OFF PAGE SEO TECHNIQUES - BACKLINKING

Backlinking

Building backlinks is a core ‘off-page SEO’ strategy. So, what is backlinking or inbound linking??!! In simple terms, backlinking is the process when one or more website mentions another website link on their web page content. In other terms, if a reputed website mentions another website on their web page content, then it is an act of vouching for your content, which increases credibility. This action tells Google that, trustworthy websites are endorsing the information on your page, which will raise your website's organic rating or SEO score.

Anchor Texts

Backlinking is done using anchor texts. There are five types of anchor texts, and it is very important to select the right type when linking to other websites.

• Exact Match:

Anchor texts explicitly mentioning the targeted keywords belong to the exact match group. If a website mentions an SEO agency, say www.xyz.com on their web page, an anchor text used can be ‘Top SEO Agency’ and this keyword will be hyperlinked. This type of anchor text is very powerful and direct since it’s using the right keyword for mentioning the business. However, it is advised not to use this type very frequently as it is not a natural combination of keywords and Google can penalize if it detects the overuse of this type of anchor text.

• Partial Match:

Anchor texts mentioning a business implicitly belong to the partial match group. For example, if a website is linking an SEO agency www.xyz.com, by using the text ‘Digital Agency for Improving Organic Ranking’ it will fall under partial match. This combination of keywords is more natural and there is no mention of an SEO agency anywhere which makes it safe to use.

• Branded Anchor Texts:

When a website links to another website using its brand name as anchor text, it becomes a branded anchor text type. For example, websites linking Amazon, eBay, etc. using their brand name.

• URL:

When a website links to another website by pasting the whole website URL of the latter, it becomes a URL anchor text.

• Miscellaneous:

These are the type of anchor texts used when a website links another website using terms like ‘Read More', ‘Click Here' etc. with hyperlinks that redirect to the mentioned website.

Do-follow & No-follow Links

Do-follow links pass link equity/link juice/page rank signals from the linking page to the mentioned website.

Suppose Website A mentions twitter in their page content, then the HTML tag of Do-follow will look like

<a href="www.twitter.com">twitter</a>

A no-follow link doesn’t pass link equity/link juice/page rank signals from the linking page to the mentioned website. In other words, when the linking page use a no-follow backlink, it means that it doesn’t want to pass the authority to the mentioned web page, thereby barring the transfer of any page rank.

An HTML example of no-follow link is given below

<a href="www.twitter.com" rel=” nofollow” >twitter</a>

The do-follow and no-follow links on a website can be checked by using some free chrome extensions such as MozBar, SEOquake, No-follow Link Checker etc.

You can check the number of backlinks pointing to a website by using tools like Semrush. This is a simple process, and the steps are given below for your reference.

Go to Semrush

Enter the domain in the search box. Under the overview, you can find the backlink section which shows the total number of backlinks pointing to this website. But the unique number of backlinks are the ones shown in ‘Referring Domains’. This example shows the website has a total of 489.2K backlinks but the unique number of back links are 5.5K, shown in the Referring Domains. The total number shows more because the referring websites might have done multiple backlinks to the mentioned website.

How to check the credibility of websites backlinking to your website?

It is important to check the credibility of the website linking to your website. If you get a backlink from a poor-quality, low-ranked website, it won’t be beneficial for increasing your page SEO ranking. It is therefore beneficial to check the following parameters to ensure you are getting backlinked from a performing, trustworthy website.

• Domain Authority:

If the website has a domain authority between 40 to 50, it is considered average. 50 to 60 is considered as good and above 60 is considered excellent. DA can be checked using Semrush for free.

Enter the domain address in the search bar of Semrush and you will get the DA score for the website as circled in the picture given above.

• Organic Search Traffic:

If a website is getting a decent amount of organic traffic, it is an indication that the website is performing well. Again, Semrush is the tool used to check this parameter.

If you check the dashboard you can see for Dec 2022 the website is getting 59.3k organic traffic, which is a solid number and an indication that the website is performing well in its SEO parameters.

• Referring Domain:

A website's reliability can be determined by looking at how many times it got backlinked or recommend by other websites or domains.

As explained previously, this can be analyzed by checking the backlink overview in the dashboard. In this example, the website analyzed is getting unique backlinks from 5.5K domains. This is an indication that the website is trustworthy.