Backlink is one of the most important factors when it comes to ranking on Google. Backlink means when you are linking any type of content or website on another website.
Suppose, you are making a guest post someone's blog according to your niche. And you're inputting link on of your website on that post. That mean's you're creating a backlink for your website or content. On the other hand, the other blog site(where you are making guest posts) is getting new content and external link which is also good for the website. It's quite like a win-win situation for both parties. This is what backlinking is!
Let's describe it more easily! If there is a link to your site on another site, it is a backlink for your site. This link could be a link to your site's homepage or any other page. Backlinks are also called incoming links or inbound links.
I already described about backlink a little on my previous post. You may also read that to get some idea - Some basic SEO terms for Beginners!
When Googlebot or another site engine spider sees a link that goes from your website to another website it will use that link as a path to navigate to the next site. Just imagine the web like a subway system where each website is a station and each link between website is a path. Googlebot acts like a subway car to navigate between this path.
The crawler starts at some known website then collect links of other sites, follows those links, crawls those pages for more links to more sites, and just continues the cycle.
When Googlebot crawls a site, it indexes that sites' data in the storage centers and wait for someone to perform a relevant search so that it can return that data as a search result. and this is why backlinks are mandatory parts of SEO.
You can't just write something on any website and put your link there! There're some techniques to do it correctly. To do it effectively you would like to have something called high-quality backlinks. What do I mean by High-Quality Backlinks?
Backlink which comes from high authority websites is called a high-quality backlink. You don't want a backlink from any junk website. You want a backlink from a website that has high Domain and Page authority. To check PA and DA of any website you can click here.
You have to collect backlink for a website which's topic is similar to your's. You would always like to have backlinks from websites that are within the same category. Suppose, your blog is about clothing, you can't just create a backlink on tech-related blog. that won't go well!
Let's say that you have a lot of backlinks from high-authority websites and websites that are related to the topic you're within then you can move up the rank organically.
Imagine this is your website in the middle. You're totally alone in the world of the internet. You're creating awesome content and you don't understand - "Why am I not ranking?"
Well, if you have a couple of friends that are backlinking to your website, you will definitely find a faster way to rank on Google.
With backlinks, you can also get referral traffic. Let's say that website within your niche is writing an awesome blog post. Now if they are linking your website to their blog post, you'll get referral traffic. If anybody is clicking the link on that blog post then you'll get referral traffic to your website.
So, with this networking or backlinking system you can rank your website and article to Google. At least we can say you will be far ahead than others in the race of SEO.
In the whole article, we're actually talking about the inbound link. The inbound link means when your website links are on the other websites.
For example, if I write a post on Medium about Hive and provide a link of Hive blog; that means I created a backlink for Hive Blog on Medium.
An outbound link is the opposite of a backlink, meaning a link to another site if you have one. Outbound link is also called Out-going link.
For example, just the opposite of the previous example. If you post a link of Medium on Hive Blog, you are creating an outbound link for Hive.
This is a link from one page to another on your site. It is very important. For example, if you have a series of tutorials on your site, you will link to the previous page with anchor text to go from one page to the next.
This will serve as a backlink to your site. This increases the page rank. You will see on Wikipedia site how many links to their site are in each line.
Well, I am also going to provide an internal link of my previous post here.
When you're referring to other website's link on your website or article that means external link. You already noticed that I provided some external links in this article, like Medium's link, source of the photo, etc.
All backlinks are not the same. There are two types of links according to follow.
After reading all of these you must be wondering that sites like Facebook or Pinterest must have high authority ranking, so I must post my links there to rank on Google. Well, I am not actually saying that Facebook isn't a high authority website. But you won't actually get the benefits of backlinking from sites like Facebook. Because your links will be No Follow links on those websites.
No Follow links mean when a website tells Google or other search engines not to follow any backlink. That means if you post your link to any No Follow website you'll not actually get any backlink from that site. So, actually from No Follow websites, you won't get any SEO benefit. Almost all the social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are No Follow websites.
Do Follow link means when a website allows Google or other search engines to track backlinks. That means you will only get backlinks by posting on Do Follow websites.
I won't talk about Do Follow and No Follow in this article because I have a plan to create an individual blog post only for Do Follow and No Follow links.
By the way, you're probably wondering how to know if the link is Do follow or No follow. I use a Google Chrome extension named ''NoFollow" where No Follow linked will be highlighted with the red border.
If there is no highlight in the link that link is Do Follow.
Check out my other SEO related articles on Hive -
