Backlinking: What Is It And Why Do You Need It?

There is one great secret that most people just don’t get when it comes to their website. And with a little help, and a few good strategies…well, let’s just say you could stand way ahead of your competitors.

When it comes to taking your business to the digital world, the focus of it all is “Visibility”.
All effort made by SEO specialists directs towards shinning the brightest light on the business website. In other words, everyone wants to get a first page position for the key terms that best describe the business.

But just how do you get up there on a first page ranking when even the SEO specialists agree that there is no one-size-fits-all for ranking every website. However, all agree that link building is a critical element, and this task follows a basic strategy.

First you start off with a unique product or service, you create; you study your competition, conduct keyword research then decide what keyword to target. You create a sound content strategy which will help increase your inbound links.

Why are inbound links important?

As much as you might think that websites don’t interact, the certainly do and links from other websites to your own is a major factor when improving the search rank of a website. So how do you build these backlinks?
The best way to focus on backlinks is to focus on the three basic types of backlinks. These include:

1. Natural links

These are links that occur naturally and are from websites that like your content and want to refer to it. These don’t really involve the use of SEO tactics. These come from other businesses that just “Like You” and they help make your website visible.

2. Manual Links

These are links that you request or submit to directories, paid listings or other blogs.

3. Self created links

These are links that you leave on forums, on guest book signing, forums, blog comments or user profiles. These are links of the lowest value but are still of value. However, these links need to be obtained carefully, as illicit links can cause penalization.

Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make When Link Building

There are some mistakes you don’t want to make when link building and that is:

• Not checking if it’s a dofollow link. Many webmasters may after a short time change it to a nofollow backlink. This can be frustrating if you’ve paid for the dofollow link.
• Not having the right anchor text for the link you’ve added. It’s got to be relevant to the link you’re trying to backlink to. Don’t put the anchor as Cat Food if you’re link backlinks to a page about dog food.
• Getting backlinks from irrelevant websites. There’s no point getting a backlink to a fish website when you’re trying to sell cars. It’s just not going to work.
• Linking to different websites that have poor metrics. You want to try to gain backlinks on good metric websites to help improve your overall quality of backlink.

Remember high quality and high trust flow backlinking isn’t something that you should take lightly, with a little time and effort you can find and gain good quality backlinks.

What should I think about when link building?

There are certain tested practices which help you create relevant and better links.

Stay relevant

Use relevant and valuable content. Well written content is a sign of a well-made and high quality web site. Good content attracts natural editorial links.

Be cautious

Your page gains trust when other reliable websites link to it. But that trust also depends on the trustworthiness of the site that is linking to your website. So buying or selling links or implementing any kind of link trick that manipulates page rankings can cause Google to penalize your website or can cause other issues.

It’s all in the details

If possible you want to get links for top level domains (TLDs) as these can improve your rankings in the search engines. Backlinking tools may be able to help you with this.

You Might Need a Link Building Agency to do the Job for You

Link building is a very critical job and greatly affects the visibility of your website. A certain amount of expertise is required to get it done in a right way so you can take full benefit of it. If you feel you are not comfortable enough or lack the expertise to do it, there are a number of link building agencies which can do it for you that you might want to consider.

Wrap it up

Links are nothing to be scared of, and they offer great benefits. Good backlinks offer an excellent way to get more traffic that doesn’t necessarily come from searches. An additional benefit is that it helps the search engines crawl your website and validate it.