Backlinks occur when one website links to another. As simple as this may seem, it contributes to a website’s SEO. The more your site is referenced or cited by other websites, especially those authoritative ones, the better the reputation you can build online.
Backlinks flag you as a website that can be trusted. This establishes your credibility within your industry, improving your authority. It improves your chance of being on search engine organic search results, which is known to generate the most ROI.
Backlinks are highly beneficial to your SEO, as they can boost your organic rankings and contributes to gaining website visitors, which you can convert to customers or clients. However, there are also toxic backlinks that can do otherwise. They can harm your SEO more than good and lead to search engines avoiding your website.
At most, aim to get high-quality backlinks within websites and content that people want to read and share. This gives you more visibility and positively contributes to your SEO strategy. Here are the best types of backlinks you should build:
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The Types Of Backlinks That Are Best for SEO
There were 1.88 billion identified websites in 2021, and more are added daily. But not all these sites are worth the backlink. Some types of backlinks can deliver the best positive results for your SEO. Some of these are:
Editorial Backlinks
Editorial backlinks are organic inbound links used naturally in a website’s content. This does not only pertain to just websites but rather authoritative ones in the industry. Such links are often contextual authority links, meaning they cite you linked to content that is relevant to the topic or industry you are also targeting.
Editorial backlinks are high-quality links, often given by verified and qualified sites. These usually occur when they cite statistics or other fact-based information that you originally published. Editorial links are arguably the most difficult backlinks to gain, yet they can also provide you with the highest reputation boost and can strengthen your link profile. These links are not paid nor requested but rather earned.
Guest Blogging Backlinks
Guest blogging is a common link-building approach – where you publish content on other sites with backlinks to your own content or website. When doing this, it is important to only publish on guest blogs that are trustworthy and indexed by search engines. It’s also important to publish relevant and informative content with contextual links, to avoid giving yourself toxic backlinks.
You need to properly vet guest blogs to link to make sure they are high-quality sites. Be on the lookout for blog sites that appear spammy, have malware or viruses, are designed only to build links, or have not been indexed by search engines, as these are among the types of backlinks you should avoid.
As much as possible, avoid unnatural and inorganic paid backlinks, as this can be considered manipulation and can negatively impact your reputation online and offline
Business Profile Backlinks
Business profile backlinks are the links you get from company profile creation sites and platforms. These websites often list companies and gather data about them for other industry players to use for monitoring, research and/or comparison.
Some websites also list companies based on legal registrations and filings for transparency. A link on these websites can help you be more visible and easily found online. These profile creation sites also have their SEO strategies, to which, in a way, you can tag along.
How To Create Natural Backlinks With Content
Good backlinks are often created through organic relationships between websites, primarily based on brand credibility and content quality. The best type of backlinks you can get are those that you earned by strengthening your brand and publishing relevant and informative content that is actually worth citing. Here are some tips on how you can effectively create natural backlinks with content:
Don’t Ask For Links; Offer Value Instead
Asking websites to link your site or page can be a common and clean SEO link-building method. However, it is often ineffective and will not generate long-term value for you.
If you wish to reach out to other websites or brands, pitch them with the value of your brand or the content you want them to link. This way, they will be able to understand its context and link it naturally to related content they published.
Create High-quality, Diverse, and Targeted Content
SEO is not just publishing content anymore. With Google’s most recent major algorithm update, context is now more important; hence the idea is that the search engine will utilize Natural Language Processing (NPL) to rank results based on quality. Therefore, you need not just to publish content; it has to be diversified, covering various topics and containing useful materials.
It doesn’t always have to be an article — it can also be an infographic, a video or other media. There are people who enjoy reading, while others prefer seeing an image with all the information on it. As you aim to be a thought leader, offering something to each type of audience is best.
This approach will not only help in your SEO but can also give you better chances of getting more natural backlinks. Publishing content relevant to a specific type of customer or readers can help you attract sites that are targeting the same group of audience who may be interested; give you a link or two.
Get Ahead
One great way to get natural backlinks that will be disseminated is by delivering relevant and timely content. Check what other sites within your industry are doing or publishing. See what’s trending or currently controversial and try to generate content that’s within this trend.
Or better yet, try to create content that’s ahead of them. Research what type of content they may need, and try to build useful and comprehensive content that will attract interest from the right audience.
Optimize Content per Channel
Your content’s ranking will vary when searched across different platforms. This is because these channels use different algorithms to retrieve searches and rank relevance. More so, these channels have different types of users. To get better chances of ranking and getting backlinks, optimize the content you publish — both for people and search engines.
If you are posting on Facebook or Instagram, be visual and use images as well as readable and impactful texts. For Twitter, keep it short but sweet; For YouTube, publish high-quality videos with relevant, informative or entertaining content and so on. This way, you can maximize your channels and attract more audience and/or viewers, making your content more credible and authoritative. In turn, this can make you a good site to link to.
People Over Search Engines
When it comes to building natural backlinks, the best way to go is to always focus on your audience. Deliver high-quality and useful content that is worth reading and sharing. This way, you are establishing a positive and valuable relationship with people and not just ranking the search engines for the sake of it.
Through this positive approach, you’ll be able to build backlinks and your overall site and brand credibility sustainably. At the end of the day, you are aiming to gain human customers. Hence it is best to always build your SEO strategy around them, where they will also benefit as you do.