What is a Backlink?
A backlink is a connection that we generate from third-party websites to our own domain. Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another that help in improving a website’s search engine visibility. A few common methods of link building include content marketing, email outreach, and public relations. Generating backlinks is important because it helps in generating referral traffic to your domain. While doing so, one should also keep in mind to avoid websites that are irrelevant or have a high spam score.
To check the spam score you can use various tools like:
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Moz
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SEO Quake
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SEM Rush
Importance of link building or backlinks
Backlinks are basically recommendations from other websites. Each of these backlinks tells search engines that the content is valuable, credible, and useful.
The importance of link building lies in building long-term business relationships and also boosting the authority of your domain which in turn increases the organic ranking of the website. The higher the number of backlinks, the higher your site will rank on Google and other search engines.
There are multiple ways to generate backlinks to a domain:
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Natural Editorial Link: A natural link is where a domain gets a backlink without even its own knowledge.
Example: A blogger who is writing an article about the list of SEO agency in Bangalore will mention a backlink to https://www.appinessworld.com/
We need to constantly monitor such backlinks and make sure it is not being generated from spammy websites.
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Manual Outreach Link: This is one of the most popular strategies for generating backlinks but also the most time-consuming way because this is where we have to reach out to websites or individuals who are related to our domain and request them to give a backlink.
Example: A digital marketing agency in Bangalore will approach highly influential bloggers who are in digital marketing networks and request them to mention their domain name in an article or blog to generate a backlink.
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Self Generated Link: Self-generated is what every website follows to generate backlinks. This is where we go to individual sites and generate backlinks to our own domain.
Some examples of self-generated backlinks are directory submission, article submission, image submission, video submission etc. One should be careful not to practice any shady/black hat techniques while generating these kinds of backlinks or creating spam.
White Hat, Black Hat, and Grey Hat Link Building Generation
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White Hat Link Building: This is the most preferred way of link building. When you create quality content, people feel it is worth sharing to others so they start to link the content, this is called White Hat Link Building.
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Black Hat Link Building: Buying links from other sites that come with a dofollow attributes and pass page rank then this form of link building is called black hat link building.
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Grey Hat Link Building: This is a combination of the black hat and white hat techniques. Where the methods followed may look like they are fishy but they are legal in the eyes of a search engine
Ex: Blog commenting, Profile creation etc.
An important note on link building vs. link "earning"
Since these backlinks are highly regarded by Google, every website/domain must have a strategy to perform an off-page activity and should ensure that these activities are performed only after all the major SEO is completed.