In today’s digital age, anyone who wishes to build an online presence has to pay attention to Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and one of the ways to do so is to pay attention to create backlinks on your blog and/or website.What is a Backlink?When a webpage links to any other page, it’s called a backlink. Pages with more back links tend to rank higher on major search engines. One creates these using hyperlinks over anchor text. Sites that link to yours pass on what is called “link juice”, which helps with the ranking of the page.

Why Backlinks are Important1. Improves Organic Ranking - If your content gets organic links from other sites, that page will naturally rank higher on search engines.2. Faster Indexing - Search engine bots use backlinks to enable faster discovery and indexing of your site.3. Referral Traffic - This refers to the site visitors who arrive at your page through other links as compared to through a search engine. Higher referral traffic also boosts your page’s ranking.

Backlinking as a BloggerA couple of ways to get quality backlinks as a blogger are to write outstanding content, and to establish a presence by commenting on do-follow forums and blogs. If your article is well-written and engaging, chances of it being shared or linked to are higher. Respectful and constructive commenting on forums and other blogs is also a good way to collect link juice. An extensive list of ways to get quality backlinks for your blog can be found hereBacklinking as a BusinessAs a business, higher SEO for your website is always a good online marketing strategy. Here are several of the link-building tactics that businesses have used:1. User-Generated ContentWhen a community is built around a brand, it provides a less commercial-feeling space for users to share about it, and the opportunity for the construction of a loyal audience.One example is the makeup brand Sephora. With Beauty Insider Community, a forum for their Beauty Insiders rewards program members, they generated almost 2 million backlinks through user-generated content.

The community is also very engaged, which boosts the number of backlinks even more.Businesses can also help build this community by building bridges to other online communities or creating shareable URLS and widgets for users to share.2. Attention-catching Tactics The ease of sharing pages and content online creates the phenomenon of something going viral. When viral content is shared a lot, it’s a huge source of backlinks for your site.Dollar Shave Club conducted a PR stunt in the form of a humorous YouTube video, attracting over five thousand links and five hundred thousand shares on Facebook.Warby Parker created a memorable product, a monocle. Despite it being its worst-selling product, it got a lot of online coverage from other websites.The company also created a blog for the product, which received over twenty thousand backlinks.

Creating seasonal or interactive landing pages is also a good way to generate online traffic. Macy’s has a different one for every holiday, such as this one for Thanksgiving.Altogether, their holiday landing pages generate the brand more than twenty thousand backlinks.Businesses can also newsjack: ride the wave of a current affair to become a part of the conversation. For example, Oreo tweeted this in response to the 2013 Super Bowl power outage:3. Discounts and GiveawaysIf within budget, giving targeted discounts to students, veterans, military personnel, and teachers is also a good way to not only reward your customers but to generate backlinks.ASOS’s student discount page alone has almost 400 backlinks.Conducting free giveaways in a raffle or a contest works because people love free stuff. Another advantage to this is receiving customer contact information like an email address, which you can use for email campaigns.4. Content Marketing: Guides, BlogsIf your products allow it, creating guides and blogs to market your own content is a great way to advertise your own products while keeping customers around for new ones. One such example is REI, who built a microsite around expert advice on outdoor knowledge. It generated almost 1.5 million backlinks.Having your business be easily found and shared online is one of the best ways to reach new customers. EVE can help your small business flourish, and take care of your digital marketing for you.A more expansive article on eCommerce link building, where the backlink stats are from, can be found here.