When performing SEO, building backlink is an aspect that cannot be ignored. In this blog post, we will learn the ins-and-outs of backlinks.

You will learn:

• The importance of backlinks.
• The qualities of good backlink.
• Ways to check your site’s backlinks.
• The way to use a backlink checker like BacklinkGap.

If you have just built your website, you must know backlink is vital for off page SEO. And of course, you might also know that building backlinks need a lot of effort.

If your website has been around for a few months or longer, there is a good chance that you have some links pointing to it. Some may be good, some may be bad and some may not move the needle in either direction.

It’s important to understand your link profile, as this will give you a clearer idea of whether or not you’re on the right track. An SEO backlink checker is a great tool to achieve this.

Why do you need to build backlinks?

• Rankings: Search engines like Google see backlinks as votes of confidence. Generally speaking, the more votes your web pages have, the more likely they are to rank for relevant search queries. The fact that 55.24% of pages don’t have a single backlink, is an opportunity for you to gain a competitive advantage. If you can gain more backlinks as soon as possible, you will run in front of numerous businesses.
• Discoverability: Search engines find new content by revisiting pages they already know and checking for new links. Because the search engines revisit popular pages more often than unpopular ones, they may discover your content faster if you get backlinks from popular pages.
• Referral traffic: Do you know that 91% of all pages never get any organic traffic from Google, mostly due to the fact that they don’t have backlinks? Backlinks exist to point people to useful resources.

What makes a good backlink:

Not all backlinks are created equal. Quality backlinks will bring good outcomes for your websites. Relevance, authority, and high traffic are what make up a good backlink.

Relevance

Relevance means being closely connected or appropriate to something else, link relevance means that a backlink coming to your website is closely connected or appropriate for your website or page.

Google places more value on relevant backlinks because people are more likely to click on them. This is something they talk about in their “reasonable surfer” patent.

What does this mean in simpler terms? If a baker has backlinks from two pages, one about cats and one about cake recipes, which do you think is most valuable?

Authority

Backlinks from strong web pages usually transfer more “authority” than those from weak ones. Page-level authority is something we’ve studied a few times, and we’ve found a clear relationship between it and organic traffic.

Google’s original patent states that authority is split equally between all outbound links on a web page. So if you have backlinks from two pages and one has more outbound links than the other, and all else being equal, the link from the page with fewer outbound links transfers more authority.

High-traffic

Backlinks from high-traffic pages will usually send you more referral traffic than those from low-traffic pages. That’s obvious.

In addition, there’s a small correlation between overall rankings and backlinks from pages with high levels of organic search traffic, though this factor is not as important as the volume of backlinks from unique sites.

How can you check your backlinks?

Method 1: Use Google Search Console

You can check your backlinks with Google Search Console.

This tool can check the quality of backlinks for free! You can access critical analytical information on your site’s SERP indexing site. Data you get include:

• Information on your top-ranking keyword
• What index is your site in the Google ranking
• Crawl errors in your site
• Frequency upon audience viewing your site and so on. 

Within its SEO analysis, the checker gives inner details on backlinks. You can see in the above picture the data about:

• Top linked pages: The most linked pages on your website.
• Top linking sites: The sites with the most backlinks to your website.
• Top linking text: The most frequently used anchors when linking to your website.

Method 2: Use an SEO backlink checker tool

With this tool, you will be able to discover and track where your backlinks are coming from. You also can perform a backlink analysis and audit for any site. In some specific features, there will be additional helpful information.

Critical information you should also look for in any backlink website check include these three:

• The total number of links & unique domains: Having a diverse link profile is often the best. It means your site should have lots of domains. This will help you get new links more easily. 
• Referring domains: These data will let you know where your most valuable links point to. With this information, you will notice any backlinking opportunity within your site or that of your competitors. 
• Top pages: These are the pages with the highest traffic. It could be your landing pages such as ‘home.’ From here, you can understand which topics or keywords are tailored to your audience – this is another way to check the quality backlinks of a site.

Introducing BacklinkGap

A lot of tools in the industry are ready for you to use. However, it is not so easy for you to choose one when there is a lot of information. In this article, we want to show you one best free backlink checker – BacklinkGap.

Overall, BacklinkGap has a simple and user-friendly interface. With BacklinkGap, you can quickly evaluate your backlink’s profile strength. You can see your data in both number and chart types. You can also identify if your backlinks are “dofollow” or “nofollow” and uncover your most common type of backlinks or get all-time backlink data.

Specifically, here is what you can do with BacklinkGap:

• Discover your backlink profile strength: You can see the value and authoritativeness of all your backlinks. The friendship score stands for the number & the quality of backlinks you have. Of course, the higher the score you have, the better your websites are.
• Pay attention to new and lost backlinks: You can be instantly informed of any gain or loss in your list of backlinks. By the time you see the changes, you can take action to gain your backlinks again.
• Referring domain: You can uncover where your backlinks come from and the quality and trustworthiness of them.
• Backlink anchor text: This help you to learn how your backlinks are labeled and the common keywords pointing at you

• Share your report: You can share the pattern of your backlinks to any one, with filtering the row and data to share. The backlink report can help you see your changing pattern.

• Backlink Monitoring: BacklinkGap has this feature to help you identify the movement of all the backlinks pointing to you. You can see the history daily, weekly and monthly. The status of the backlink is also at the top of the dashboard.

One more best thing about BacklinkGap: It is free. You can access all the basic features. With premium access, you can get your CSV files, more rows to monitor, more rows for backlinks. 

How to get more backlinks to your website?

After you check your backlinks with a backlinks checker like BacklinkGap, you now have a look at how you are doing. Whether you are doing great or you need more improvement, it’s necessary to get more backlinks to your website. So how can you do it? Here are the 6 tips for you.

#1. Guest blogging: 

This is when you offer to write a one-off post for another website. Guest blogging is one of the oldest link-building tactics. 

How does it work? You write an article for another website in your niche. They publish it. You link to yourself from that article. It’s as simple as that.

Many websites offer a contributor account or a write for us section where anyone can write an article and get featured on the site. They even let you link to your site, either in the author bio section or within the text of the content.

#2. Broken link building: 

Broken links are links that no longer exist or work on a website. And they may be caused by the source removing those links (also known as 404 error), having an improper URL, or the destination website might have closed or moved to another domain.

With a checker tool like BacklinkGap, you can find relevant dead links on other sites. Then you can reach out and suggest your working link as the replacement. While you’re looking at your competitors, you can also look at their broken links.

#3. The Skyscraper Technique:

Find relevant content with lots of links, make something better and ask those linking to the original to link to you instead.

The idea behind skyscraper content is to write a post that covers all aspects of the topic in detail and better than the rest. By doing so, you can attract other sites to link your post and generate lots of backlinks.

#4. Unlinked mention:

Sometimes people will mention you or your business without linking to you. With such mentions, you’re already halfway towards earning a link.
When you go through a site that mentions you unlinked, you can also contact them and ask for a backlink. Very easy, right?

#5. Community site link building: 

Most people focus on building only the highest quality links. This is a good thing as a whole. But let me ask you a question: do you think that a genuinely natural backlink profile consists of only followed, editorial links from high-traffic websites? Of course not. That’s why it’s important to build links from other sources too. For example forums, message boards, Reddit, Quora, etc. These are all good places to market your website and in the process, build some relevant links to diversify your backlink profile.

#6. Create quality content – link-worthy sites: 

Simply publishing content isn’t going to land you any links. If your content were nothing more than an online store, why would anyone link to it?

People tend to share or link to things that:

• Help make them look good (or help back up their own point/narrative).
• Make them feel some kind of emotion (e.g. anger, awe, happiness/laughter, etc.)
• Attach themselves to “top of mind” stories and current events (this is how “newsjacking” works.)
• Offer practical value/utility (e.g. something genuinely useful, something that serves as a good reference on a particular topic, like a study.)
• Have already been shared/linked to by many others (yes…people generally follow the crowd.)

TL;DR

While understanding how many people are linking to your work and context is important, the value from this contributes to reputation, traffic, business growth, and revenue. For this reason, backlinks should be treated as an important piece in a complex puzzle.

By using a backlink checker, you can do a lot of SEO work and quicken your link-building process. BacklinkGap is a free SEO backlink checker for your business. Know your backlink profile and monitor your backlinks now!