What’s A Backlink?

Lately, lots of people have been asking me the following questions:

• What is a backlink?
• How do you get backlinks?
• What do they do for me?

In this post I will do my very best to simplify this information and show you how you can use backlinks to increase your visibility in the search engines. Let’s begin

1. What is a Backlink?

Let’s use a simple analogy. We have website 1 and website 2; just like this picture. Website 2 writes a post about toilet paper and recommends website 1 as the best place to get it. He then puts a link that his readers can click on, which will then take a reader to website 1. It’s a backlink because website 1 has a website that is linking back to his site.

2. How do you get Backlinks?

There are literally a million ways to create backlinks. You should know that there are also millions of companies that will take your money and promise you backlinks every month. You’ll be wise to learn their process and see how they’re creating their links. I’ll be honest right now and tell you that they won’t actually give you their step by step process for doing it.

Later in this post I’ll tell you the kinds of backlinks you should be obtaining (as there are different kinds and quality). In the SEO (search engine optimization) world, there are 2 different methods of generating backlinks. They are:

• White Hat
• Black Hat

White Hat strategies take time, effort, and patience. They are characterized by honesty, integrity, and long-term. Google loves white hat optimizers and doesn’t threaten to shut down sites who do business this way.

Black Hat strategies can get you results relatively fast. However, these strategies are characterized by spammy, incoherent,  and dishonest. Google threatens to shut down sites who use these strategies. To see more about white and black hat strategies, read this interview I conducted with an SEO expert. 

My favorite methods of generating backlinks include:

• creating content that people actually want to share with their friends
• guest-posts on other blogs where I can link to my blog or have an author bio

There are lots of other strategies to get backlinks and I would love to hear your favorite in the comments section below.

3. What do they do for me?

Backlinks do a few powerful things for you, your site, and your business:

• steal traffic from existing sites
• improve your visibility in the search engines

Google looks at a backlink and says, “Because sites are linking to this site, it must be a valuable resource in this niche.”. As a direct result, they see each backlink as a popularity vote and rank more popular websites. Sites listed on the 1st page of Google have loads of backlinks. They tend to also be sites that people like. Coincidence? Hardly.