A Beginner Guide On How To Manage Backlinks In SEO
What are backlinks in SEO? Backlinks are links that point to a website from another website. In simple terms, a hyperlink helps Google Bot crawl and index web pages more efficiently on the web. Apart from crawling and indexing web pages, backlinks are the most important part of SEO. They help improve a website’s organic presence on SERPs and drive organic traffic. However, backlinks cannot be the only factor in improving a website’s ranking. To improve organic rankings on Google, one needs to invest in on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is all about optimizing the content of your site, and off-page SEO is all about increasing the number of backlinks on your website. In order to get a good ranking on Google, you need to implement both on-page and off-page SEO by equally distributing your efforts. In order to better understand backlinks in SEO, here’s a great example about it. Imagine you have a blog about “Digital Marketing Strategies.” A popular website, such as moz.com, publishes an article on “Top 10 SEO Trends for 2024” and includes a hyperlink to your blog post, “Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing,” within their content. This hyperlink pointing from moz.com to your blog is considered a backlink. Here’s how it might look in practice: “For a more comprehensive understanding of digital marketing strategies, check out this Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing.” The text “Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing” is the anchor text, and the hyperlink directs readers to your blog post. What is backlink management in SEO? SEO and backlink strategies have changed a lot over the years. 10 years ago, backlink strategies like forum posting, image links, PPT links, PDF links, and directory submissions had a huge role to play in SEO. However, these strategies don’t work today. Nowadays, contextual, relevant, and high-authority backlinks play a huge role in SEO. And this is where backlink management comes into the picture. Backlink management simply means optimizing your website’s link profile and taking complete control over your off-page SEO activities. Acquisition, maintenance, and monitoring of backlinks are the three most important tasks of backlink management in SEO. 1. Link acquisition As the name says it all, link acquisition involves the strategic process of obtaining backlinks from other websites to your own. This can be achieved through various methods, such as building relationships with industry influencers, engaging in guest blogging, creating high-quality content that naturally attracts links, and leveraging directories or business listings. The main aim of the backlink acquisition is to increase the number of referring domains to your website, which can enhance your website’s credibility and search engine ranking. Acquiring links does not mean getting backlinks from any website. The backlink you are trying to acquire must be relevant to your niche. Plus, the website from where you are getting a link must be a genuine business website with good authority, design, traffic, and quality pages on the site. Following are some of the best link acquisition techniques: a) Blogger outreach Blogger outreach is a fantistic way by which you can reach out to fellow bloggers or webmasters in your niche and ask them to give a backlink to your site. However, no one would like to give you a link for free. So you can either contribute a guest article on their website or mention them in your content and link out to them. Highlight that you have given them a backlink and, in return, you would like to get a backlink from their website too. Check out this sample blogger outreach template: b) LinkedIn outreach This is one of my personal favorites and most effective link-building techniques. It works like a charm and gives me 100% results when done in the step-by-step format.The first step is to find a website from which you would like to get a link. After that, you need to scroll that website and come to the footer section, where you can find the social media icons of that site. Now click on the LinkedIn icon, and you will be taken to the company page of that site on LinkedIn. After that, you need to come to the people section on the page and look for the employees who are working as SEO or digital marketing executives or managers at that company. You can use the advanced filter option and type of position and job role to make it quick. After you find a few employees, you can send them the connection request. Once they accept your connection, you can outreach them and ask for a link to your site. c) Be part of SEO Slack communities. Joining SEO Slack communities for link exchange can be an effective way to build relationships, share knowledge, and acquire quality backlinks. I am personally part of 10+ Slack communities, where I build 30+ quality backlinks to my site every month. You can also leverage these communications and connect with fellow SEO professionals, digital marketers, content creators, and website owners who actively engage in discussions, share insights, and collaborate on various SEO strategies. By becoming an active member of such groups, you can connect with like-minded professionals interested in mutually beneficial link exchanges, guest posting opportunities, and other collaborative efforts to enhance backlink profiles. Additionally, these communities can provide a platform to stay updated on the latest SEO trends, tools, and algorithm updates, helping you refine your strategies and achieve better search engine visibility. 2. Link maintenance Link maintenance is another important part of backlink management, which is the ongoing effort to manage the quality of your existing backlinks, ensuring that they continue to provide value to your website’s SEO. This can be done by checking your backlink profile for any broken links, reaching out to webmasters to update or fix these links, and disavowing harmful or spammy links that could negatively impact your site’s performance. Additionally, link maintenance includes reclaiming lost links by contacting the site owner who has removed your link after a while. Proper link maintenance … Read more