What Are Backlinks in SEO? A Beginner’s Guide to Boosting Rankings

What Are Backlinks in SEO?

Backlinks are the off-page activities, are the key part in search engine optimization. They help search engines to determine how relevant and authoritative your website is for a given topic or keyword. Backlinks are also known as inbound links.

A backlink is a link from some other website (Referring Domains). They are basically votes from other websites. Each of these votes tells search engines: “This content is valuable, credible and useful”.

Why Are Backlinks Important in Search Engine Optimization(SEO)?

Backlinks are important for search engine optimization (SEO) because they show search engines that other websites find your content or keywords are valuable:

Authority: Backlinks helps to increase your website authority and credibility.

Ranking: High-quality backlinks has change to increase your website ranking in SERPs.

Visibility: Backlinks can improve your visibility in search results and increase brand awareness.

Referral traffic: Backlinks can provide more website visitors through referral traffic.

Backlinks in SEO are important for domain authority (DA) & page authority (PA)

Criteria of Backlinks Creation in SEO

Before creating backlinks in SEO we need to check following things:

• Check Domain authority and Page Authority of referring domain. Higher the DA & PA of referring domain chance to increase DA & PA of your website.
• Referring domain must be related to our domain.
• Traffic of referring domain
• Do-follow backlinks & No-Follow backlinks
• Spam Score of referring domain
• To check DA, PA, Spam Score & Do-Follow, No-Follow backlinks we can use MOZ.
• For analyzing the traffic of referring domains, SEMrush or Ahrefs are helpful tools.

What is Do-Follow & No-Follow Backlinks in SEO?

Do-Follow Backlinks in SEO: Do follow backlinks in SEO are allow user or search engine bot to follow your web page. Do-follow links are help to increase domain authority of your website by passing authority from referring domain. This is known as "link juice". Which can then improve keyword ranking & increase referral traffics.

No-Follow Backlinks in SEO: A No-Follow backlink is a hyperlink that tells search engines to ignore it for SEO purposes. No-follow backlinks are used to prevent a website from benefiting from link spam or paid links.

No-follow backlinks don't pass authority to the linked website, so they don't help with SEO or improve search engine rankings. However, they can still generate referral traffic to a website.

Important Types of Backlinks in SEO

Guest post

Social Bookmarking

Blog Submission

Article Submission

Image Submission

Business Listing

Local Citation

Profile Creation

Forum

Infographic

Directory

Quora Questions and Answers

Blog Commenting

Links in Social Media Posts

 

Guest Post: Write articles on other sites to gain backlinks, exposure, and traffic. Guest posting is most important off page activities in SEO. It is paid or unpaid both. It’s an effective way to build relationships in your industry while increasing your site’s traffic.

Social Bookmarking: Share URLs on bookmarking sites to improve indexing, visibility, and traffic. Popular platforms include Reddit, Diigo, Instapaper, Pocket and StumbleUpon.

Blog Submission: Submit blog posts to directories for backlinks and SEO. Common websites are blogger.com, medium.com, tumblr.com.

Article Submission: Post articles on submission sites to boost SEO and reach a larger audience. Common websites are blogger.com, Medium, Tumblr, Penzu.

Image Submission: Share images on platforms like Pinterest to enhance visibility and backlinks.

Business Listing: Add business details to directories for improved local SEO and discoverability.

Local Citation: Include business info on local directories to increase local search ranking.

Profile Creation: Set up profiles on various sites for backlinks and brand awareness.

Forum: Join forums to engage, build authority, and share links to your site.

Infographic: Post infographics on specialized sites to attract backlinks and traffic.

Directory: Submit site to directories for better indexing and backlinks.

Quora Q&A: Answer relevant questions with links for traffic and authority.

Blog Commenting: Engage in blog comments for interaction and backlinks.

Links in Social Media Posts: Share site links in social media to boost visibility and traffic. Common website are Facebook, Instagram, & LinkedIn

How to Analyze Backlinks?

Analyzing backlinks is a key part of SEO. It helps you check both the quality and quantity of links pointing to a website. Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush make this easy. These tools provide insights into the number of backlinks, the domain authority of the linking websites, and the anchor text used in the backlinks.

What Types of Backlinks Are Valuable?

Guest post backlinks

Business profile backlinks

Backlinks Coming from Trusted, Authoritative Websites

Link's Anchor Text Includes Your Target Keywords

Website with High DA & Low Spam

Website with high traffics

What Kinds of Backlinks Should You Avoid?

Low-Quality or Irrelevant Directory Links

Domains with High Spam Score

Domain with less Traffics

Paid Backlinks

Broken links

Comment and forum spam

FAQ

1. How many backlinks per month are good for SEO?

Generally, a score between 60 and 100 is excellent, 40 to 50 is okay, and below 40 is poor. To build high-quality backlinks, focus on getting links from websites with good domain authority. Make sure these links are relevant to your topic and trusted by search engines globally.

2. Which is the most powerful type of backlink?

The most effective backlinks are those that are do-follow. Do-follow backlinks carry the SEO juice from the website that provides the link to the website that receives the link.

3. What is anchor text in SEO?

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Through anchor text link juice is pass to your website.

4. How do backlinks improve SEO?

Backlinks offer better website SEO because they boost your website’s authority and can help you rank higher for target keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs). Of course, while you should try to get as many backlinks as possible, the quality of the website linking back to you matters more than the number of backlinks you have.

Conclusion

To learn more about off-page SEO and how it differs from on-page SEO, visit our website, Learn SEOWith Durgesh. We provide insights on building backlinks, boosting site authority, and effective SEO strategies that go beyond your website content to help improve search engine rankings.