What You Should Know About Backlinks
Backlinks refer to outside domains pointing links back to your website or pages on your website. In short, it’s when a website links back to your website. Your backlink profile is basically links pointing to your site from external sites, and in turn, this contributes to your backlink profile’s overall relevance, strength, and diversity.
The number of backlinks can include links from one domain or from multiple domains. It’s quite common for multiple domains to link back to content that is relevant, useful or authoritative. In a perfect world, this is how backlinks are gathered, from content that is unique and shared on other sites that want to be associated with the content.
In general, think of backlinks as being a vote of confidence. The votes are for content that is linked to your domain from sources other than your own domain. Generally speaking, backlinks are important and we’ll discuss why in the following section.
Why Are They Important
Backlinks are important to both search engines users and search engines. Backlinks let people find other sources of info on the same topic or related topic. For example, if a search engine user lands on a page about “the best smartphones,” then he might find backlinks to other carriers, reviews, and content such as that. Links give consumers a good experience because they can easily find other information about the topic, which is “the best smartphones.”
As for search engines, backlinks play a role in building value and importance of a page. Generally speaking, the number of backlinks used to be an indicator of how popular a page was, but things have changed and there are various ranking factors that come into play when evaluating backlinks. These days, quantity isn’t that important and if you have too many backlinks from questionable sources, then your domain’s authoritative signals may become hindered.
What Is A Good Backlink Profile
Variety is the key to obtaining a natural link profile. Links come from various domains and links have various strengths. If you want to get a better idea of what your backlink profile is like, then you can look at KPIs, such as what domains are referring links to your site and the countries where the links are coming from. Don’t forget to check the TLD, short for top-level-domain.
Some domains are better to get links from. These domains are considered to be sources that are trusted, and a few examples include links from government entities and educational institutions. Such domains are looked at as being trustworthy.
Don’t ever pay someone to link back to you. If you do decide to try to build links via sponsored content, then make sure you label it as “sponsored” or else you will be running afoul of FCC rules. Many publishers choose to use the “no-follow” tag for such links. So, you can consider doing this too.
In the past, it was a good idea to add listings to DMOZ and other directories like it. However, times have changed and such directories are not that relevant but do try to build a relationship with webmasters of directories that are focused on a niche. Getting a backlink from such a site may help you out.
Domains that end with .gov are good for backlinks too. They are valuable links. The reason why is because not just anyone can start a website with that extension.
Building Backlinks
You should make sure you personalize your messages to webmasters, such as mentioning why you like their sites and brands, and you can cite their articles. Doing such things will make webmasters more receptive. As for a point of contact, consider using sites such as LinkedIn because these are professional sites. The process of creating backlinks to your page can be time-consuming and stressful, make sure to hire a Houston SEO company to do the work for you.
Who Links To Your Site
Monitor links that point back to your site. Many domains from countries such as Brazil and Russia are sometimes often looked at as being spam, so disavow links from sites located in such countries. You can do this via Google Search Console.
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