Whenever someone starts learning about SEO, they almost immediately hear the word “link.”

But why are links so important? And what are the different kinds?

First of all, what is a link?

Nofollow, follow, internal, backlink, what’s a good link, what’s a bad link, and most importantly, how do you build them on your website?

So first we’re going to start off with probably the most high-level question on links, as in, what is a link? You might notice in a Google search bar or on a certain website you’ll see a blue text, maybe an underline as well, and when you click on that, that link takes you to another website.

A “hyperlink” is a longer form of this word, and that simply answers the question you may have, “What is a link?”

Now that we have that high-level information out of the way, we’re going to talk about what types of links that there are.

To break it down from the high level of what a link actually is, three links that we deal with on a daily basis are internal links, external links, and backlinks.

Internal links specifically deal when you’re linking one page on your website to another page on your website, never leaving the same domain.

External links are linking a page that’s on your website to a page that’s off your domain, and backlinks is kind of the opposite of what an external link does, so another website would link back to your website.

90% of the time when we Internet marketers or SEOs are talking about links, we’re talking about backlinks, and we can break these backlinks down into four more subcategories.

There’s manual outreach, natural-editorial, self-created, and citation and directory links.

Also Read: 5 TIPS FOR GETTING HIGH QUALITY BACKLINKS

The #1 type of backlink that we strive for is natural-editorial backlinks.

This is when you create content so great on your site that other news sites, blog sites, and other sites on the Internet want to use your content and thusly link back to your website. These can be great for SEO.

The next backlink on the list that we strive for are manual outreach links. These links occur when we find resources that currently exist on the web that could use a little bit of an upgrade from the information that exists on our content from our websites.

At this point in time, we can simply contact the webmaster and/or writer of the article, blog post, or webpage, and see if they’ll link to our content while also providing the information that provides the content upgrade.

Next on the list of backlinks is self-created, non-editorial. These can kind of go down two different funnels of backlinks.

One would be moreso guest blogging on blog sites or offering your own news story to write on news sites and using that content to link back to your own website.

The other type of backlink in this category lies more in the gray hat / black hat SEO area, and this would be leaving a link in the blog comment section of a website.

As an SEO agency, we don’t really recommend this.

Last but not least, we have citation and directory website backlinks. These can easily be built by yourself or through aggregator submissions.

What these typically do is make sure that your name, address, phone number, and an optimized paragraph of your business information exists on multiple websites throughout the Internet.

Now that we’ve discussed different types of backlinks, there’s actually another category of backlinks which breaks it down to follow and nofollow.

When you choose to link to a website or when another website chooses to link to you, they have the option to put a tag on that link that says follow or nofollow.

This tells Google and other search engines that they do not want to pass authority onto your website or any link juice, if they choose a nofollow.

If it’s a follow link, all that link juice and authority comes right through that link from their website to yours.

So as you can tell, there are tons of ways you can get links built back to your website.

But you should be careful because you should know what good links are and what bad links are.

A good link is typically built from a website that has a high domain authority or content that is highly relevant to the topic of your page.

Bad links can typically come from websites that have a low domain authority or from websites that look a little bit spammy.

So after all this information, I bet you’re wondering, “How do I build links back to my site?”

Well, if you’re ecommerce or a product or service industry and you have a new product or service coming out, it might be good for you to do a little bit of PR.

Writers are always looking for an opportunity to write about a new product or a new service, and this could earn you some great, valuable backlinks to your website.

Another option is to hire an SEO agency so they can make sure that all the pages on your website are great pages for linkbait.

If I had one piece of advice about linkbuilding, it would be to make sure that your website is always filled with high-quality content that can serve as great linkbait to build links back to your site.

Thanks, everyone!

Also Read: Link Building in SEO