If you own a blog or a website, you may have heard the term “backlinks” bandied about and how important it is to increasing traffic to your content.
Backlinks, quite simply, are links that lead back to your site.
For example, a report by Ahrefs states that pages that have backlinks get more organic traffic from those that don’t. If you click on “report by Ahrefs” you’ll be redirected back to the Ahrefs website. That click is a small boost to the website’s traffic.
You can get the same kind of boost for your blog.
And you should, because having backlinks can mean the difference between lots of traffic on your website and next to none.
Below, we’ll show you the top 3 reasons why backlinks are so important, and also how to acquire them for your blog.
Top 3 Reasons Why Backlinks Are Important
1. Improved Search Engine Ranking
According to Search Engine Journal (look, another backlink!), backlinks are a huge factor in how the Google algorithm decides where to rank web pages.
It’s a vote of confidence from other websites that your content is high quality and worthy of a referral.
Further down we tell you how you can get those precious backlinks, but for now, just know backlinks will help your website rise in Google search rankings.
2. More Referred Traffic To Your Blog
To make money and promote your brand, there’s one thing above all others that you need to get: visitors to your website.
Backlinks can help you reel them in. Here’s how.
With backlinks, you won’t just catch search engine users. You’ll also net visitors to other websites who see your backlink and decide to check it out. They will click on the hyperlink to your page, just like you clicked on the links to the Ahrefs report and Search Engine Journal.
That click counts as a new visitor to your site.
Now you have two streams of traffic flowing into your website: organic search traffic, and backlink traffic/referral traffic.
3. More Opportunities To Grow Your Brand
When you reach out to other websites and brands to promote you with a backlink, you automatically open yourself up to new opportunities to grow your brand.
You may start by writing a guest post for another blog.
But that one guest post could turn into ten. Then other blogs might be interested in hosting you as their guest.
Slowly but surely, you’ll develop a huge portfolio that will highlight your growing skill and reputation, especially as you approach bigger, higher-quality companies to work with. The result is you’re growing your brand as well as your blog traffic.
Top 3 Tricks To Create High-Quality Backlinks
According to the Ahrefs study from 2020 that we referenced at the beginning of the article, 66.31% of web pages don’t have any backlinks whatsoever. This is a criminally underused strategy, but with the three tricks below, you can hack it to improve your website traffic.
1. Write For Other Blogs As A Guest
Think about what your blog is about, and what unique skills and viewpoints you have in that field.
Then leverage those skills and viewpoints by reaching out to other websites and offering to write guest posts for them. While you’re writing your guest post, insert a backlink to your blog where it’s appropriate.
By the way, those words “where it’s appropriate” are extremely important. Make sure that it makes sense to insert a backlink to one of your web pages into your guest post. Don’t just randomly put one in or write shameless self-promotion at the end. The pages you’re linking to still need to be relevant to your content. They should seem natural and not forced.
Remember that your readers aren’t dumb. They recognize when someone is just trying to make themselves look good, and they don’t respond well to it.
2. Ask Other Websites To Promote Your Page
If you don’t want to write a guest post, you can still ask other websites to promote you.
Emphasize to them how beneficial your website and blog posts will be for their readers, and how you provide useful information or services that complement their content. Offer to insert backlinks to their content in your web pages, or show them proof if you’ve already done that.
Another option is to offer to pay for backlinks – but this is not as effective as inserting “natural” backlinks, which we’ll discuss in the next point. Still, it’s an option you may want to consider if you want to take advantage of every opportunity to increase your website traffic with backlinks.
3. Improve The Quality Of Your Blog Posts To Stand Out
In a Google Hangouts session in early 2021, Google’s webmaster trends analyst John Mueller suggested that backlinks acquired “naturally” – in other words, not purchased or exchanged – are more valuable to the search algorithm.
Mueller said, “… when it comes to links, Google’s point of view is that these should be things that are not organized by you, that are not paid for by you, that are not created by you. But rather they should be natural people who say well, this is cool, I like that.”
The biggest takeaway from these quotes is that bloggers and website owners should concentrate on creating content quality. They should make sure they craft well-written, unique content so that other people will “naturally” want to link back to their pages.
Backlinks aren’t the easiest way to funnel new visitors onto your website, but they do provide an enormous payoff. Use the 3 strategies above to get started!