What Are Backlinks and How Do They Work?

What is the way in which Google search engine determines which website to rank number one, two and three? It comes down to SEO, right? Well, it’s more in-depth than that.

Moz SEO company interviewed tons of marketing experts, and they asked them what factors affect Google’s rankings the most? They all said backlinks. So, with backlinks, that’s one website linking to another website. Google’s looking at it as votes. The more links that your website has, the higher you’re gonna rank.

Today, I’m going to teach you what backlinks are and how they work.

What are Backlinks?

You may also see the term “backlink” when someone says they want to “build backlinks.” A backlink is a link on a website that points to a page on another website.

Backlinks can be very valuable. By getting backlinks on a page, you can make sure that when a person searches for keywords related to that page, your page will be one of the first ones that come up on the search engine results page.

A good backlink will help a website rank better in search results, allowing it to be found easier by more people. If a page has lots of backlinks, it may even show up at the top of the search engine results page when someone searches for a particular keyword.

Why do you need backlinks?

You may be wondering why you need backlinks. This is actually a simple question to answer.

If you have a website and someone wants to link to your page, then they are going to put the word “backlink” in their anchor tag, or what a web browser calls it.

If you want that backlink to be as valuable as possible, you should put the “backlink” on a website that is similar to yours. In fact, that is one of the main reasons why search engine companies make certain keywords more important than others when ranking pages.

How Google treats backlinks?

Google has over 200 site ranking factors, and the number one factor that affects rankings is backlinks.

In addition to that, they’re looking at quality. So, if Huffington Post links to you, that’s way more effective than if Joe the plumber linked to you. And Google knows that it’s way harder to get a link from Huffington Post than it is to get a link from Joe the plumber. Now, another thing that they’re using within their algorithm is how related is that link? So, if Huffington Post links to your plumbing website, that’s not as effective compared to Joe the plumber linking to you.

But, on the flip side, if Home Depot is linked to you because it’s very relevant and they’re within your space, that’s way more effective than if Joe, the plumber, linked to you. So, a few things.

Google is looking at how many backlinks you’re getting; how many you’re getting over time because it has to be natural, they don’t want you to pay people to link to your website because they don’t like that, you shouldn’t pay for links; they’re looking at how related those websites are; and they’re looking at something called domain authority, that’s how authoritative that website is.

So, assume you’re getting tons of backlinks, you’re getting them from related websites, and they have high domain authority. Domain authority is from 0 to 100, 100 being like Google.com, Youtube, a Facebook. And it works like on a Richter scale. A logarithmic scale is way easier to go from 1 to 10 than it is to go from 10 to 20.

Getting backlinks from authority sites

So, if you can get a lot of backlinks, you can get them from relevant sites, and you can get them from authoritative sites with high domain authority, your rankings will climb. If you’re wondering what domain authority is, like what number a particular site has, you can go to ahrefs.com, put in a URL, and they’ll spit out the domain authority.

It’s a paid tool. A free version of this is Open Site Explorer. If you Google ‘Open Site Explorer, it’ll take you to moz.com, and you can put in a URL, and it’ll tell you that site’s domain authority. Now that you know how links work in the eyes of Google, if you want to get links, the quickest way is to do round-up posts.

Outreach approach to backlinks

Go and email every single expert within your space. You can email these people, include them in their round-up posts, and since you’re asking them one question and you’re asking that same question to every expert within the space, it’s an excellent opportunity for them to get free press, which is why they’re going to participate.

And then once they all participate, and give you their response, write a fantastic looking blog post showcasing all the responses, including their name, link to their website, link to their Twitter or Facebook profile. And then, from there, email each of those experts once you’ve published the post and ask them to share it on their favourite social network.

Summary

By doing this, your blog, your website, is going to get more traffic. The more eyeballs that see your site, the higher probability that someone will link back to your site. As you get more backlinks, your rankings will also climb.