Have you ever clicked on a link available on a website that brought you to a page of another website instead of directing you to the next page of the same website? Such types of links are called backlinks. These are also known as ‘inbound links’ and ‘incoming links’. Backlinks are used in blogging as well as in other types of content.

A website may use your website or webpage link as a backlink only when they find your article to be somehow relevant to its article or contains most of the part that their website wants to explain to its clients and customers. 

Backlinks are one of the most important parts of SEO and represent the traffic redirected to your website from another one. The qualitative backlinks are highly capable of improving the rank of your website. However, the quantity of the backlinks also matters in search engine optimization. 

Many factors are evaluated by Google for ranking of the webpages, one of them is the link popularity of a webpage. The more backlinks you get, the more popular your website is. However, the quality of your content and its relevance is a great factor that influences the use of backlinks. 

The more backlinks you have, the more trustworthy your website is to your customers and the more chances of getting on-trend. But let us clarify that not all the backlinks are valuable to your website, there may be bad backlinks as well. Different backlinks have different values. 

You may use certain attributes in the links you address towards other sites to qualify their value and specify the relationship between your website and another website, such as rel=”sponsored” for advertised links, rel=”ugc” for links within comments and forums, rel=”nofollow” when you don’t want your website to be associated with the website you’re linking to.

In this article, we will be discussing how backlinks are used in any website, how they assist the SEO part of the website, how they fix different issues, getting quality backlinks and avoiding bad ones, etc. 

Now that you have enough idea about what backlinks are, let’s move on to the different factors we need to take care of to make them work more effectively:

• Terminate Invalid/Broken Links

Sometimes the links inserted on a website may lead you to a ‘404 error’ page. Do you know what it means? It means that the webpage that you are redirected to does not exist anymore. None of the customers enjoy such responses from any website. 

So, make sure that the links that are redirected by other websites to your website are working to the date and do not show a 404 error. Even if the page is removed from your site, you may create a 301 redirect. 

• Don’t Get Trapped with Redirect Chains

As you have an idea of creating a 301 redirect in place of the 404 error page, you may have got to the conclusion that you can now replace every 404 page with a 301 redirect. But there still is a long way to go and many more things to understand.

One or two of 301 redirects would not hamper your website, but using multiple redirects will create confusion and may be frustrating to the customers. The use of multiple redirect pages will result in one link leading to another, another link to another, and so on. Which will go through the chain of irrelevant contents before reaching the destination URL. So make sure that you don’t create a lot of redirect chains. 

• Page Load Speed

Just because you are receiving traffic from other websites, you cannot be sure that your website is functioning at its best. You should make sure that none of your web pages take a long time to load because your customers are not gonna wait long to load your page. 

According to the data from (pingdom.com) the page load time should not exceed 2 seconds and if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, there is a high chance that the visitors would close your webpage to move on to another search result. So, to be able to hold or retain the visitors from backlinks, make sure that your page load speed is good. 

• Check Current Backlinks

Do some research on the links of your website which are referred to the visitors by other websites. Check the number of backlinks that you currently have, the websites that are using your website link as backlinks, the similarities between that website and your website, top linked pages, etc. Because there’s no use of such backlinks which do not show the relation between your website and that website. The users would immediately leave your site if they find it to be irrelevant.

You may check the current backlinks with the help of a backlink checker or free Google Search Console as well. 

What sort of backlinks are of no use? 

Not all the backlinks work as effectively as the qualitative ones. There are some sorts of backlinks that are of no use to your website and may even harm your current ranking. 

Check out the list below. We have mentioned some types of backlinks that do not provide you with any benefit.

1. Backlinks from irrelevant site
2. Automated link building
3. Public link networks
4. Sitewide links
5. Purchased comments

Conclusion: 

As you have gained enough idea about what backlink actually is and how it works, you can get started with backlinks on your website now. Be careful about the types of backlinks that connect your website with another website and the backlinks to be avoided to maintain the reputation and quality of your website.