This short guide outlines what backlinks for SEO are, how to check the backlinks you already have and how to earn better ones for your site and brand.
If you’re interested in boosting your website’s web presence, you’re going to have to focus on search engine optimization, or SEO, sooner or later. SEO is vital to how you appear in search results, and even an anti-trust suit against Google doesn’t seem likely to change the importance of SEO moving forward. That being said, SEO relies on a variety of factors, so it can be difficult to determine which one to prioritize if you’re just starting out.
One of the best ways to improve your ranking is to harness the power of backlinks for SEO. Backlinks basically refer to websites that link to yours, but they can work in a positive or negative way depending on a few different factors.
What you need to know about backlinks for SEO
Here’s everything you need to know about backlinks as well as what sorts of tools you can harness to improve your website’s ranking.
What are backlinks for SEO?
Think back to writing an essay in college or high school. Do you remember having to cite your works? Citing other authors, academic journals, and writers was a way to show that your position had weight, ultimately illustrating the trustworthiness of your essay. Backlinks serve a similar function online, acting as online citations from one website to another.
Just like there are good resources to cite in an essay and bad resources to cite in an essay, there are also good and bad backlinks to get. For example, good backlinks are often editorially-based and come from reputable websites with high domain authority.
Bad backlinks for SEO come from suspicious or spammy websites, and can actually hurt your SEO ranking, even if you only have a few of them. As such, it’s important to know what backlinks for SEO your website has and where they’re coming from.
How do you check your website’s backlinks?
So, how do you know whether or not you even have a single backlink to your website in the first place? Thankfully, you don’t need to be a search engine optimization expert to do so. In fact, the best backlink checker will give you all the information you need about your website’s backlinks report free of charge.
A good backlink checker gives you insight into not only your own website but information about the websites linking to yours as well. Qualities like domain authority and whether or not a website is considered good or bad can help you weed out useful backlinks for SEO from toxic ones.
A free backlink checker tool can give you all of the information you need, and can even help you understand the trust flow and citation flow surrounding your backlink profile. All of these factors help you strategize how to sharpen your keyword research and improve the number of links and quality of links pointing to your website.
How do you get better backlinks for SEO?
There are myriad ways to get better backlinks for SEO to your website. Some people choose to guest blog on other websites with a high domain authority or page authority, while others look for ways to get other writers and publications to link to their website.
Some businesses even get extra creative and create valuable pages or infographics that link back to their website and are likely to get shared widely within their sector. Even simple content marketing strategies have a role to play in getting more high-quality backlinks to your own site.
Conclusion
If all of this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Search engine optimization is a full-time job if you want to do it well, and when you factor in the research hours it takes to analyze your website and craft a strategy that will work for you, the number of work hours becomes even larger. Remember that there’s no shame in consulting with a team of content marketers or link building experts to see what they might be able to help you with when it comes to backlinks for SEO.
