Welcome to the first guide in our “How To Get Backlinks” series! I know a lot of you are saying, “Dude, we already know what a backlink is!” but I wanted to make sure this guide was as complete as I could make it. Even for beginners. So with that being said let’s get started! A backlink is simply when another website links to yours. These links are also called inbound links. Google takes into consideration how many backlinks you have, but also the quality of those backlinks.
What Determines the Quality of a Backlink?
The quality of a backlink is determined by these factors:
- Relevancy – Is the website related to your content? If you run a website about health, a backlink from a blog about cars is not a quality backlink.
- PageRank (PR) – This is a 0-10 rating system determined by Google using their own algorithm. The higher a website’s PR, the better.
- TrustRank – Similar to PageRank, this is another algorithm used to calculate whether a website is considered spam or not.
- Authority - Another factor in figuring out how trustworthy a website is.
- Age – How long a website has been up and running.
- Content – When a website sends a backlink, it is better that the link is surrounded by related content.
- Anchor Text – This is the text used to link to your site or the clickable word that would lead to your website.
- Page position – Higher up on the page, the better.
- dofollow link – dofollow lets spiders crawl the link, while nofollow is the opposite.
- IP Diversity – Various sites may have the same or similar IPs which have a slight factor in how effective they each are for your SEO.
Phew, didn’t think the list was going to be that long. Another factor to consider is when you can get access to a backlink from a .EDU or .GOV website as those have a lot more authority than the usual .com, .net, or .org. Now that you know what makes a quality backlink, you need to know the different types of backlinks you can have.
Backlink Diversity
While a lot of backlinks can be nice, you need there to be diversity in your website’s backlink profile. It’s great that a single website just gave you 50 backlinks, but it would be even better if 50 websites each gave you 1 backlink. Another factor to consider is the type of backlinks you get. Here is a short list of different types of backlinks which I will be diving deeper into (in no particular order):
- Article Links
- Blog Comments
- Web 2.0
- Forum Links/Signatures
- Social Bookmarking
- Press Release
- RSS Feed Submissions
- Guest Blogging
- .EDU and .GOV Links
- Videos
- Documents
You’ll have a lot of options to diversify your backlink portfolio, but of course, some of these are a lot harder than others, but may come with better results for your website SEO. We will also be getting into each of these types of backlinks and how to get them more in-depth as this guide progresses.
The full guide on backlinking will be viewable here.
