Backlinks? We're talking about *backlinks*!?

With gratitude to Allen Iverson for the forever-quotable and memeable soundbite from (gasp!) 2006:

We're actually talking about backlinks, not practice, although they rhyme (kind of).

What's a backlink?

Backlink is just the digital marketing industry term for a link from another site (back) to yours. There's a few things that are important about them:

• The page the link points to. For young companies this is frequently your home page but it might be your product page, your 'about us' page, or to a specific blog post (more on that later)
• The perceived reputation of the linking site. Buried in Google's search algorithm is a relative reputation ranking for every site they know about. It's based on how closely the site as a whole adheres to Google's best practices for promoting content that's helpful to searchers. It's not possible to see your score directly from Google but companies like Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs have their own ranking systems based on similar criteria, and those you can see if you subscribe to their tools.
• The text of the link itself. Hyperlinks are attached to specific text, and the website being linked to and the text can be different. For example, https://orchestra-ai.com is a hyperlink where the text of the hyperlink happens to be the website location, but the text could also be just Orchestra (for example) or even unrelated words like pineapple or fire engine. It could even be an emoji; 🍍 🚒 . Search engines like Google consider the keyword used to link to you heavily in their algorithm. So if enough high-quality sites link to you for the phrase best custom-built canoes , you will start to rank for that search term.

Why are backlinks important for early-stage companies?

The obvious answer is, links from other (high quality) sites will generate traffic to your site when people click through, and hopefully those visitors will turn into customers or adopters of your offering.

But the more important answer is, until you have about 1,000 backlinks to your site (and about 1,000 visits per day from sources other than search), Google's algorithm will basically consider you a spam site. That means your SEO efforts to rank for important keywords? Ineffective.

How do I know how many backlinks I have?

The easiest and most authoritative source for this data is Google Search Console. It's free, and you don't have to write any code or have any special skillset to use it.

All you'll need to do is sign in with a Google account. If you have Google Apps for your company domain, sign in with a Google account associated with that domain (not a personal email) and that will verify you are connected to that domain, so you can access the data google has for you. If your email isn't with Google you can still verify ownership of the domain, it's just more complicated.

Once you're in, select the website you want (Google calls these 'properties'), and look for the menu item on the left towards the bottom (in the hamburger menu if you're on mobile) named Links. Once you click that, look for the panel named External Links. That top value is your backlink count.

Below that is a panel named Top linking sites. These are the sites that link to you. If you click on one, you can see the page it's linking to. Frustratingly, here you cannot see the text a particular site used for its link. But in the panel below, Top linking text, you can see the text used in links to you, also ordered by count (and also, frustratingly, not tied to the specific site).

How can I get more backlinks?

Before we cover ways you can get backlinks, let's talk about ways not to get them, and that's to buy them. If you own a business with a website you have almost certainly gotten an email from a company offering high quality guaranteed non spam backlinks at an affordable price.  Don't fall for it, these are scams. Block the sender and move on.

If you've hired a firm to do SEO-focused content marketing, they might offer to bundle backlinks in with their service. Do not take them up on this, and fire them the first chance you get. Google penalizes sites with lots of low-quality backlinks, and that's a jail that's hard to get out of. While it may be true that not all of the linking sites are low-quality, it's not worth your time to try and verify their claims. Just move on.

Okay, I won't buy them. How should I get backlinks?

Before going through some of the time-intensive methods let's look at the easiest ones. There are plenty of directory sites for just about every industry and those typically have a submission form somewhere on them.

If your company serves a local market, the Chamber of Commerce (or if you are not in the U.S., its equivalent) will often keep a list of member businesses with links to their sites. These typically cost money to join but you'll get other benefits from them - the backlink is a bonus.

If you graduated from a university, find their alumni community and write to them with information about your business and ask to be featured in an edition. These newsletters are almost always published on the university website. Boom. High-quality backlink.

If your company has venture investors, make sure you're on Crunchbase and Pitchbook. While you're at it, make sure your investors' websites all have links to your site, and ideally they've all written blog posts or press releases announcing their investment and included a link to you in those, too.

Any other tips for backlinks?

The final boss of backlinks is journalism. Getting a link in a website with high readership will generate other links just from websites linking to the sites linked in that one. One good article featuring your company can almost singlehandedly put you over the 1,000 backlink threshold.

So how do you get one of those? Well, it won't be easy or guaranteed, but here are some tips. First off, listen to or read the transcript of Lenny Rachitsky's podcast interview with Jason Feifer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, to get a great background on how to work with journalists in general; what they are looking for, how to help them so they can help you, etc.

But as a small business, chances of getting featured in a large national or international magazine are pretty slim. Luckily, backlinks from smaller publications count the same, at least by quantity if not by reputation and traffic potential. And as it turns out, where do national-level journalists turn to get sources for their articles? Smaller local publications. So be kind to your local beat writer. They might be a path to a viral hit.

Last tip. From that same article, when a journalist is deciding whether to use you as a source for an article vs. someone else, they often turn to the company (and individual)'s social media presence to get an understanding of how active the company is and what else it's talking about. So if you're not posting regularly about topics relevant to your audience, you might get rejected in favor of a different company representative.

Okay, a bonus tip. As it turns out, a lot of journalists are still on twitter. Despite many public pledges by journalists to leave the site after its owner's public bashing of the profession, few actually did. While they don't post as often, the fact that it's still a primary platform means you should probably continue posting content there, even though we don't recommend actively using the platform anymore.