Backlinks are an important part of optimizing websites for search engines. It does not matter whether you are new or experienced at SEO when it comes to backlinks. Every time Google releases a new update, website owners and SEO experts start wondering how they can build backlinks to get the best SEO results for Google ranking

Today, we will talk about how you can build and evaluate strong backlinks.

What are Backlinks?

A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. They are also called “incoming links” or “inbound links”. Backlinks are the single most important tool for Off-page SEO. A backlink works as a reference comparable to a citation.

How do Backlinks work for SEO?

Backlinks play an important role in SEO because they add credibility and authority to a website by adding a vote of confidence from another site. Backlinks give signals to search engine algorithms that other websites support and rely on the content of your website. 

Thus, if many other websites have linked to the same website or webpage, Google search (or other search engines) intercepts that the website is worth linking to and so it also worth appearing on the SERP (search engine result page). 

In short, backlinks one of the most important search engine ranking factors so they are important for SEO. This is why websites need to create a strong and effective SEO backlink strategy.

What is Backlink Building?

Backlink building refers to the process of earning backlinks. It is also known as link earning. There was a time when having more backlinks was the ultimate goal. However, in today’s competitive digital market, having backlinks alone is not enough.

The k building good backlinks is the quality. It is understood that having a popular, trustworthy and high authority website backlinks will leave a better impression on search engines as compared to backlinks from poor websites. This means that when it comes to link building you should obtain high-quality backlinks to stay on the good end of the spectrum.

Just being mentioned on high quality and high-traffic websites will give your search results rankings a boost. Similarly, the links you create to other websites should also be valuable. The reason being that when you link out to an external website, the quality of its features can also have a huge impact on the reliability and authority of your site; these include page authority, search engine accessibility, content, the anchor text you use, metatags associated with the linking page, etc. 

Building backlinks is hard and time-consuming, especially for new websites. It is often difficult to know where to start but the first step of backlink building should always be competitive backlink research. You can use a free backlink checker to analyze the backlink profile of a competitor’s website that is already ranking well. This will give you a better idea of what kind of backlinks are performing well within your niche.

To tell you how you can build and evaluate backlinks, first, we need to talk about backlink quality.

What is Backlink Quality?

As stated earlier, when it comes to backlinks the rule is quality over quantity. In the past, the number of backlinks was enough to determine the quality of a website for search engine rankings. Today, quantity matters more because the quality factor was easily manipulative. Websites used different tactics to artificially increase the number of linking websites. The techniques included:

  • Buying links
  • Automating comment spam
  • Hiding links in widgets
  • Links wheels and few more

To prevent this manipulation, Google released the Penguin algorithm. This update penalizes “link schemes” and degrades low-quality links. Hence, to meet the new standard of Google you must avoid artificial and poor quality link building and focus on creating natural links with high-quality websites. 

How to Build Quality Backlinks?

There are two main ways to build quality backlinks:

Blog Posts – Pitching guest blog posts is an effective way of acquiring links. It has the advantage of giving the control of the keywords used, the Meta description, the top text and the anchor text of the backlink. 

Existing Content – This is a simple and easy way to generate backlinks. Just add links to your existing content by contacting the website owner of the linking website and convince him how your site will add context, quality, and engagement. 

Influencers – This does not involve reaching the influencers and asking them to endorse your site and mention your brand. This involves creating content that relates to the influencers, their work, and their achievements. Curate your content around the influencers as it will add credibility and more exposure to your website.

SEO Link BuilderThis is a quick way of creating backlinks online through a backlink generator. You find quality backlinks with a click of a button and add it to your content.

To conclude, link building depends upon one thing: Content creation. No matter which above-mentioned link building method you choose, getting quality backlinks requires original, high quality and engaging content to link people. 

How to Evaluate Backlinks?

Different ways of evaluating the quality of a backlink are:

1.Anchor Text

This is the highlighted or underlined blue colored clickable text containing the link. The anchor text is what allows Google bots to crawl and determine if the destination URL is relevant to the webpage or website. The ideal way of adding anchor text is using the relevant keywords to the linking page. You can do that by conducting keyword research and analyzing what keywords the linking website is using. For example, the linking website is about home construction then the relevant keywords used as anchor text would be “builders”, “construction material” or something along these lines.

Ideally, a good website should have a mix of anchor texts including:

2.Linking Page and Domain

Linking web pages and websites that contain relevant content to your website will pass more link juice as compared to irrelevant ones. You must analyze how the linking website fits in your domain. However, determining the quality and relevance of the domain can be quite subjective. This is why there are plenty of backlink SEO tools that allow you to do it objectively yourself.

3.Link location

The location of a backlink can also impact its quality. Where a link appears on a page also greatly influences how valuable it is for your SEO purposes. A normal web page as 5 main sections:

  • Header
  • Footer
  • Right sidebar
  • Left sidebar
  • Body content

All these sections contain external links to pass link juice to the destination webpage. With that being said, the links located within the body content are the most valuable to SEO. 

Furthermore, the placement of links within the body content is also an important factor. The higher up a link appears on a page, the more relevant and significant it is to the content. 

Conclusion

Building links and evaluating their quality is essential for a successful SEO strategy. As Google keeps on improving and adjusting its algorithm, it is getting better at identifying high-quality real backlinks. If you want to earn links that will enhance the performance of your website then you must make sure they meet the quality criterion. 

The quality of backlinks depends on relevance, human value and authority of your content as well as that of the linking website. Technical factors like link placement, anchor texts, and domain also enhance the quality of a backlink. 

To conclude, quality backlinks will improve SEO as well as online reputation.