If you’ve been following our blog, you will now be familiar with the 3 most important aspects of On-page SEO: keyword research, metadata creation and using internal links. Now let’s jump into the second phase: Off-page SEO. Today, we’ll explore the first and most important thing you can do outside your website to popularize your brand online: creating backlinks.
It’s shocking to learn that more than 60% of all web pages have ZERO backlinks!1
Read our detailed introduction to Off-page SEO here.
Why are backlinks so important for SEO?
A backlink – also called an ‘inbound link’ or ‘incoming link’ – is a link that originates outside your website and leads users to your site when clicked. If you’ve ever read a blog or an article online and clicked on some anchor text there that leads you to another website, you’ve clicked on a backlink.
The main reason why backlinks are so important is that they indicate how trusted and valuable your site is. It’s exactly like word-of-mouth recommendation, except here it’s one website recommending another website. If many online resources – blogs, news articles, press releases, other websites – link to your website, Google’s algorithms figure out that your website must be important, and thus will jump your page up in the search rankings.
Click here to read more about what backlinks are and how they work.
Two ways to create effective backlinks
There are two ways to do this: one is using your own resources, and second, using external resources.
By yourself, every time you post something about your brand on social media or write an article on another forum or website, make sure to include your own website’s link with the proper anchor text. This will generate valuable backlinks to your site. In fact, companies that create blogs receive nearly 100% more backlinks than those that don’t!2
Once you’ve done that, you can start creating a strategy to score backlinks from external sources. Make sure they are trusted people, sites or forums: a link from a trusted authority means so much more than just asking a random friend to mention your company’s website in a post.
Link outreach
We work a lot of with entrepreneurs and small businesses. They often have one question: when I myself have just started out, how can I get backlinks from reputable sources? What they mean is that they aren’t big enough to be written about in newspapers or get called for interviews. So, in such cases, how can they get enough backlinks? Through a process called link outreach.
Outreach, as the term suggests, involves you reaching out to other prominent individuals in your field of interest, and actively asking them to write about you or feature your website. In return, you can offer to write about them or feature links back to their site on your own content.
You can also start posting on different forums about topics on which you are an expert. Soon, as your expertise grows, your presence there will attract readers back to your side (as long as you’ve got your website link in your posts, writings, profile or author bio, of course).
And there you have it: that’s how and why backlinks are important. So, whether by your own efforts or in collaboration with others, you need to create good-quality backlinks for your website. It is one of the best things you can do in Off-page SEO to get more visitors and grow your brand.
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- Ahrefs, Search Traffic Study
- Hubspot, Business Blogging
