While you may think that the main factors for the level of traffic your website receives would be things such as the topic, visuals, and quality of content this isn’t always the case. Your website could be the most amazing one in the world, but first, you need to take the proper steps to ensure that people can actually locate it. Our little friends called backlinks are the backbone of improving search result rankings and internet traffic and we’ll be going more in-depth into how this works in this guide. For any questions regarding things like specific backlinks so important generators, we recommend a review aggregator site such as Truely.
What even is a backlink?
Before we can explain why they are important we first need to understand what exactly a backlink is and how it works.
In layman’s terms, a backlink is an external link on another website that leads to your site. The more of these you have and the better they are the higher up your site will be when keywords related to it are searched up.
While the concept itself is quite simple, there is actually quite a lot of depth when it comes not only to how they work but also how they can be obtained and whether or not you should focus on them and related things such as backlink generators.
What do backlinks do for my site?
Backlinks are useful for your site as they pretty much tell Google (the search engine) that your site and its content are deemed valuable by another site due to them pasting a link to you. This allows them to rank you higher in search results based on the vote of confidence given to you.
Simply put, backlinks tell search engines which websites are more likely to have valuable and worthwhile content so they can place them in higher spots on search results related to said content.
Backlinks are one of your best tools when it comes to increasing traffic to your site from search results as they directly affect how well your site is ranked and how likely someone is to find your site from searching related keywords.
Are all backlinks the same?
Backlinks used to be all about quantity and it was quite simple, the more you had the higher your chance was of being at the top of search results, however, things have changed quite a bit from this.
Since 2012 the system has been changed to where higher-quality backlinks were valued far more, and the quantity started to mean less because of this. Considering that you could have hundreds of low-quality backlinks be worth less than a single excellent one.
Not only was it made so that better backlinks were worth a lot more, but those which were suspicious would be worth less than before, possibly even accruing a negative score. You could actually have backlinks which lowered the chance of getting a high spot on search results.
How can I get backlinks?
Now that you have an understanding of what backlinks are and how they function you may be wondering how you can obtain backlinks to boost the ranking of your site.
The main ways to get backlinks are the following:
- Organic or natural links – these are obtained when a backlink is gained without any action being taken by the owner of the linked site. For example, if a blog likes your content and links your site despite you not having asked them to do so. As the name implies you can’t force organic links and simply have to create quality content and hope people like it enough to link it to others online.
- Manual links – as the name implies these are created when you take action and reach out to obtain a link. If you reach out to some site and request a link then that link would be manual as you took an action to have it created.
- Self-created links – these are created when the site owner themselves link their site somewhere. While this may seem tempting as it is the simplest way of obtaining a link, remember that not all links are created equal and ones such as this would be of low quality so they could actually harm your ranking.
It may seem like a disappointing answer, but truly the road to many high-quality backlinks requires a lot of time and consistently good content. Not only that but it also takes a bit of luck as not everyone who consumes your content will want to link it elsewhere.
While it can be frustrating to be at the mercy of others in terms of organically increasing your traffic it is expected because it’s just that, organic growth, not forced by your hand.
Backlink generators
If you look into backlinks a bit more you may see the term “backlink generator” tossed around when someone asks how to improve their search ranking within a quick time frame.
A backlink generator is a tool that you can find online that is able to generate backlinks for your site once you provide it with a URL. They were used a lot before 2012 and while quantity was the name of the game, in recent times their effectiveness has been up for debate.
While backlink generators certainly do create backlinks to your site, not all will actually improve your search rankings as most of them create quite low-quality links which may not do anything for you or even hurt your SEO.
Some people do say that certain backlink generators are capable of creating high-quality links. Many people still have their doubts so be careful when deciding if you want to use them.
Conclusion
Unless you’re running a site that for some reason doesn’t care about search result rankings then backlinks should be quite important to you, however, remember that it’s very hard to force the best backlinks so you may not be able to affect it as directly as you may want to.
Nevertheless, it’s important to know about them as they can massively affect the traffic your site gets. We hope that this guide has helped you not only learn about backlinks themselves but also helped you possibly increase how many visitors your site receives.