Do you know what different types of backlinks to prioritize in your next link building campaign?
When it comes to ranking your web pages on Google and Bing result pages, creating quality content is only half the battle. The other half are promoting your content and generating backlinks with an effective backlink strategy.
Backlinks are links to your web pages that appear on websites, social media, directories, and other websites. Getting quality backlinks from trusted publishers signals search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. As a result, web pages with a lot of backlinks will tend to rank higher on search engine result pages.
If you’re just learning how to create a link building campaign, you should be aware that not all backlinks are ranked the same. While some types of backlinks can help you rank higher in search rankings, other types of backlinks are considered poor quality and can negatively impact the overall search performance of your web pages.
To help you differentiate between the two, we’ve created this list of 10 types of backlinks you need to know in 2021.
10 different types of backlinks you need to know in 2021
Editorial backlinks
Editorial backlinks are some of the most valuable types of backlinks that digital marketers should target as part of their link building strategies. When someone creates valuable original content and includes a link to your web page, that’s an editorial backlink. Editorial backlinks signal the search engines that your site is an authority figure in your subject area.
The best way to create editorial backlinks is to create high quality, engaging, original content that other websites in your niche would like to share with their audience. This might include how-to guides, tutorials, case studies, but there must be some unique value or insight that readers won’t want to miss. Editorial articles are most effective when they use anchor text with many keywords to link to your website.
Image / Infographic Backlinks
It can take a long time to create an original case study to solve a problem for your audience, but what if you could generate twice as many backlinks with half the effort?
People love to share and interact with infographics that use vibrant colors and thoughtful designs to present information in a unique way. When it comes to creating great infographics, it’s less important to have unique data, but it’s more important to present the information in a fun, engaging, and easily digestible way.
The available data supports the benefits of infographic marketing. A HubSpot study found that blog articles with infographics generated 178% more inbound links than articles without them.
Guest blogging backlinks
Guest blog backlinks are one of the best types of backlinks you should use in any link building campaign. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:
- You are reaching out to the owner of a reliable and reputable website in your niche.
- You are offering to create free original content for this website in exchange for the opportunity to include an editorial backlink to your own website in the content.
- They get fresh content on their website and you get an editorial backlink to their website from a trusted publication – everyone wins!
Business Profile Backlinks
Directory listings have always been considered an easily accessible source of backlinks for digital marketers, but it’s important to avoid spam directories and focus on the most prominent and valuable places to host your business. The best place to start optimizing your business profile backlinks is in the search engine business directories:
- Google My Business is the most important business directory on the internet, setting up an account will allow you to optimize your presence in both Google search results and Google maps.
- Bing Places for Business – Bing’s search engine receives over 12 billion searches per month from 850 million users, most of whom are from the United States. Listing your business on Bing Places can give you a backlink to your business profile as well as additional visibility in Bing search results.
- Yahoo Localworks – Yahoo Localworks enables digital marketers to manage directory listing across 70 different platforms from a single interface.
From there, you can start looking for other authoritative directories such as:
- Yelp
- Yellow Pages
- About Us
- Best Business Bureau
- Foursquare
- Local.com
Backlinks to social profile
While you’re working on these directory listings, why not create social profiles for your business at the same time?
When you set up a social media page for your website, you will always be given a place to add a link to your main website. When someone visits this business profile, chances are that they will follow the link and eventually visit your company pages. You will also improve your backlink profile with quality social media links from trusted sources.
The key to maximizing the impact of your social profiles is engaging people with your brand, and that always starts with an internal team.
Even a small company with a few employees can generate a decent amount of backlinks with an integrated strategy. Start by creating a few social media profiles …
- Create a Facebook page for your site = 1 backlink
- Create a LinkedIn Page for your website = 1 backlink
- Create an Instagram account for your site = 1 backlink
then ask employees to update their own social media profiles by adding a link to your business .
- Ask each employee to list your business as an employer on Facebook along with a link to your website = 5 backlinks.
- Ask each employee to update their LinkedIn to include a backlink to your website = 5 backlinks.
… And you get even more social backlinks!
Quora / Reddit Backlinks
The backlinks that appear on social media sharing sites are sometimes considered lower quality search engines, but sometimes they can generate a lot of traffic to your site with relatively little effort. Here’s how to get started:
- Search social media sites like Quora and Reddit for people asking questions related to your area of expertise.
- When you see the same question coming up over and over again, write incredible content that provides a detailed answer with lots of examples and evidence. Include eye-catching visuals and helpful information to make it as valuable as possible.
When you see the question being asked again, answer helpfully by providing a basic overview of your detailed article, and then provide a backlink to your article that readers can view for more information.
If your article is really helpful, you’ll get a lot of praise, free organic traffic, and additional backlinks.
Links to press releases
If your brand has something to share, such as a new product launch or innovation, you can generate backlinks by writing a press release and distributing it using tools like PRWeb and Newswire. These web-based tools will distribute your press release online, helping you build brand awareness and improve your organic search performance.
Read Also: The 10 Best Types of Digital Marketing
Three different types of backlinks to avoid
All of the types of backlinks mentioned above are believed to have a positive effect on how your site performs in organic search results. Next, let’s check out three different types of backlinks that you might want to avoid.
Irrelevant links
The best types of backlinks are editorial links. These links usually appear in the body of a blog post or piece of content, prompting readers to refer to your web page for more information. Links posted elsewhere are generally not considered editorial links and will be treated by search engines as lower quality links. Try to avoid the following different types of backlinks:
- References to the header, footer and the side panel – links, which are not displayed in the main contents of the web page, but instead appear as the upper part, the footer or side panel, not as good as editorial links.
- Global Links – Links presented on every page of a website will have less value than a link that appears in one place, but they have high contextual relevance and add genuine value to the content.
- Links from irrelevant websites – Search engines prefer it when you generate backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche. Links from unrelated websites won’t have the same positive effect on your search rankings.
Spam backlinks
Sending backlinks to your site over the Internet is one of the quickest ways to get punished by search engines. The following types of links are considered spam links by search engines:
- Links for comments. Posting a lot of YouTube comments or comments on social media sites with a link to your site is considered a low-quality spam tactic.
- Links to forums. If you create profiles on forums on the Internet just to spam backlinks to your site, this is a spam tactic that you will be punished for.
- Websites with content spam. Websites that publish articles with massive amounts of substandard content and non-existent editorial standards are considered spam by Google. Avoid participating in these websites and focus on more authoritative online publications in your specific industry or niche.
- Low Quality Directory Content – Don’t worry about listing your site in low quality directories with minimal traffic. Again, focus your link building efforts on reputable and highly trusted sites in your niche.
Paid backlinks
As a final word of warning, we caution all digital marketers against directly purchasing backlinks from other websites or service providers in an effort to improve their rankings. This often happens in two ways:
- Paid backlinks for a single website. Some websites take a monthly or one-time fee to publish a link to your website. This paid endorsement does not depend on the quality of your content or its value, but on your ability to pay the webmaster for a link. This practice is not only unethical and degrades the user experience, but you can rest assured that the webmasters who do this are using all kinds of spam tactics that you do not want to associate your business with.
- Paid Backlink Packages – Service providers who sell packages with a certain number of backlinks should be avoided. These service providers are there to prey on newbies who think they need thousands of backlinks to start ranking but don’t know how to build backlinks naturally.
These providers use automated software to spam your link on forums and social pages all over the Internet. You will get a lot of backlinks (of terrible quality), but they will most likely lead to ranking penalties rather than improvements.
Summary
Thanks for checking out our guide to ten different types of backlinks you need to know in 2021!
We hope this guide helps you avoid low-quality tactics and focus on the best link building techniques in your next digital marketing campaign.
Read Also: What is Inbound Marketing? A Complete Guide
