What are Backlinks?

Last modified: July 12, 2020

Backlinks are a fundamental part of your website’s marketing strategy. They help with your ranking, bring in traffic and build a reputation for your store. Every week, you should be looking to increase backlinks to help your website succeed.

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks are when another website has linked to your site on their own pages. There are many different types of backlinks and backlinks can directed to any page. For instance, backlinks can be to your homepage or they can be to specific blog posts, product pages or free resources on your site.

Backlinks used to be the main way that websites used to be ranked. However, because the ranking system was abused by website owners, Google and other search engines have reduced the importance of backlinks, but they are still a vital component.

How To Encourage New Backlinks To Your Site

There are two types of backlinks that you’re looking at. The first are ‘No-Follow Backlinks’. These are worthless to your business. They simply point the visitor to your page. While this might help visitors from one site to visit you, you won’t get any accreditation from the search engines and therefore, your rank will not be improved.

Alternatively, ‘Follow Backlinks’ are those where the website is giving you points which contribute to your website’s rank on Google and other search engines. These are the links you want to encourage.

There are several ways to encourage these links. The first is to write lots of content on your site, especially blog posts. Sites that produce more than 15 blog posts per month will have more backlinks naturally.

Another option is to guide post on other sites. You should approach similar sites to your own and then create content for them to publish on their site. From there, you can add one or two links to your site.

A final option to register your site on numerous other sites that allow for businesses or websites to be listed. This is a great option, but there are certain problems. First of all, not all sites offer follow backlinks, so check before submitting. Second, not all sites are equal. The more popular the site, the more value the backlink is to your site.

Another option is to create comments on blogs. However, not all blogs allow for website addresses to be added, some moderators will remove them if you write a sales-focused comment or the link could be a no-follow link.

Never buy backlinks. This is against the terms and conditions of your site being ranked on Google and this can lead to you being penalised and de-listed off the search engine.

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How Many Backlinks Do You Need?

There is no definitive number on how many backlinks your website should have. The more you have, the better position you’ll be in. Not just on your initial ranking, but also on protecting yourself from new websites who get a surge on their Page Rank.

Therefore, you should never stop trying to create backlinks for your site. If possible, create about 10-15 links per week.

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