Back links are an essential part of a well put together SEO strategy and learning how to build back links can help boost your websites traffic in a variety of ways. As an essential part of SEO strategy, building back links is a mandatory task for every e commerce store owner who’s looking to build and maintain organic traffic to their website over time. The most difficult and time consuming part of getting back links is figuring out how to build them and doing so in a way that’s acceptable by search engine standards (AKA: White hat techniques). As back links need to come from sources outside of your own website, convincing other website owners to link back to your site in a way that’s honest and mutually beneficial can be tricky. In this post we’ll discuss how to approach others so you can generate back links to your site, but beyond that we’ll also discuss the various ways you can generate back links for yourself via honest means so that you don’t get penalized by search engines.
First, let’s discuss what a backlink actually is.
What is a Backlink
A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one website to another website.For example: In one of our previous articles, a Shoplift Review, our opening sentence reads:It’s been long overdue that we post a Shopify review on A Better Lemonade Stand.In that sentence we included a link to Shopify, the business that we’re making reference to, and that’s a backlink for Shopify.Any link to another website that a site includes anywhere on their webpages is considered a backlink. As a website, your goal is to get quality (more on that soon) back links from other websites because it increases your credibility in the eyes of search engines and thus increases your chances for ranking as a search result when appropriate.
Why back links are Important
back links are important because search engines read them as a way of websites vouching for one another which helps to improve the rank and domain authority (think of this as credibility) of the linked site. When one website links to another they figuratively pass on “link juice” and all the link juice a website acquires from back links helps build up their own authority by indicating to search engines that they must be high quality too because websites with high quality link juice are linking out to them.
In the example mentioned above, when we’re linking out to Shopify from A Better Lemonade Stand, Google reads that and come to the conclusion that:
Shopify is likely a reputable website because A Better Lemonade Stand is linking out to them, and;A Better Lemonade Stand is likely a reputable website because they’re linking out to another reputable website, Shopify.
back links are recognized by search engines as a vote of confidence and the more reputable websites that link back to your own website, the more reputable it makes your website seem to search engines by association.To simplify this, a links from CNN is seen is much more credible and valuable than a link from a Joe’s random thought blog that he started 2 weeks ago.
When you have other high-quality websites vouching for your website it helps to improve your organic search engine ranking, you get indexed faster and you also get direct referral traffic from websites that are relevant to yours which means targeted traffic gets passed on to you and you’ll experience a lower bounce rate.
How back links are Measured
That being said, different websites are ranked differently in a variety of ways when it comes to reputation, and that, amongst other variables, affects how back links are measured.No back links are created equally. They depend on a variety of ranking factors that are, for the most part, speculated.
Source: Abetter Lemonade Stand
