Having a great website and plenty of good content isn’t always enough. If you really want to get a leg up on the competition and get ranked in Google, you need backlinking. But what is backlinking? And do backlinks really work?
Let’s dig into each question one at a time.
What Is Backlinking?
There seems to be a lot of confusion around backlinks (and SEO in general). Some think it’s getting your website listed on a bunch of directories (whatever those are). Others think it means putting a lot of hyperlinks in their web copy. Wrong again.
So then, what is backlinking? In a nutshell, backlinks are any links on other websites that link back to your pages or content. In SEO, they might be referred to as incoming or inbound links as well as backlinks.
For example, if someone really likes your website and writes a blog about it and hyperlinks back to it (kind of like I did in that last paragraph), that’s a backlink. They have linked back to your website.
Now, most of the time, people don’t link back to website home pages. They like specific content like a blog post or something and link back to that page. This is why it’s good to have useful content.
But content isn’t necessarily enough.
Getting Found
No one will consume your great content if they can’t find it. And these days, the primary bus shuttling people to and from good content is called Google.
Your well-written blog post will do a lot of things. It will interest readers, build credibility, even convert readers into leads. But it cannot drive traffic back to itself – you need Google to serve it up to people.
Unfortunately, Google is getting pickier and pickier about who it will let on the bus. The Google algorithm is notoriously complex, but some trends have become well known. And one of them is websites (and their respective pages) do better if they have quality backlinks linking back to them.
And yes, you should pay special attention to the quality vs. quantity debate.
On one hand, you have the old guard that says buy backlinks on a bunch of “directories” or “private blog groups,” etc. This basically means you pay someone to spam a bunch of sites frequented only by other spammers. Is that really where you want your links to hang out?
On the other hand, you have high-quality backlinks coming from authoritative domains that real people read and share from. Google recognizes whether or not the places backlinking to you are legit or not.
And this brings us to our next question.
Does Backlinking Work?
Yes! Backlinking done right does boost your search rankings. But here’s the dirty secret: it takes hard work. There is no shortcut, although there are some great techniques to try out. Here’s a great backlink playbook that goes into a lot of those.
In short, the basic idea is to reach out like a real, live human being, and ask other human beings to link back to your site. This is yet another reason to have good content.
First, find influencers and people who write on related topics. Then, send them an email, commenting on their work and asking them to include a link to yours. Again, there are variations on this theme, and that’s where it pays to hire a digital PR agency or influencer marketer who can help with this stage of SEO.
But if you want to go it alone, here’s a list of things that do and don’t work.
So what is backlinking? It’s simply the process of asking others in your space to recognize your work by including a link back to it in their own. Google recognizes this as social proof and rewards you by boosting your search rankings.
Does it work? Yes, but only if done right. Paying for backlinks can actually penalize your site. Doing it right requires asking for the backlink. But contextual backlinks from relevant influencers and authoritative sites are powerful and pay off in the long run.
