Backlinks are on the most vital factors that are considered by search engines for ranking a website. As far as importance goes, backlinks are on the same level as keywords, site design and content uniqueness.
In this post, we are going to start at the bottom by looking at what backlinks are and how they are used in web content. Then, we’ll move on to discuss some of their main types and why they are important for SEO.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks (although they sound like a strange term for vertebral discs) are defined as links on a webpage that go to another page. Since this is a pretty broad term, there are different types and categories in which backlinks are divided into.
Backlinks can be acquired internally or through a link building agency. Both have advantages and disadvantages. An internal team gives you greater control over the plan, while a professional link building service can offer knowledge and resources specific to the industry.
This post will look at the various types of backlinks you can get for your website. Let’s get started.
Types of Backlinks
1. Editorial Backlinks
Editorial backlinks are defined as the inbound links to a website that are used by another reliable and high-authority website. Editorial backlinks are organically used by the other website for mentioning statistics, facts or figures.
Among the different types of backlinks, editorial backlinks can pass off the highest link equity to the linked website. Since they are used organically, they can be very helpful to the linked website’s SEO.
See the words ‘link equity’ in the paragraph above? That’s what an editorial backlink looks like. Since we were talking about a particular fact, we left a link to Moz.com to back up our info.
How to Get Editorial Backlinks?
Unlike other types of sponsored backlinks, getting editorial links is not very easy, and there is no short-cut for it.
You just have to create awesome and high-quality content rich with information. If you manage to sound authoritative and reliable, your readers will start adding links to your website in order to corroborate their content.
And once your content gets popular enough, you will start getting backlinks from high-authority websites as well.
2. Comment Backlinks
Comment backlinks are defined as the backlinks that are left by users in the comment section of an existing blog post or article.
These types of links can be organic as well as…non-organic. If an online user leaves a link to your website in the comments of their own accord, then this will be organic since you did not make any sort of monetary effort to acquire it.
Moreover, you can also leave links to your website yourself.
Considering this last part i.e., that you can leave links to your website yourself, we can appreciate how comment backlinking can be used as a spammy, black-hat technique to boost SEO.
Users can just go around leaving comments on just about any site. They can even use bots for this purpose.
But, this sort of stuff can be detected and prevented by search engines. If someone attempts to leave a comment that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand, it’s stopped from getting published and is sent to the site owner as spam.
If you’ve ever used WordPress for running your blog, you may be familiar with this. Check this one out to get a better idea:
The outlined text is the name of the blog post. The comment left by the user is completely unrelated and irrelevant…which is why it was flagged by WordPress
How to Get Comment Backlinks?
If your site is good, and if it has good content on it, then it will automatically get lots of comment links.
But as for leaving comments yourself, you should only do it on relevant websites, and that too on an irregular basis.
3. Guest Posting Backlinks
Guest posting backlinks are not as organic as editorial links. Guest posting is an SEO technique in which you contact a webmaster, and ask them to upload an article related to your website. In the article, a link is added to point back to your site.
For online users, guest posting links and editorial links look the same but since the former is due to an effort of your own (which involves payment as well, in some cases), it’s not organic.
How to Get Quality Guest Posting Links?
When choosing a site for guest posting, you have to be careful about the quality of the targeted website. It won’t really help you a lot if a bunch of spammy sites were linking back to your website.
The more authoritative and high-ranking a website is, the more link equity it passes on to the backlinked sources.
So, before reaching out to a website owner about publishing a guest post, you should first use a DA checker to find out its domain and page authority.
Sites with a DA score of 40+ are authoritative enough to give your website a decent amount of ‘link juice’.
Importance of Backlinks for SEO
Now that we have looked at some of the various types of backlinks that you can get to your site, let’s come down to elaborating our main topic i.e., the importance of backlinks for SEO.
When website ‘A’ gives a backlink to website ‘B’, it (website ‘A’) acknowledges ‘B’s credibility. It is, in the words of Moz, a ‘vote of confidence’ from A to B.
When Google wants to rank a website, it checks and sees how many authoritative websites are backlinking to it. If there are lots of them, then Google will give it a higher rank in the SERPs.
A high number of backlinks to a website are essentially an indication that its credibility and reliability are affirmed and corroborated by other websites and platforms on the internet.
Site authority is essential for SEO, and backlinks are the quickest way to build it.
Conclusion
Backlink building is one of the most essential components of any SEO strategy. Site content and usability can only help your site’s rank to a certain extent. For consistently improving your site’s SEO, you have to use backlinks.
In this post, we looked at some of the main types of backlinks that you can use for boosting your site’s SEO rank. Of all these different types, editorial backlinks give the highest amount of ‘link juice’.
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