What Are Backlinks In SEO And How To Earn Good Backlinks

If you want to know what are backlinks in a nutshell you are in the right place, I am going to tell you also how to earn the good ones.

Backlink Definition: every website that links to another website is creating a backlink.

For instance, if I put a link here! This link would be a backlink on marcodiversi.com for the website I am linking to which is reliablesoft.net.

The link on the website A will be seen from Google when crawling the website and it will give more authority to the website B.

The more quality and relevant links you have from other websites to your site, the biggest your authority will be.

The authority also called DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) of a single page, are some of the key factors to rank on Google.

This is like a voting system that tells Google if your site is good or not based on other sites votes. Click To Tweet

In this article, I am going to tell you what is a good backlink and what is a bad one and some techniques to use to earn good backlinks.

Table of Contents

What Are Backlinks In SEO

Backlinks in SEO are like a form of trust that someone gives you.

For instance, if tomorrow I am getting a few articles about marcodiversi.com on the New Tork Times or Neil Patel etc…

My website will be more appreciated because if those authoritative websites are linking back to me it means that it is worth it for visitors to visit them.

Google love to show to the users the best content possible based on the search that the users is performing also called query.

You can understand by yourself that this is a very legit system that Google uses to create trust.

The thing you need to deeply understand is that it doesn’t matter how many backlinks you have! The big numbers will come without your efforts.

What matters is to have some quality backlinks from authoritative sites at least in the beginning.

You can check the domain authority of any site using the MOZ bar extension on your browser.

INSTALL THE MOZ BAR NOW

The process of getting backlinks is called earning links or link building.

What are good and bad backlinks?

Good Backlink: is a link that comes from a website relevant to yours that has a decent DA and that is not a spammy site. i.e: If your site is about cars you don’t want backlinks from a site that sells candies.

Bad Backlink: is a link that comes from not relevant websites, from profiles created just to get a link and all of the black hat techniques, these links are also called ‘toxic links‘. Google is pretty smart to figure out if the backlink was created without being spammy.

Do not buy links ever!

How To Earn Good Quality Backlinks

The best way to earn quality backlinks is to spy on a competitors website and see where they are getting links from.

The only tool you will need to accomplish this is SEMrush. This is the best seo tool and all you need. You can use SEMrush here and run a search from the script below.

Once you have a free semrush account you will be able to run searches and check on your competitor’s backlinks profile.

Once you find the websites they are linking from! You need then to create some strategies and use some techniques to get a backlink from them.

Something I want to highlight is that as soon as your sites are starting to get noticed and searched for on Google many backlinks will come without the need for doing the hard work you need to do in the beginning.

You must from time to time check also if the backlinks to your site are quality links. Some spammers and some people might link back to your site just so that your ranking will be ruined.

I will talk about later how to disavow links and one of my favorite tools to see the toxicity of my backlinks is Web CEO.

Do All The Links Have The Same Weight?

The answer is NO!

There are different kind of links you can have on a webpage!

If you are planning to make a lot of money online, I strongly suggest you to learn to code a little bit with freecodecamp.

LEARN TO CODE FOR FREE ON FREECODECAMP

The reason why I am telling you this is because you don’t want to rely on others when playing with your sites.

Something you need to understand, SEO speaking is that when you place a link on a website you can give to it a lot of attributes.

These attributes are often hidden from human eyes but are not hidden for crawlers or computers.

Something you need to understand when speaking about backlinks are these two attributes:

rel="dofollow"
rel="nofollow"

The first one will be applied if you don’t put anything. Instead, if you decide to give it a nofollow attribute this one will not be considered from Google and it will not pass the same authority as a dofollow link.

If you are a WordPress user you need to install Title and Nofollow For Links if you are coding the site you need to add:

rel="nofollow"

<a href="http://www.marcodiversi.com/" rel="nofollow">Marco Diversi</a>

Using a nofollow link is useful in certain cases, I will talk about that in other articles.

Links that are coming from your own domain also do not give you more authority on a page, but they will create what’s called ‘link juice‘.

And last but not least, you should get backlinks from other sites linking to a specific keyword.

i.e: if you are selling cars, you want ‘best cars‘ to be linked to one of your articles talking about best cars.

‘Best cars’ is called in this case ‘Anchor text‘.

What Are Backlinks Advantages

To summarize all of this, here I will list the top advantages of having backlinks all over the web.

increase your DA – PA etc…
make it easier for Google to find your site. If Google finds your site on a famous site then it will crawl your site as well. Otherwise, you need to wait until Google decides to scan your site by itself.
you will earn referral traffic, eventually.
people will notice you on the web.
crawlers will have an easier time to see what you are talking about on your site.

How To Get Quality Backlinks?

This part of this article focuses on the best techniques that will help you to gain high-quality links on your site.

I am not talking about how to gain bad quality links since there are many companies that will sell you millions of links for a fixed price and there are many black hat techniques that will accomplish that.

Since the Penguin update from Google, websites that have bad quality links pointing to their sites will be penalized.

So it is your goal to avoid any kind of bad practice an technique to increase the number of links to your site.

Your goal when planning an SEO backlinks strategy should be just one, and more precisely this one:

GETTING A PERMANENT DOFOLLOW LINK ON MANY AUTHORITATIVE AND RELEVANT WEBSITES!

And here I am going to list and shortly describe some of the most efficient and powerful techniques to earn quality backlinks.

Guest Posts

Guest posting or guest blogging is one of my favorite ways to earn high-quality links. Guest posting is basically writing a good article for another website that will give value to their site and in exchange, you will get a link back to one of the articles of your website.

This requires a lot of time and also it is not very cool to give away for free your precious insights to someone else.

But with this method, the chances that they will accept it are very high. The best way to search for websites that allow guest posts is by writing on Google:

“write for us” YOUR KEYWORD
“guest post” YOUR KEYWORD

Keep the double quotes and replace YOUR KEYWORD with your blog keyword. Like, in this case, it would be:

“write for use” SEO

You can then read their requirements for a guest post and if you feel like you can satisfy them, just contact them or write them a pitch idea of the article you want to write on their site.

If you get approved your article will go live and linking to your site. What I usually do is a big research of the websites I am interested to link from and then bookmark them all and sort them by DA.

Broken Link Technique

This is a more advanced technique, it is not 100% sustainable like the one mentioned above. But if you persist and you are good with words, you can eventually earn an awesome backlink with almost no efforts.

This technique works like this, you need to install an extension called check my links on Chrome.

INSTALL CHECK MY LINKS

Once the extension is installed all you have to do is browsing on your favorite websites. In most of the cases, these are related to your blog posts and website as well.

Each time you are on one of these websites run a check with ‘check my links‘. This extension will scan the webpage and look for broken links on that page.

Since 404 errors and even worst 5xx errors are bad for SEO you want to reach out to the owner of the site and send them a mail saying something like this :

Hello,

my name is Marco Diversi and I am a webmaster. I was looking at your site and noticed some broken links, these are not good for SEO!

I have a blog with content relevant to yours and especially to the link that is broken on your site now.

Please feel free to replace that link with mine:

https://marcodiversi.com/blog/seo

thanks

Chances are that for every 30 messages you are sending out you will get 1 link.

Outreach The Guru And Mention The Guru.

If you are making great content, by the way, you can always reach out to gurus and important websites in your niche.

You can ask these guys to publish your article on their social networks or to link to your content if they find it awesome and interesting.

In most of the cases, if you are doing a good job, gurus would love to link to you, this would give them material to share on their sites that is relevant to theirs.

Also, something that works pretty good is to mention a guru on your article. Like Neil Patel and then link to your site with Neil Patel as the anchor word.

These gurus have people using ahrefs to see mentions and new backlinks every day. They are very careful with backlinks that are created without their consent.

If you link to them and you have good content on your site, chances are that the guru will comment on your site to say thanks or even invite you to make a guest post on their site or even link to your article with no efforts.

Create Awesome Pictures And Graphs

Create awesome pictures and infographics or a badge that will give value to someone. Something smart to do for instance is to create a little javascript script you can grab from your site that does something awesome and that includes the API of your site or even a link to your site.

For instance, if you learn how to code on free code camp you can create a badge to put on your website that people can grab and that for instance that can show the DA of your site in a glance.

If you are able to code you can link that script to your site, you can do the same thing with pictures and infographics.

You can use a website like Siege media embedder to create the embeddable version of that pic or infographic that anyone can just grab and paste on their site.

Get Interviewed For A Special Skill You Might Have

If you are a guru yourself on something in particular and you are an expert or you have a story to tell, you might want to consider to get interviewed.

Reach out to people in your industry and tell them that you are the best at doing this and that and you would love to be interviewed.

There must be a video and a blog post posted somewhere on a famous website that will link back to your main site.

And voila you will get another backlink!

Go To Conferences, Meet People And Ask To Link Back To You

Talking to people in the real world is the most effective way to earn fame and trust. People love to interact with people, eat together, talk about stupid stuff, laugh and ask for backlinks on their sites right?

Jokes apart, going to conferences, seminars and summits is a good way to meet webmasters and websites owners that after a few drinks and laughs might be very prone to link back to your site.

Leave Comments On Relevant Sites

Leaving comments on other sites is a very effective way to gain a link and eventually traffic from people searching for you on the internet.

90% of the links that you will get from commenting are nofollow links, these will pass to your site less authority but still are very worth it and they will boost the link juice of your site.

Try to write comments that add value to the reader and never link to your site from the comment section. In most of the cases these websites have a form to fill that includes these fields:

comment.
name.
email.
website.

The website field even though will make your website not visible on the comment box, will give a nofollow in some cases dofollow link under the name you are commenting.

This will be a backlink and it is not required for you to be spammy and drop links all over the internet. Once the comment is approved and in order to be approved, it must be a good comment you will get a free link under your name.

Use Tools Like NinjaOutreach

If you are lazy and willing to pay some money they have created a very good tool that will do the hard job for you.

This tool is called ninja outreach and what it does is finding all the best blog posts, and relevant websites to your site every day, and automatically reach out with the websites owners.

It will search for blogs, keywords, and relevant articles and reach out the owners day after day so that you will improve the chances to get links.

Of course, you need to interact personally once the link trade is accepted and talk with the owners of the websites. But still this will save you so much time and it is one of the only backlink tools you need.

TRY NINJAOUTREACH NOW

This will not create any backlink on your site, it will just find you the best people to reach out and reach them out automatically.

If you are trying to find these people manually and then outreach them you will soon find out that it takes a lot of time.

This will save you time.

Ask To Link Back To One Of Your Articles Via Your Email List

If you have a website you should have a place where people can subscribe to your newsletters. This will guarantee that you will have some sort of customers that stick to your website content.

Something smart to do is to send automated email and newsletters where you put in it some call to actions and reminders of your coolest articles and that you would appreciate if they link to your articles on your blog and that you will do the same.

This is a very effective way to increase your backlink portfolio and in most of the cases, it works. The only problem is that it takes months if not years to have a decent email list.

Aweber is a good EMS (email marketing service), you can get access to it from this link.

Spy on your competitors

Spying on competitors is the best way to get links that are relevant to your site!

The best way to do it is by using SEMrush. You can get a free trial and use it as a freemium for life from the button below.

MAKE A SEMRUSH ACCOUNT NOW AND GET IT AS A FREEMIUM

After the account is created you can run searches and reports and figure out where your competitors are linking.

You can read my guide on semrush here. They will ask you for a credit card if you want to have full features as a trial for 1 week.

But actually, if you hit the back button and log in again you will be able to use it for free as a freemium.

But you can get the backlink analysis from “Backlinks analytics” ⇒ ” Backlinks“.

You can then click on the little arrow next to the link and open it and then reach out or use one of the techniques listed above. Click To Tweet

Conclusions

Hopefully, by now you know what are backlinks and you can make a distinction between good links and bad links.

There are some theories saying that backlinks in 2018 are not important since Google algorithms are smart enough to figure out if your site is good or bad.

But there are also other theories that actually make a little more sense prooving that there are almost no websites on the first page of Google targeting certain high volume keywords that don’t have at least a few high-quality links.

Something I didn’t mention is also that the TLD matters a bit if you are getting a link from a .edu TLD it matters way more compared to a .club or .com etc…

You can also read my guide on how to get quality backlinks using google alerts. This is another smart way to find people in your industry and you should read it.

SEMrush is the only tool you need regarding SEO and SEMrush is pulling out the backlinks from the majestic API.

GET SEMRUSH NOW

Things you don’t have to do: