Welcome to Tuesday Tips! Let’s get right into it…What are backlinks?

In a nutshell, backlinks are links to your website that are found on other websites.

If another website, blog post, or piece of content has a link to your website, that’s a backlink. For example: If your business belongs to a BNI chapter or a local Chamber of Commerce, there is often an online database that includes a backlink to your website in their listings.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are an important factor in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website. Because of the way search ranking works, Google identifies sites with lots of backlinks as more helpful, reliable, and important than other sites with fewer backlinks.

Basically, the more links to your website that are found in other places around the internet, the more popular your website is with Google.

Google will favor a website that has thousands of backlinks, because that means that other people are putting links to your site in their content. This implies that people find your website to be helpful and reliable, and worth sharing with others. Because of this, Google will rank your site more highly in keyword search results than similarly themed sites with fewer backlinks.

Not only do backlinks help your SEO, but they also increase your web traffic. Backlinks means that your website can be found and visited from numerous different locations online.

How can I get more backlinks for my website?

Acquiring backlinks takes time, and it is not a guaranteed science. But there are some things you can do to increase your backlinks organically.

  • Write blogs. If you write, publish and share blog posts that contain valuable industry information, followers will begin sharing, or even referencing your blogs in their own content.
  • Link yourself. When you use platforms like Tumblr, email marketing programs, and social media, you can create links to your own website and blog page that will help increase your traffic and backlinks.
  • Be active online. Sometimes, you have to work for backlinks. You can start by commenting and engaging with other companies through blog posts, online discussions and reviews, providing a link to your site in the correspondence.
  • Courtesy links. If you backlink a colleague or another trusted industry professional through a blog post, they will often return the favor and backlink your website if you ask.

I hope we’ve shed some light onto backlinks and how they work. If you have more questions about backlinks and SEO in general, we’d love to chat with you. Contact us online or give us a call at 603-227-5240.