If you've spent any time on the internet looking for a way to promote your website, you've probably heard about link building.
There is a flood of information out there about the effects that backlinking has on SEO and how important they are in the great scheme of things.
Other people are reading: How to Use Trending Topics to Build Links & Boost Traffic
This article was written expressly to demystify backlinks and give a historical perspective on them:
What are Backlinks?
A backlink simply refers to any link that points back to a page on your site.
It's the main method search engines use to decide how to rank websites competing for the same keyword.
It's a relatively easy concept to grasp:
The problem is, not all backlinks are created equal: some of these will benefit your website, some will have no effect, and some will be considered spam and even hurt your website's ranking.
Outsourcing it to software developers is one way to ensure you'll get it right.
How Did They Become so Essential?
You might be wondering why do search engines decide to rank a page based on how many people link to it?
Well, for this, we have to hop back to the dark ages of humanity: before the internet revolution. Alta Vista and Yahoo were the top dogs in the search engine market.
The problem was, whatever algorithm they were using, it didn't work.
Most search pages were brim-full with spam and misinformation, and the companies had no meaningful way to check the authority of a site.
Enter Google. created by two Standford Compsci Ph.D. students, they realized that there has to be a better way to recognize the informative and authentic pages from the low-quality low-effort ones.
Since both of them were in academia, they already had something like backlinks standing right in front of them.
But, how do you know a research paper is influential and authoritative? Easy, by the number of citations it has.
A research paper with 200 citations has made a bigger splash in academia than one with only 5. Their brilliance was to consider links a page has to other websites as a citation.
Ushering in an era of search results free (almost) from spam and changing the landscape of the algorithms used in search engines forever.
Eventually, giving birth to SEO companies from London to Mumbai who tried to leverage the algorithms to rank higher.
What Techniques Can I Use?
Now that we have learned what backlinks are and how they became the dominant way to rank websites on the internet, it is time to learn how to use that knowledge to rank higher.
There are two complementary ways you can approach backlinking:
Focus on Your Content
One way to ensure that your content gets more attention is by publishing content that has a higher chance of getting attention.
The internet is filled with content, and you have to have ingenuity if you want to stand out:
- Publish content that is statistically proven to be shared more. Lists, How-Tos, and Whys are the most linked post types, and you should focus on them if you want other people to link to your blog or website. Quizzes and random posts are almost never shared.
- Visuals matter! Creating informative and intuitive infographics will go a long way to compliment what you're already talking about in your post.
- Doing the research, citing papers, and being original is rare but, a valued currency on the net. It'll make you look genuine and authoritative on the subject, too.
Focus on Making Sure Your Content is Seen and Shared
It's not enough to only focus on writing content without reaching out to bloggers and websites in your domain.
There's a real possibility no one will even see your content without some kind of promotion.
If you have any question, feel free to ask via comments
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