Backlinks: everything you need to know to improve the positioning off your website

Learn how to master the construction of quality external links and improve the positioning of your website by exponentially increasing its authority.

What are backlinks and how do they work

Also called inbound links, backlinks are found on other websites and point to pages on our website. Another way to understand this would be to think of backlinks as the highways that connect one city to another, this is the path that the user travels from one page to yours.

The improvement of backlinks is part of what is known as off page SEO, and it is characterized by the work we do outside our website to improve its positioning. 

Contrary to on page work, our links will not only work to organize our content, but will improve our authority. Working with backlinks is called Link Building, which means link building in English. 

Link building consists of the management and generation backlinks with great quality. The main challenge that this work presents is that we have no control over backlinks because they are on a third party's page.

Google Penguin and link quality 

Before you start generating external links, creating websites or using tools to link yourself to third-party sites, we have to warn you of a couple of things: self-generating our backlinks might seem like a practical way out, but in the long run is a practice that could do us more harm than good.

If you had this in mind, you're not the first or the only one. There is a practice called "link farms", these are multiple websites created with the single function of generating links by the thousands. Other fraudulent strategies include buying external links, in other words, paying to be linked to public lists of service bookmarks.

These techniques promise to generate thousands of external links that in a matter of days will increase your authority. However, it is more than obvious that, by now, Google will take action against this constant generation of false authority. Search engines will always try to keep the integrity of their index clean, so, since 2014, Google Penguin was invented with this purpose.

This algorithm is able to determine the quality of links, additionally, it has the ability to penalize those that are considered to use non optimal links. It is then that all the people who enjoyed authority by using massive links, began to have problems.

Many pages have been affected since the arrival of the fearsome Penguin. The harsh penalties applied considerably lowered the rate of traffic these pages received, affecting mainly websites that monetized advertising on their pages.

We recommend you to learn more about links: the fundamental element of a web page. 

A quality backlink in the eyes of Google 

You're probably wondering what an optimal link looks like under Google standards by now. But don't worry, we can safely say that the ideal backlink is obtained from another website that has relevance in your sector.

It could be a site that handles a general theme similar to yours and complements its services or information on its blog using a link to your page. In addition to including your URL, in the “anchor text” section of the HTML code, the link must also contain the keyword to rank or, better said, our main keyword.

When it comes to the latter, it is important to look for variety. It is necessary to receive diverse anchor text, with synonyms of our main keyword and the rest that we seek to position. For this it will be helpful to know all the variants of our keywords.

Some examples of variety are:

• Main keyword usage in anchor text
• Use of synonyms and variations in anchor text
• Brand or company name + keyword

An alternative to this is forgetting about the anchor text and building an URL that is as friendly as possible and that also contains our keywords to rank.

Backlinks are the path that the user takes to reach our website from other sites while browsing the internet. Added to this, backlinks are used by the search engine as indicators of popularity and ultimately authority.

That's why you should remember to make a quality link building, with websites that are in your sector and add your keywords to rank in the anchor text. We remind you that it is not necessary to work on this all by yourself and learn everything from scratch.

There is the possibility of consulting all of this with a professional or leaving the job completely to a specialist. Either way, we wish you good luck in your search for your website's best positioning.

If this information was of interest to you, continue reading about SEO and learn how to plan your content.