Continuing our “Now You Know” series, we will be discussing backlinking and how it can help your site.
What is Backlinking?
A backlink is one important aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Backlinks are links from another site that link back to your page. Backlinking is a good and worthwhile way to improve your ranking on search engines by raising your site’s authority on a particular topic.
How Does Backlinking Work?
Say someone writes a blog about SVGs and uses your site as a reference. They will take your link and add it to their site, which in turn, with guide readers who click on it to you. In the eyes of the almighty Google, your site is considered important enough for people to reference, so that can give it a boost in search rankings.
How Can You Get Backlinks from Other Sites?
Getting other sites to link to yours can be tricky. There are a few strategies that you can try, like:
- Create sharable content like infographics
- Write a guest blog for another website
- Join social media groups in your industry and post content there that people can share
You want to be careful when guest blogging. Google is concerned that if you guest blog for the sole purpose of building links, the quality could lower and become spammy—especially if the blog is sent to multiple sites.
Google highly recommends participating in your industry community and answer questions that anyone has to build links. The more relevant your content is, the more people will link to it naturally.
Buying Backlinks Is Bad SEO
We’ve mentioned that you shouldn’t pay for your links before. Buying backlinks to improve your ranking is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. No one is linking to your site naturally and seeing it as an authority. It’s like if someone held a concert, but the only reason it’s filled with people is because they were paid to be there.