What is a backlink?
In recent times I have become much more involved in direct internet marketing, the type that involves an actual website rather than just messing around on a social platform. It all keeps coming down to one thing, backlinks.
A backlink is better described as an inbound link. This is when someone on a website creates a link to another page on another site.
Here let me give you an example. I get all my news from the BBC News website.
See what I did there? I created a hyperlink href tag that links away to another site.
Now strictly speaking this is not my backlink. I am the source of the link so it is not my backlink, it’s a backlink for the BBC website. That’s the end destination and it’s technically their link.
Why is this important?
Google is trying to do one thing. Provide the most relevant, suitable and popular content in its search engine. When you type a keyword in to Google it wants to provide the most appropriate content to you, neatly listed out in an appropriate list. The best stuff should be at the top and the less appropriate stuff further on. It has to do this or else you will go somewhere else and use their search engine.
Now Google assesses a huge amount of factors in how it ranks your content. Is the content laid out in a suitable manner? Does it conform with the latest web standards? Is is easily crawlable by the search engine bot? All of these factors have to be right to be able to compete.
Assuming you meet all these prerequisites how does Google gauge popularity? How does it evaluate relevance or even truth? How does Google know to put your site above someone else in its listing?
The simple answer is that it works out who links to whom and try’s to judge popularity based on this metric. If more people link to a piece of content then the chances are that it is more popular, right?
The Holy Grail
Getting people to link to your site and give you a backlink is the most important thing you can do for your website. Bar none.
How to get backlinks easily and safely is the most guarded secret of the SEO community. No-one will ever tell you an easy way of doing it, mainly because there is no easy way any longer. In the old days people would buy lots of domains and use them for linking or trade with others to exchange links. Google is smart enough to spot this now and the rules of backlinking are both complex and highly flexible. It is not uncommon for a well-functioning site to drop in to oblivion in terms of ranking simply because it triggered a Google link trap. Panda or Penguin.
Be very, very careful of anyone who offers to sell or trade you backlinks because of this. It may work in the short-term but from past experience it is only a matter of time before you get a good dose of Google’s equivalent of the ban hammer.
There are a number of tools that can hugely benefit any marketer in being able to tell you what sites backlink to yours. The main ones are Majestic, ahrefs and Moz. Each of these tools will give you a rough idea of all the other sites that link to yours. It may also be worth using them to have a look at your competition.
Dealing with the Pro’s
If you do want to get some proper help from the professionals the key to dealing with them is understanding what links they can get for your site and where those links came from. Google frowns upon these kind of services but the reality is that you will not rank properly without some kind of backlink support. The secret is to be very picky and only backlink from reliable sources so the key is taking that decision in to your own hands and understand what service you are getting.
If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. Some companies will use black hat techniques that will boost your site very quickly in the short-term but obliterate it three months down the line when they have been paid in full. The SEO business has its fair share of car dealers.
There is no substitute for putting up good interesting content but the reality is that it will still need some kind of shove to get it moving. Best that it is a gentle push rather than a hurl off some cliff.