Being a website owner, have you ever wondered where does all the traffic come from? Are those social media posts that bring you your customers? Or maybe some web forums you should thank for the links that direct new clients to your resource?
Backlinks are the links that allow visitor traffic inflow to your website from external resources or vice versa. In the former case, when visitors arrive at you by clicking backlinks somewhere else, those websites may be called “referring sites” or “referrals.”
Likewise, your website may be a “referral” for someone else’s if you place an external link yourself. The link you posted will, in this case, be also called “a backlink” – by owners of that external website.
Google Analytics, the world’s most popular web analytics service (as shown by W3Techs’ “Usage statistics of traffic analysis tools for websites”), has an inbuilt tool for backlink analysis among dozens of other its instruments. Following the stats from a renowned Russian news portal, most of its visitors come from the Yandex search engine. Then there are posts on Instagram, Facebook, and a couple of other social platforms popular in the region.
What are Backlinks For?
Should it be reminded what a vital part backlink analysis plays in search engine optimization and backlink building strategy? However, we do advise not to stick to the GA’s toolkit alone as there are dozens, if not hundreds of other more tailored solutions that might help you increase visitor flow.
There are three main reasons for high backlinks relevance:
- Ranking. Internet search engines see backlinks as a sign of credibility. The more your website has – the higher its rankings, and the closer to the top it will appear in search results (that’s, will have higher SERP rankings). Why is it so?
As it was demonstrated by one of the recent studies by Ahrefs, there is a strong correlation between the number of backlinks and Google rankings (by the way, have you noticed that we’ve just placed plus one backlink to Ahrefs – that’s how it is done). - Becoming popular. This factor is essential for relatively novice web resources. It naturally follows from the logic of how search engines work: it’s all about “crawling,” indexing, then ranking web pages. In that, they monitor pages which they already know and how well they know them is, in other words, the degree of web indexation, a process of indexing contents of a website.
Popular websites with higher rankings are visited more often not only by visitors themselves, but also by web search systems. The more new backlinks, the faster they’ll find you! - Organic search traffic. The same study we mentioned above hits with a surprising conclusion from the very beginning: in more than 90% majority of cases, traffic comes not from Google! Where from then, you may ask?
It appears that those thousands of millions of hits fall within the organic search category. To think of, that’s what “backlinking” is for – to direct people where they may find what they search for.
What to Choose as a Backlink Service?
Given the high relevance of obtaining proper backlinks, choosing a SEO backlink service should be done very seriously, especially when there are so many of them. The whole set of backlinks pointing to your website are like your fingerprints: what you give determines the first impression of visitors who will follow.
Let us consider several factors before making a choice:
- Backlink index. SEMrush, for instance, states that new backlinks are added daily, with regular public updates. It may be true that it holds the most extensive backlink index, as it is asserted on its website.
- Backlink analysis. SERanking seems to provide a user-friendly instrument with a number of options – although, understandably, not all of them are available in a free trial without registration. The tool generates a list of backlinks within seconds, after which it is already possible to see how close the main subjects of the referring websites are to your website’s specialization.
That thing should not be overlooked. A “reasonable surfer model” followed by Google implies that web surfers don’t click the links randomly. Backlinks on resources of subjects closer to yours will also be seen as more important.
- We got a general feeling that Crowdo puts a particular focus on “authority” – or URL Rating (UR), in other words. Higher rankings are granted from backlinks leading from “stronger” external resources; that’s a common sense feeling. And yes – there are instruments to check URLs for their ratings, but why bother with that if you can let a backlink service do that for you?
- Noticeability. Naturally, people tend to click on the links they notice first. In his research, Bill Slawski discovered a positive correlation between what he called “PageRank” and the link’s noticeability (whether it is located within the main part of the page’s content, highlighted with color, style, or else). When paying for backlink services, make sure your backlinks are exactly where users can spot them!
- What else affects ranking is an anchor text. Google, for example, uses a whole bunch of methods to improve search quality. They take into account many factors – including anchors. Anchor text has to matter, at least, to a certain extent, so you should be careful when formulating it.
To Conclude With
As you probably see by now, even such a seemingly simple thing as putting backlinks on external websites takes time and effort to master. It is not just a link somewhere on the Internet which gives you traffic; as studies show, it is the main source of it!
At the same time, it is not as simple as getting in touch with some friendly (and not directly competing) web portals and shaking your hands upon agreement to exchange links.
However, with your website’s auditory increase in geometrical progression, you simply won’t be able to keep so many counteragents in mind. That’s where you decide to leave it to SEO backlink services for professional support.
One should be aware that the whole process still won’t be as easy as pie, even with professionals’ support. In fact, building a comprehensive backlinking strategy requires careful consideration of numerous factors. Without clearly communicating your needs, you’ll never get in return what you expect.
