPs.
So How Do You Generate Backlinks?
Here’s the thing about backlinks. They only work to your advantage if they come from a website with good ‘Domain Authority’. This means that you have to carefully choose the backlinks that connect your website. Some of the ways of getting good backlinks are:
- Creating Great Content:
Any content that you create should add value, remain useful and relevant. Only then other websites will be willing to provide a backlink to your page. Infographics, listicles, video-embedded blogs etc. have a higher chance of getting good quality backlinks
- Building Backlinks:
Reach out to website owners with a proposition of linking your pages to theirs. You can also participate in forums and by leaving a comment, replying to comments, you can create a backlink to your page.
Find pages relevant to your field and create content that contributes additional value and information and then ask those pages to provide a link of your page.
- Fixing Broken Links:
There are several broken links on the website (Error: 404 Not found!). You can fix the links and then ask the webpages to connect to your link instead of the broken links.
There are several other techniques to get great backlinks for your website. We shall discuss this in more detail in the next article.