Backlinks (also known as inbound links, incoming links, or one-way links) are referring links to your website that are a source of relevant or related information. Backlinks from well-established and reputed websites help to gain user trust, credibility, and reputation for a website. 

Backlinks, therefore, are a crucial digital marketing strategy for every website. They will help your website get good rankings and wide discoverability with increased online traffic. Just one good backlink -- from a reputed website -- is enough to generate constant traffic to your website. For a search engine, backlinks are like votes from other websites that help them to rank a website for a search result. According to Google, a backlink is still an important factor that decides the rank of a website during a search.

Backlinks are no doubt an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Having said that, people become too fanatic about backlinks and make them their only digital marketing strategy. They start spamming other website emails or adopt several blackhat techniques to get backlinks. Ideas like these only hamper the ranks and even get blocked by search engines. We will help you to avoid such a messy backlink situation by telling you everything there is to know about Backlinks and Why They Matter for SEO. And, if you want to keep yourself sharp, you can always read our other blogs and articles posted regularly on the website. 

What Makes a Good Backlink?

• The credibility of the backlink

The credibility of a backlink is a crucial factor that decides its ranking on search engines. The credibility of a website is attributed to its "domain authority" on the internet. A well-reputed website always has higher domain authority, and being backlinked on such a website considerably increases the traffic to your website. 

It is also important to understand that, even though the number of backlinks matter, it is more important that your website gets quality backlinks. To reinstate the point, getting one backlink from a popular website can equal to thousand backlinks from smaller websites. 

Getting Keyword-Specific Anchor Text

An anchor text is used to define a link on the website. An anchor text is that blue, underlined text that you often see over links to another website. An anchor text makes a link relevant, easy to understand, and subtle with other content.  

An anchor text that has some target keywords related to your website makes it more effective and increases the search ranking. To understand this concept more clearly, we can compare two anchor texts.

Two different websites are linking to your website, informing them about a good SEO article, here are two different approaches, 

Backlink 1 says, To learn about digital marketing and SEO, click here! 

Backlink 2 says, Overall Digital marketing solution: learn SEO; SEO basics, what is SEO. 

See any significant difference between the two? Notice, how backlink 1 seems rather indifferent to the text it defines, but backlink 2 very well describes the overall link briefly, and more importantly, it has all targeted keywords in the anchor text. A good anchor text helps in better search results and boosts the quality of the backlink.

Please note that an anchor text is important, but should not be misused as search engines have specific algorithms capable to detect black hat strategies applied to build exact match anchor texts.

• Relation with the source website

A backlink with a significant connection to the linked website will always be preferred over a normal website backlink. This is natural, as any search engine would like to take opinions from related businesses. This sounds strange though but makes sense if given some thought. For example, 

Let's say, you are a website about hotels. A search engine would always prefer a backlink coming from other hotel websites, as compared to, let's say, a website about cars. It also helps search engines keep their algorithms aligned for accurate searches. 

• The “Dofollow” Links

The links that are actively directed to some other website with an actual link are "Dofollow" links. A Search engine would never include a "nofollow" link for search rankings. 

• Getting a backlink from a new website

A backlink from a new source is always helpful to improve search rankings. Repeated backlinks from the same website again and again diminish its quality over time. A backlink from a new website that has never backlinked you in the past will boost your search rankings considerably. 

It is always better to have backlinks from several websites, as compared to having several backlinks from just one website.

How to get more backlinks?

Backlinks are good. This has been established very clearly by now. We talked about, backlinks, their benefits, and the characteristics of a good backlink. One question remains unanswered, though, how can one attract potential backlinks to their website to increase the organic traffic to their website? For this, we have made a list of points that will help you identify better what changes you can make to your website to get the attention to get more quality backlinks. 

• Create linkable content

Content is a big part of any digital marketing strategy. When you create a new content it should be able to draw the attention of others to your website. Research deeper and read more to find content that can have an impact on users all over the internet. You can add interesting statistics based on polls which will always be inclusive to your website. Add new quizzes that not only keep your audience engaged but will also help you to build a rich database. 

• Build Backlinks from Link Roundups

These are a list of the best websites of a particular industry. Several websites publish the best websites to give chance to emerging players. It is a good way to boost the number of backlinks by convincing such websites to publish your website in their list. You can send emails to these websites, and let them decide whether they want to backlink you or not, based on the quality of your content. 

• Inform other websites about dead links and pages 

The fast growth of the internet has made many websites outdated, or completely out of business. There are thousands of inactive pages, broken images, and texts by websites of the past. Try to find such outdated backlinks, and suggest to the owners how they may find your website a better alternative to this out-of-business site. This is a very good thing for many websites and many will be more than happy to do this favor for you, as a broken link on their site is not very appealing. 

You can also inform such websites about the broken links with 404 error while you are looking for such a website and tell them how you just browsing around their resources page among the lists of great resources found some broken links. This will also help your website become trusted by a large number of people. 

• Post your blogs on another website

Many websites allow other bloggers to write for their websites. This could be a feature blog, or a full informational article, which will guarantee that you have a good platform to feature your website. Finding a website that lets you Guest Post is a challenge, though, which can be tackled by following these pointers. 

• Find someone in your niche that writes a lot of guest posts.
• Find the bio of the author and take a screenshot. 
• Perform a reverse image search on the bio which will give every article published by the author. These are the places where you can publish your guest posts. 

• Prepare good infographics 

This could be a little far-fetched for many website owners as this would mean extra effort on their team but they can make new infographics that are related to the industry. There is a huge gap in quality infographics that is in popular demand by many websites. You can create something that might be useful for others and you can get a backlink from their website without a hassle. 

• Submit Testimonials

Everyone wants to see happy customers and would love to boast about such a customer to the world. Submit your testimonial to a relevant website along with a backlink that might showcase you on their website. 

• Blogger Reviews

Blogs are a huge part of the internet today and have a very wide user base on the internet. You can get a good backlink from a blogger by offering them some of your products as gifts. They are always looking for content and always give you highlights on your website. 

• Link Reclamation

Websites always get mentioned by other websites, but not all the time they are linked back to the source site. If you find such a website that has mentioned your name on their site without giving a backlink, you can write them a mail by reminding them of their omission. A reclaimed link is a very significant achievement as this would boost considerable traffic.

• Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Backlinks

It is always good to keep an eye on the competitor's backlinks. This will also help you identify your weaknesses. Just look out for things that help your competitor get backlinks to their websites, and make sure that you follow their lead to change your backlink strategy.

• Always update your content 

Just a friendly reminder. Closely monitor your content for any inconsistencies that are hindering your chances to get a backlink from other websites. There could always be updated on the images, text, quality, etc. of your content.