What is a backlink in SEO?
A backlink in SEO simply means another website has linked to one of your web pages. This is important because one of the biggest ranking factors that Google considers is how many third party websites link back to yours. This is the foundation of Google PageRank.
Each backlink is considered a vote for your website. If you create boring, uninspired content, or your content is just trying to promote or sell something, you’re not likely to get many other websites linking to yours.
If you create valuable content that people want to share on their social networks then it’s possible that other sites might link to yours.
Examples of content that other websites want to link to include:
- Stats and facts – survey results are an excellent source of stats that others would want to link to
- Original research – this is where you research and mine data to produce a compelling study that others would find interesting, for example, what’s the average price of a McDonald’s meal in each country, or how much does a plumber charge per hour in each state, or how much money do you need to retire in each country, or what type of content attracts the most backlinks.
- Free tools – Free tools that are genuinely helpful to a user can attract backlinks. No one needs another calculator site. Free tools include a free alternative to a paid option, for example a free email newsletter tool, or a free CRM tool. If you are making another “me too” tool such as an online text editor your tool should do something remarkably better than the other 300 online text editors.
- Free resources – resources in this case are not blog posts or PDFs but things that people can do something with. For example, free business document templates, or free printable graphics for Easter, or free WordPress themes and plugins.
- Something topically relevant – a printer review article became the number one ranked article on Google for various printer review keywords because the writer mixed a funny review with the sarcastic inclusion of content generated by ChatGPT. People shared and linked to the article as an example of turning an otherwise boring article into something link-worthy, like I have done here.
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