What are Backlinks?

If you're confused about backlinks, we can help! Check out what Chris has to say about them!
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Hey everybody, and welcome! My name is Christopher Zook and I'm an Internet marketer here at WebFX. Today we're going to answer the question what are backlinks?

In a nutshell, a backlink is a hyperlink from one site to yours. Links act like votes of confidence online and when Google sees that you have a lot of links pointing to your site, its algorithm will recommend your site in more search results. That means your site ranks higher, it gets more qualified traffic and it earns more conversions all at the same time.

It also means that backlinks and the campaigns that build them are imperative to the success of an SEM campaign. With that in mind, let's talk about the three best ways to earn backlinks from great online sources.

The first method of earning backlinks is creating high-quality content. High-quality content refers to any page you publish on your site that includes well-written text, engaging images, and other helpful multimedia. These elements combine to create naturally captivating and engaging pages. To make high-quality content, you have a number of options at your disposal. First, we have infographics, which are helpful data visualizations that present information with graphical aids. The best of them go viral on social media, which helps build brand awareness and everyone from bloggers to news sites love to show their readers a new infographic. At WebFX, we've used infographics to build links for years, and we can tell you first hand they work.

Next, you could produce high-quality content with video. Videos like the one you're watching are great for explaining concepts related to your business to inform your target audience. Videos are in links because it's much more interesting to learn about something by watching a video than it is to read it - at least for most people.

Website owners also like to embed videos on their own site, which gets you more exposure and naturally earns a backlink to your website.

Third, you can create high-quality content by combining lots of different multi-media elements into 10x content. 10x content got its name because it's supposed to be ten times better than average content. It answers questions in depth and provides holistic solutions to common problems. An excellent example of this is the WebFX guide to Facebook marketing.

Developing online tools is another great way to earn links because they're interactive elements on a website that lets users input certain criteria to get an answer specific to their situation. One example of this is the WebFX cost calculator. We let users choose what they want on a website and then we give them a cost estimate based on our industry knowledge. It's one of the most popular pages on our whole site.

Some marketing experts say that tools qualify as high-quality content. We're categorizing them differently because they're using for a distinct purpose from content. Tools provide a specific answer to a problem without explaining the concept behind it - so they're kind of like looking in the back of a math textbook for answers.

Website owners link to tools because they want to provide a valuable experience to their readers so when you create a tool that people start to use, you'll passively attract backlinks from other sources in your industry that think your tool is helpful.

You may not provide a lot of background information with a tool, but that's okay.

Lastly, it's never been more important to be a trustworthy authority in your niche. Online, reliable niche authorities are few and far between. Your industry probably has a couple thought leaders you can name, but you should be one of them if you're not already.

You can become an authority by pursuing both of the link building methods we've discussed already. Creating high-quality content shows that you know your industry and you know how to appeal to an audience. When you earn links to that content, other websites in your industry are vouching for your expertise to people who may not have heard of you.