What is a backlink and how do backlinks help SEO?
What is a backlink?
Backlinks are links to your website from another website. A backlink is like a vote of confidence for the content on your website. It means that someone found your content relevant enough to link to it from their site.
Backlinks are important because they help search engines determine the relevance of your content. They in turn help boost the website’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs). This process is called “ranking” and we call it SEO (search engine optimization).
Why do backlinks matter?
Backlinks are a major factor when it comes to how you rank in search engines. In fact, backlinks are what make up the majority of your SEO score.
You want backlinks because they help you build your brand and get more traffic, social media shares, email subscribers and even sales:
How do you earn backlinks?
To get a backlink, create content that people want to link to. You can do this by:
- Writing a blog post or web page and publishing it online.
- Creating a landing page for an event you’re hosting, which will give you more traffic and backlinks if it’s hosted on your own domain name (i.e., not just on Facebook).
- Creating an infographic or video that offers valuable information about a topic of interest in your industry.
- Posting on social media
- There are many more ways.
How to measure backlink effectiveness
Backlinks can be measured in many ways. You can use free tools like Ahrefs, Majestic or Moz to see the number of backlinks your site has and how many other sites link to yours. You can also use SEO tools like SEMrush to see where your competitors are getting their links from. If you’re using Google Analytics, it should show you how many people are visiting your site and what pages they’re viewing. This will help you determine which pages on your website have the highest bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave without visiting another page).
If you’re looking for more information about specific backlink metrics like anchor text distribution or referring domains by month/year, Ahrefs provides some advanced analysis options and an API. Users can pull data into third party platforms such as Moz Pro and Adobe Analytics Suite.
Backlinks help your content rank higher in search engines.
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. They’re also sometimes called “inbound links,” because they point towards your site. They can be added manually by an editor at another publication or automatically generated by a website’s software. The more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher it will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Backlinks are a powerful tool for SEO. They’re the primary way that search engines rank websites and determine which ones to show first in their results pages. If you want to rank higher in Google, backlinks are a critical part of your strategy.