What is a backlink?
Backlinks are, as written above, links from other websites that link to your website. They are also called inbound links.
Example 1: A blogger has written a promotional blog post about your product and links to your website where customers can buy the product.
Example 2: A business partner links to you from his website or internet portal.
Example 3: You have written a good article on how to clean an old dirty sofa. A user asks for help with this on a forum, and another user on the same forum replies to the person, with a link to your guide.
What do I need backlinks for?
Backlinks are typically good, as Google considers backlinks as a recommendation of the linked page. This is also why pages that have many backlinks are more likely to rank higher organically in Google.
How many backlinks you have, whether they are nofollow or dofollow, and where they come from matter a lot. The higher the authority of the websites linking to you in Google, the better a backlink it is.
You are therefore well advised to plan a strategy for your backlink SEO.
How do I get backlinks?
There are different ways to acquire backlinks.
You can get backlinks in the following ways:
- Buy backlinks. There are several providers where you can buy backlinks. The providers typically have both high and low quality links. Read more about purchase of links.
- Earn backlinks. If you create good content on your website, like in the example of cleaning the old sofa, you have a chance of people linking to your website.
- Switch to backlinks. For example, you can ask your partners to link to each other. Just don't link to and from the same pages, as Google will be able to see through such a manoeuvre 🙂
Read more about methods to get backlinks in our article on link building.
How do I check my backlinks?
There are various tools that allow you to track your backlinks. The best tool in our opinion is Ahrefsbut you can also find information about links to your website in SEMrush, Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
