If you are in the world of website design and development or digital marketing, chances are you’ve heard the term backlinking being thrown around regularly. But what does it actually mean, is it that important and how do you implement it? These are probably the questions that are flooding to mind when the topic is mentioned. The SEO Academy is here to answer those questions. Let’s take a closer look at backlinking, why you need it, and how to use it.

What is Backlinking?

Let’s first define the term backlink. A backlink (also referred to as an inbound or inward link) is a hyperlink that points to a particular website or webpage on the internet.

In SEO terms, backlinks show search engines that there are other sources on the internet that can pouch for your content as being genuine and reliable. While many people will argue that backlinking is no longer relevant in 2019, according to Google it is. Who’s not going to listen to Google, right?

Why Do I Need Backlinking?

Let’s use a little analogy here. When you own a restaurant and you have a large number of great reviews, chances are you get more patrons through the door than if you had a large number of bad reviews or even mixed reviews. Backlinking is pretty similar, the more genuine backlinks you have, the more impressive your look to Google. By having other sites that are similar to yours pointing to you as an authority figure, you should see more targeted traffic coming your way. See backlinks as a sort of vote of confidence (your restaurant’s good reviews).

This becomes a ranking factor for search engines when indexing. The more good quality inbound links you have, the better you will be ranked on their results pages.

Backlinking Techniques

When you’re attempting to implement the art of backlinking into your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to understand that too many links in the wrong places can hurt our site’s ranking ability and as such, you should be careful with your backlinking practice. For backlinking to work effectively, you need to have backlinks present on sites that are relevant to your own (that is, in the same industry or share commons themes), sites that are popular and that are proven to be trustworthy.

Factors that Affect the Value of Your Links

There are many factors that will affect the value of the backlinks to your site. Here are just a few of them:

#1 Link Placement

Search engines are using new technology to determine the layout of a page and where the link is placed is weighted based on surrounding content.

#2 Anchor Text

Clickable text in a hyperlink is known as anchor text and adds great value to the site’s ranking. Bonus points if your anchor text is on relevant keywords.

#3 Deep Links

Deep links are hyperlinks that bypass the home page and go directly to a particular page. These increase your site’s relevance and each separate page too.