The Lowdown on Backlinks
In layman’s terms, a backlink is a way for the search engine to verify the authenticity of a website and obtain an endorsement from other sites that a certain business and its content is trustworthy and high-quality. They are usually created during a blog exchange when two websites that offer a fairly similar, but not identical, service will create content for each other’s site with their own keyword and hyperlink included. This creates a ‘link’ back to their own website that the search engine spiders can crawl between. Read on as we go over everything there is to know about backlinks…
The Different Types of Backlinks
The first thing that marketers need to know about backlinks is that they aren’t all equal. In fact, there are at least four different types! For example, there are No-Follow backlinks which link to a website that is considered poor-quality. This can prevent ranking penalisations because a no-follow tag in the HMTL code tells the search engine that you don’t vouch for the content that exists on that site. On the other hand, a Do-Follow backlink is created when you do want to vouch for the quality of a site, and this is the default form of a backlink so there is no need to add any HTML tags. Low-quality backlinks are those which can be bought and should be avoided because they often come from unauthorised sources, and finally, internal backlinks are created when the pages within a domain connect together and are often used as part of on-site SEO.
The Importance of Backlinks
Backlinks are implemented as part of an SEO or internet marketing strategy in order to increase a website’s ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and this makes them incredibly important. After all, the search engine will usually take them into consideration when ranking a website. In addition to this, backlinks can also help the pages on a website get indexed faster, create referral traffic and develop brand authority.
How to Obtain Backlinks
As stated above, backlinks are often created during a blog exchange. After all, high-quality content is the most effective way to obtain a backlink that the search engine will see favourably. With this said, it is also possible to create backlinks via guest blogging and this allows marketers to establish a foundation for a future blog exchange.
In SEO, it is important to ensure that backlinks are created between two high-quality websites in order to obtain the best results from the search engine. After all, less is more when it comes to this type of promotion. To find out more information about backlinks and the role they play in internet marketing, get in contact with a member of the Internet Marketing Questions team today!