Off-page SEO – What are Backlinks
Hey guys, I hope you have written your first article and also forged all the on pages SEO points. So today we talk about backlinks, the core of SEO. So let’s start with the post.
We are already done with the on page SEO, and today we will be learning about the off page SEO. And this will conclude our SEO segment. So SEO has evolved a lot. It has continuously evolving. Earlier, it is very easy to fool Google. So black hat were used to rank your website to the top search results. So what people used to do is, to make quick money, they used to rank some articles which has monetary intent. And they use to do it by calling the black hat ways. So some of the black hat ways is like making comment backlinks, forum backlinks, VPN or the private blog network. So these are all the ways to fool the Google algorithm and get your website ranked. All these used to work earlier in 2012… 13 and all. But after the latest algorithm updates, Google has become really smarter. Now only the white hat ways of SEO works. So it is extremely difficult to rank your website if you’re following the black hat ways. You really need to provide quality content, add value to the user who is searching for the keyword, only then will your website be ranking. Now with various algorithm updates, Google has become smarter. That’s the gist. So here is a snapshot of various Google algorithmic updates. The major ones were Panda and Penguin. Google rolls out these algorithmic updates to remove all the irrelevant results on the search engines and to only keep the high quality results for their users. Now Google rolls up algorithmic updates quite frequently.
Why?
Because they really want to provide the best experience to the people who are searching on their platform. The ultimate goal of Google is to be highly relevant and to provide the answer as quickly as possible. So logically speaking, the results that answer the query the fastest and comprehensively should be ranked number one. But what people do, is that they follow the black hat procedure and they rank their websites above the high quality results. These algorithmic updates help remove all these irrelevant links, and to put only the high-quality links into the search results. So we are already done with the on page SEO part. How to find the right keywords, how to structure your content, how to make your article really comprehensive. So we are already done with the on page SEO part, and now let’s talk about off page SEO.
What is off page SEO?
It refers to action taken outside your website to impact your ranking within the search engine results page. So on page SEO was all about taking action on your website, and off page SEO is all about actions outside your website. So the primary off page SEO element is backlinks. Backlink is the most important metric when we talk about off page SEO. So we are not talking about any kind of backlink. So there’s a strategy behind the backlinks. So these are the four key parameters you have to look at when building backlinks to your website. So follow vs no follow backlinks, anchor text, link juice and relevancy. Don’t worry we will be explaining all of these one by one. So let’s start with backlinks.
What is a backlink?
So a backlink is created when one website links to another. The link between the two websites is the backlink. Let me show you, through an example. Here’s another website, Moneytap.com. So here I got an opportunity of adding a guest post on their website. When you click this link, it opens my website, xyz.in, best credit cards in Pakistan. So this is a backlink made to my website. For this article, this is a backlink. Since this article is linked to my article, this becomes a backlink to my article. The rule of convention is the more backlinks you have, the better ranking you will get. But that is not the correct definition, because there is so much more to a backlink. There are various parameters like whether the backlink is a follow backlink or no-follow backlink. Whether the backlink is coming from a relevant website or an irrelevant website. Those are the quality of the backlinks. We’ll be talking more about it now. So let’s start with the difference between a follow and no-follow backlink. Let me explain follow and no-follow backlinks through an example. Let’s take the same example of my article “best credit cards in Pakistan”. Now here this article is linked to my article “best credit cards in Pakistan”. Here I have added an extension called “no follow” in my chrome browser, so whenever it finds a no-follow backlink it just putted a red-dotted square around that backlink. So here you can see that in my article, I have link to “Standard Chartered” credit card through a no-follow backlink.
And how to check that?
You can do that by checking the source code of this article. Here you can see that the tag “rel” is equal to no-follow is applied to this link. So the power of my website, won’t be transferred to the website I am linking to. So let’s talk about this link from MoneyTap linked to my article “best credit cards in Pakistan”. Here when you check the page source code. Search for the anchor text, here there is no tag of “rel no follow”. That means the link is follow in nature. That means that Google crawler will pass on the power of this website towards my article. I know it might sound complicated, but it’s a simple concept. All you have to understand is for follow backlinks, the power of the website is transferred to the website you are linking to. And for the no-follow backlinks, Google does not consider the power. Now let’s talk about the internal and external links. So internal links are all the links that are pointing to the internal links of the website. And an external link is a link that points to any external domain. So here in my article of best credit card in Pakistan, here you can see that I’ve linked to another article to my website called “check EPF balance”. So this is an internal link to the website. For any link that is going outside of my website, like the quick application link here of this credit card, this is an external link. Now let’s talk about the anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it is usually blue and underlined. So anchor text is the exact keyword, phrase used to create the backlink. So here this keyword phrase of which credit card is the best, becomes the anchor text for the backlink that is created for my article. Now this is a very, very important part when we talk about backlinks. But honestly people, just literally ignore this part. As I mentioned, SEO has involve a lot. So Google has become much more smarter. So they are not only looking at the quantity of backlinks, but also at the quality of the backlinks. So link juice is more of a measurement of the quality of a backlink. So if a link is a no-follow like in our article, so no link juice is passed to the linked website. Also the relevancy of the backlink matters a lot. So if our article is best credit card in Pakistan, so a backlink coming from a credit card related article will be much more powerful than a backlink coming from a guitar-based website. So a backlink coming from a treasury website, which has been functioning for let’s say over 11 years, and write specifically about credit cards, then that backlink is gonna be a hundred times more powerful than a backlink coming from a new credit card based website. So why should you even create the backlinks? It’s simple, you need more organic free traffic. More the high-quality backlinks, the better ranking you will get in the Google search results and more traffic you’ll be driving for your website. So when you are building backlinks you are also getting extra traffics from the websites that are linking to you. A backlink also help in brand building and also in building relationships with various other webmasters. So let’s talk about the black hat versus the white hat SEO now. Black hat SEO involves all the wrong ways to get your website ranked. I don’t use it, I don’t recommend it so kindly please stay away from black hat SEO. White hat SEO refers to the use of techniques and strategies that target a human audience. It looks more natural and it is the preferred way. So backlink building is not easy. It is a time-consuming process and you will definitely need some tools to make this process simpler. So all the tools mentioned here, I personally use and these are the same tools recommended by internet marketers all over the world.
Let’s start with ahrefs
If you don’t have a very big budget and you just have enough money to invest on one SEO tool then I highly recommend ahrefs. I’ve been using ahrefs for almost 3 years now. It’s the absolute best tool when you talk about SEO. So for example let’s take Scoopwoop.com and here is an overview of Scoopwoop.com at ahrefs. As you can see they have almost 7.7k referring domains, 145k backlinks and they are driving approximately 1.8 million organic traffic. Again I’ll mention that these are not absolute numbers, these are just estimates. I used ranking pages as well. You can even check the top pages to find the highest ranked pages of this website. You can see that this article “interesting Pakistan” on Scoopwoop is driving approximately 31,000 people per month. Here you can see that 11 domains are linking to this article. And also you can find the right keywords for which it is ranking. So if you searched “facts about Pakistan”. Let’s search for “facts about Pakistan”. Then you can see Scoopwoop in the number one position. This tool is the absolute best SEO tool out there. The overview section also shows you the number of do-follow backlinks, number of no-follow backlinks. And the text and the redirection and how many image backlinks it has. Also the growth of referring domains month over month. You can also find the various anchor texts that were used in creating the backlinks. You can also use Moz or SEMrush for doing the same, but I highly recommend Ahrefs. The other important tool is Buzz stream. Buzzstream is the best outreach management and white hat link building software out there. We use Buzz Stream for all our outreach efforts. So we are sending 100 to almost 200 emails per day through Buzz Stream for all our websites combined. It makes it super easy to manage the emails. It tells you how many people have replied, how many people have seen the message but have not replied. And also categorizes all your emails in “buckets”, in folders to make it easy for you to manage. Managing responses or replies using Gmail alone is extremely difficult. This is where Buzz Stream comes into play. It tells you how many people have seen the message but have not replied, how many people have actually replied. And you can also categorize your emails in folder structure. So I highly recommend using Buzz Stream for your outreach management. To send the emails you also need the email IDs, right? To find the right email IDs we use a browser extension named “email-hunter”. It is an extremely efficient browser extension and it will give you all the email IDs associated with the website. In my experience, I have seen that 6 out of 10 times, I have received the right email ID from email-hunter. So another highly-recommended tool. So “check my links” is another browser extension. It helps in finding the broken links of your webpage. So let’s say if you are writing an article and the article has around 15 links and somehow few of the links has broken. So you can just click on this browser extension and it will give you all the links which are not functioning properly. Lastly but not the least, Similar Web. Similar Web definitely uses dark magic to display traffic of websites, the traffic sources and much more extremely useful info. So here we are in the SimilarWeb website, and I’ve already searched for Scoopwoop.com. You can check that the global rank here is 9,960. In Pakistan the rank is 706. And ScoopWoop is driving approximately 11 million people to its website on a monthly basis. It also gives you a timeline on how the traffic increased or decreased. Definitely the data is not accurate but the approximation is quite good. As expected the majority of the traffic is coming from Pakistan. It also gives you a basic overview of the traffic sources.
What percentage of people are direct visitors?
How many of them are coming from search engines. It also tells you about the referring websites. And the different keywords for which the website is ranking. Social media, in terms of social media, Facebook is the biggest component. YouTube the second part. And also they are using “display advertising”. It will also show you the percentage breakup of various networks they are advertising on. Although there are hundreds of techniques out there to build backlinks, but the one that has given me the best return are guest posting, link reclamation and link worthy content. So guest posting is all about adding high-quality content in someone else’s website. You do this by first outreaching by using the Buzz Stream software, communicating with them and showing your intent on adding a high-quality content on their website. And through that content you can link back to that article. Secondly you can use link reclamation. So once you get big, many people will start mentioning your website name in many articles. So you can set up a lot. So whenever someone mentions your website name, you can get in a lot. And then you can email and outreach them and tell them “will you please link back to our website”? And setup just the name. And the most important part is creating link worthy content. Just please write content that is actually worth linking to. Give people a reason to link into your content. So if you are writing a 500 or 600 word article on a topic like “best credit card in Pakistan”. Definitely no one will link to you. So make sure your content is the absolute best. It should cover all points and questions that a person might have while searching for the target keyword. So this was it about SEO. For any doubts comment on the post. Guys backlinks are extremely important for the search engine rankings. So make sure you actively build them and please do not use any black hat techniques. Just follow for your website, and very soon you’ll have the organic search engine rankings. We’ll talk about Google Analytics and Google ReMaster tools.
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