Search engines estimate a website’s worth by evaluating a lot of factors. Among them, backlinks have been an important factor for quite some time. Link building has remained one of the difficult digital marketing tactics of all times. It’s not the numbers that matter while building backlinks for your site, but the quality. An effective SEO strategy requires some good quality backlinks to make it work. Search engines recognize and value links that are only from established and trusted websites. 

In this article, we’ll discuss some factors that impact link building, the type of backlinks that you can look for, and the ones you shouldn’t be very fond of. Even after reading this article, if you feel that you’ve already done these and still think your website can do more, simply connect with us.  We’ve got a team of digital marketing experts to fix your issues. 

What Impacts Link Value?

Before we discuss the types of backlinks that could benefit you and the ones that you should be avoiding, it’s important you understand the factors that make it valuable. There are plenty of factors that influence backlinks, and we’ll be discussing a few of them below.

1. The Authority of Linking Site

Backlinks with the most value come from quality websites. These sites containing top authoritative resources send you traffic that search engines recognize as positive signals. Backlinks from low-quality,  lesser-known websites will not be able to offer you this advantage. Even a few backlinks from websites with a higher rank will benefit your website SEO over the ones from a less-popular, low-ranking website. 

2. The Dofollow vs Nofollow Status

Basically, when you get deep into this, there are only two types of backlinks, dofollow & nofollow. The difference between the two cannot be directly seen by anyone who reads the webpage, instead, you need to get into the source code to see it. The link mentioned with the dofollow tag in the code tells Google that the link is organic. This means that the link wasn’t bought and it was linked for the accuracy of the content at the other end of that link. While links tagged as nofollow indicate the search engines to ignore them.

Although Google wants to see a good share of both dofollow & nofollow links on a website, they place a lot of value on dofollow links. You need to include dofollow links more in the website code since they are the ones Google consider valuable for SEO.  

3. On-Site Link Location

Most websites are divided into sections. And the value of every backlink is influenced by the place or the section on which it appears. Backlinks with the most value need to be placed on the main body content of the site.  Search engines may not consider the same value when the links appear in the header, footer, or sidebar of the page. Keep in mind to include the most valuable backlinks in the main body content of a site while you build high-quality backlinks. 

The Links You Need to Look For Better SEO

1. Editorial Backlinks

Editorial backlinks are the links with editorial mentions to your site. An editorial mention is when an authoritative website refers and links to your website in a piece of relevant, high-quality content as a source to support their own work. This usually happens when backlinks are created for your own content cited as the source of specific information (such as an article, infographic, or video), when a company representative is quoted or interviewed, or when your site is included in a collection of links on a particular topic. 

There is no shortcut to earn editorial backlinks. You need to develop a strong content marketing strategy and create high-quality, shareable, evergreen content. Such interesting content will help your website & brand go viral and grow into a go-to resource source for all. 

2. Guest Blogging Backlinks

Guest blogging has been around for quite some time, and it still remains a valuable type of backlink. The only matter of concern is to do it the right way.  Write guest posts on well-established sites and in most cases, you’ll be allowed to include an editorial backlink to your own site content. When you establish a good relationship with a relevant and authoritative website, you can turn them into a recurring source of links. So, make it a practice to do some guest blogging!

3. Business Profile Backlinks

For a business, you’ll have to create digital profiles on business listing sites, social media, industry directories, and review sites. And most often, this becomes an opportunity to post a backlink. Placing links on such authoritative sites will help search engines identify it as evidence that shows your website is well established with contents of high quality.  

So, start creating profiles on popular directories, review sites, social media pages and include links to your website in them.  

4. Webinar Links

Creating valuable content and embedding them on your website encourages other sites to link back to it. You can create useful and informative webinars (and their recordings) and share it for public reference. When other sites embed your webinar recording content on their page, they will link and mention your brand with it.  To make it even more rewarding, you can transcribe the video. The transcript will help the content reach people better and boost your organic SEO. 

5. Free Tool Links

Everyone loves valuable resources and gets even more excited when they get it for free. Offering a valuable resource like a tool for free is one of the best ways to get links naturally. A free tool can be a basic scaled-down version of your advanced paid tool that you currently offer. But, do not scale it down too much that people don’t find it useful enough to want it. The free tool you offer should be able to give them a taste of the full version you provide. 

Find the audience who would be interested in the tool you offer by searching on Google or using SEO tools. All you need to do is to reach out to them, promote the tool, encourage backlinks, and if possible, have them write a feature about it. 

6. Acknowledgement Backlinks

You can earn an acknowledgment backlink when a website mentions and links to you in reference to a relationship or sponsorship. This doesn’t deal with content related to the brand or what they do, and, instead, it’s based on simple mentions like:

• • Indicating that your brand made a donation
  • Showing people that someone from your brand speaking at or sponsoring an event
  • Including a testimonial for the linking to your website

Since most organizations that accept sponsorships have a page acknowledging their sponsors, you can get exposure to a community that comes under your niche, and improve your SEO by asking for backlinks to your website. 

7. Guest Post Bio Backlinks

There are situations where guest blogging sites disallow or won’t include a link back to your website’s main body of content. Instead, they’ll allow you to include a link in the bio. It is not as valuable as a link in the body of the post, but it still adds value to your website’s link portfolio. 

8. Badge Backlinks

A branded badge can be created to award other brands as recognition for their status or achievement in some capacity. This is a clever approach to earn backlinks. You can award certain websites and send them the badge to put on their website as a status symbol. And while they promote the quality of their website with this badge (on their website), you get a link back to your own.

Use  SEO tools to recognize sites with similar audiences to yours, and then determine targets for your badge program. It is a bit difficult to promote your badge to something valuable in your niche. But it will be highly rewarding if you can succeed in this, both in terms of traffic to your website and attention to your awards every year. 

9. Newsworthy Press Release Backlinks

A newsworthy press release can alert media outlets about news related to your business and help your website gain backlinks. This works only if you write and put out press releases that are newsworthy or interesting to share. You can release such news when you launch a new line of products (or a product), while you plan to open your store in a new location, when you rebrand your business with a new name, or when to collaborate with or sponsor other businesses.  

Whenever you have such a newsworthy piece of information to share, publish it on PR websites. And, you can also try reaching out to local outlets to see if they want to write something themselves and link back to you.  

10. Comment Backlinks

While you read other blogs to get news and information related to your field, you can join the conversation, comment under the blog post, and include a link back to your website. But don’t be spammy, avoid posting comments under every random blog you see, instead, post genuine comments under high-quality blog posts. Ensure that your comments prove useful to readers. This practice will help you gain traffic from people clicking on your profile. 

Bad Type of Backlinks

1. Paid Links

After discussing all these types of backlinks, you’d feel that going for a paid link is easier than spending time and effort on other backlinking methods. But you shouldn’t pay other publishers and websites to link to your site. Google itself has made this point clear that paid links can impact a site’s ranking in the search results. So, refrain from buying links in pursuit of improving SEO. 

2. Non-Newsworthy Press Releases

Non-newsworthy press releases won’t help you gain attention and backlinks. This usually happens when websites become desperate for producing backlinks. Such practices will affect your SEO badly since it appears spammy. So, refrain from putting out content that lacks genuineness. 

3. General Business and Article Directory Links

Don’t overdo with your directory listings. Creating profiles in every possible directory you can find is not the right approach. There is no point in reaching directories that aren’t trustworthy and respected (or those that simply aren’t related to your brand). This practice has the same effect of circulating non-newsworthy content, it views your website as spam and harms your SEO efforts.

4. Forum Links

It’s obvious that you’ve seen recommendations to join internet forums and link to yourself in your posts and replies. But, you need to be careful while interacting with forums. Since it has been abused in the past by spammers, Google doesn’t favor it very well. You need to find and join high-quality forums where authentic discussions happen. Also, include links to your website exclusively at necessary places since doing it otherwise will have an effect opposite to what is intended.   

Conclusion

Search engines decide a website’s worth from the sources it associates to, the backlinks. Backlinking works well for websites only if the links are from qualified and genuine sources. Each type of backlink varies depending on its value and importance. Choose the one that will bring you relevant traffic and help in generating the most engaged clicks. Finally, try to stick to quality websites while backlinking and avoid overdoing it just for the sake of collecting many links. 

We hope this article will help in improving your link building strategies. And if you still feel you need assistance, connect with us. Our team of digital marketing experts will be glad to help you.