Are you familiar with the terms “backlinks” and “referring domains”? If you’re in the world of search engine optimization, then these phrases are likely part of your daily vocabulary. But for those who are new to SEO, understanding the difference between backlinks and referring domains can be confusing. In this blog post, we’ll break down backlinks vs referring domains, and their importance for website ranking, and provide tips on how to improve both metrics. So read on to learn more about backlinks vs referring domains! What are Backlinks? Backlinks are links that point to your website from other websites. For example, Let’s say you have an article about “Top 10 ways to reduce belly fat”. And websites related to the fitness niche let’s name them ‘Site A’ and ‘Site B’ for now find your article and find it interesting. So, eventually, these sites will mention your article when they write about content related to reducing bellying fat. A portion of a text will be chosen to link to your article on “Top 10 ways…”. The chosen text is known as the anchor text. And this process of linking to other people’s content/posts is known as backlinking. FUN TASK: Mention the number of external links that we have used on this post in the comments! What are Referring Domains? So, now that you know what backlinking is, understanding referring domains is so simple. The website from which the links are coming is called the referring domain. In the example we discussed, the sites ‘Site A’ and the ‘Site B’ are the referring domains. The main difference between backlinks and referring domains is that backlinks are an indication of the number of links pointing to your website while referring domains show the number of unique websites linking to you. Backlinks and SEO If you are trying to learn about SEO, blogging, or marketing you definitely must have come across the phrase backlink without a doubt. Is that a big deal? Why do people fuss so much about backlinks? Blogging has bloomed like never before in recent years, and with that, a lot of people started creating blogs, and the competition is heavy. For every search query, google shoots you millions of search results. But only a handful gets a lot of traffic and eyeballs. How does that happen? Multiple factors can contribute to this. But, the most important among them is the number of backlinks a post has. If a post has a huge number of backlinks, it is ultimately a signal to Google that the website is an authority and is definitely trustworthy (since many other websites do believe so). So, Google will eventually rank these articles with higher backlinks in the search results. More Number of Eyeballs == More Revenue That is why people are so crazy about backlinks and there are several link-building companies that will help you with this process of building relevant backlinks in your niche. How to get backlinks and referring domains There are a number of ways to get backlinks and referring domains. The most common way is through link building. Link building is an extensive topic on its own. But in simple terms, it involves using various approaches to get more backlinks to your site or post. Some of which include submitting articles to directories, guest blogging, or by participating in forums and discussion boards like Quora or Facebook groups. You can also get backlinks and referring domains by creating great content that other websites will want to link to. Finally, you can use social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn to generate backlinks and referring domains. Factors of the best backlink profile Yes, your articles need backlinks. But not all backlinks are equally good or valuable. There are various factors that Google will take into account when considering your backlink profile. i) Diversification Diverge your backlink profile to include links from multiple referring domains. If a post or page gets a backlink, make sure to get 10 backlinks from different referring domains instead of getting all those 10 links from a single referring domain. Getting links from various websites increases your website’s authority and ultimately helps with your SEO. ii) Domain Authority The domain authority of the referring domain does play a major role. Getting a backlink from a referring domain with a domain authority of 50 is a lot more valuable than getting one from a website with a domain authority of 10 or 20. But it doesn’t mean you should avoid backlinks from domains with low DA value. These domains also help and over a period of time when these referring domains with lower DA values started picking up & getting more traffic, it will automatically be beneficial to your site as well. iii) Site Quality Most of the time, especially when people buy backlinks it is easier to get fooled. When you get a backlink from a site it has to be a well-maintained site with no history of scams or other attacks. Even if the DA is low if a site is well-maintained backlinks do provide value. But, getting backlinks from spammy, fishy sites including gambling, drugs, and other illegal activities can affect your site’s ranking as well. iv) Relevancy The backlinks have to be relevant enough. Linking to a weight loss post in a technology blog doesn’t feel right, isn’t it? The backlinks you get or you give has to be relevant to the topic and content in the post. This will add a lot of value to both parties. Conclusion In summary, understanding the differences between backlinks and referring domains is essential in devising an effective link-building strategy. With this knowledge, you can start today building a powerful link profile that will help increase your search engine rankings and traffic from organic searches.

If you are one of those affiliate marketers or a blogger. You probably would have used affiliate links in your websites, blog posts, or campaigns. And you should have also heard about the term link cloaking a lot. But if you are not quite sure about the term, in this article you will learn in detail about what link cloaking is, the benefits of link cloaking, and the best free wordpress plugins for link cloaking. What is Link Cloaking? Link Cloaking is changing a long ugly looking link to a simple link with your brand/website name attached. The structure of these affiliate links follows a generic pattern. The pattern mostly goes like Website url+ ref + your name/id. The problem with these links is their length and structure. At the very first sight, these affiliate links look quite fishy and are not very trustworthy. Many of your website visitors might refrain from clicking these links. With the increase in the number of Internet scams and phishing these days, people try to be aware and are usually very wary of clicking any links that look malicious or not so trustworthy. This can be a problem if you are into affiliate marketing seriously. Link cloaking is a technique that comes to the rescue. With this technique, you can easily transform your affiliate links into nice-looking, trustworthy recommendation links with your website’s brand name and URL attached. This makes visitors who click those links feel safe. Benefits of Link Cloaking a) Statistics – If you use any link cloaking tool to cloak your links, it becomes easy to collect analytics about the number of people who have clicked on the links, their demographics, and other information. This will help you to choose the right products for your audience. b) Improves the Click Through Rate – Nobody wants to click on a random link with lots of numbers and characters. This makes the look so suspicious. But by clocking your link, you make it look so professional and this will increase the overall CTR. c) Redirection based on Geolocation – In link cloaking tools, you can set conditional redirections based on the user’s geographical location. If a user from Canada clicks on an amazon affiliate link, you can redirect him to the Canadian version of the site using the link cloaking tool. d) Make links look pretty – Link Cloaking makes your links look short and pretty. e) Builds your brand’s authority – By using your brand’s name in affiliate links, you increase the reputation and authority of your brand. f) Single-point link Updation – Outsmarts all the other benefits. If you need to update your affiliate link, you can update it at a single point. g) Increases email delivery rates – Using Affiliate Links in the email usually lands your email in the spam folder, because google’s spam detection algorithm, categorizes affiliate links as spam. By Link Cloaking, you reduce the risk of your email being marked as spam. h) Bypass Ad blockers – Ad blockers are good at blocking affiliate links. By Cloaking your links you can easily bypass ad blockers. Best WordPress Plugins for Link Cloaking Link cloaking requires tools to convert your affiliate links to trustworthy links. There are several free as well as paid tools that can help you cloak your links easily. The main difference between the paid and the free tool is the limit/ the maximum number of links you can convert in a day/month. People try to avoid and not use affiliate links because they don’t feel very safe using them and it also makes your website’s reputation questionable. Even if you genuinely recommend a good product or a service, a long affiliate link can make it look like a marketing strategy.That is why it is important to cloak them. Here I have listed the Top 4 Free Link Cloaking plugins that you can use for your affiliate links. Easy Affiliate Links Compatible with both the Classic and the Gutenberg WordPress editor. But the free version doesn’t offer you the statistics and information on how many people clicked your links. For every affiliate link, you can add a name, description, categories, original affiliate URL, type of cloaking, the cloaked or shortened URL, anchor text, target, direction type, and no-follow. This plugin makes it easy to manage all the affiliated links in a single place. You can have a better overview, and also edit the links if needed. EasyAzon – Best Plugin For Amazon Affiliate Links If you are an amazon associate member, then it is a tedious task to manage all the links. But with easyazon as the name states, it becomes completely easy to manage all the links in one place. The plugin is free to download and there is no limitation on the number of sites you can use it on. Easy to set no-follow property, and target attribute. Cloaks the affiliate links. The best part about this plugin is its ability to localize affiliate links. Based on the location of the visitor, easyazon automatically redirects them to the amazon site specific to their location. This increases the overall commission and purchase rate. A quick view of the product pops up along with the product details, buy now, and pricing when a user hovers over the affiliate link cloaking with easyazon. URL Shortify It works for any links. This plugin shortens the links and makes them look simple, easy, and pretty. It comes with a free tracking feature that lets you track the audience who have actually interacted with the shortened URLs. The special feature is unlike Bitly and other URL shorteners, which add their own domain name to the shortened URL. URL Shortify doesn’t add its own brand name to the shortened URLs. Instead, you can add your own domain name. This increases the overall brand reputation and trust. It has a search feature, that makes it easy to search for any particular link from the heap of links. you can also

An anchor text is a link that is highlighted and takes visitors to a new resource or page when clicked on. Usually, it is colored to differentiate it from the rest of the text. An anchor text is enclosed within <a> tags in HTML. Here is an example of an anchor text ‘ <a href=”https://design2deploy.com”> web designing studio </a>’ In this article, you can find detailed information about What anchor text is, Types of anchor text, distribution, and How anchor text affects SEO score. Why is anchor text a big deal? Using the correct phrase for your anchor text is important for user experience and accessibility. Anchor text is also a significant SEO factor because they play a major role in making a site accessible better. Which of the following anchor text is easy to understand? Obviously, the second anchor text (dog toys) is more meaningful and depicts what the linked content is about. Your anchor text should be descriptive and not be generalized or just mention an action like click here. It should explain to you the content where you will be taken to on clicking it. Just a “Click here” for a visually impaired person will convey nothing about what action will be performed when a link or button is clicked. Whereas a more specific and descriptive anchor text like “About Us” will assist them better in understanding the result of their actions. How Does Anchor Text Affect SEO? Anchor Text helps you to understand more about what a page is all about. A perfectly drafted and targeted anchor text helps your site rank better and also get more traffic. How does a simple anchor text determines the ranking of your webpage for a keyword? Let’s say you have a blog post about the “10 best online games.” A page has linked to this blog post with an anchor text, best online games. This gives google very little indication that your blog post has content related to the best online games. If several other sites link to the same post with more or less similar anchor texts like online games, top 10 online games, games to try, etc.., Google becomes pretty confident that your blog is about online games. And now if people search for this particular keyword, the chances of google showing your blog post on the first few pages are high (provided you also have your other SEO factors right), On the contrary, if the website that linked your blog post, uses completely irrelevant anchor texts, google gets confused about what exactly is the content of your blog post and your blog post will never rank for any keyword in general. Google has explicitly mentioned in its patent that anchor text influences the ranking and it is one of the crucial and undervalued ranking factors. A Similarly undervalued ranking factor is the Alt text of Images. They are mostly unnoticed and not a lot of people put the effort into getting them right. A Decade back, every website and blog use keyword-rich anchor text. Google revised its algorithm and introduced the First Update of the Penguin Algorithm. After this algorithmic update, Google started penalizing every website that used keyword-rich anchor text to a greater extent. A lot of bloggers saw a great downfall in their traffic. And with every new rollout of google algorithm updates, they started to become more stringent on keyword stuffing. Not just the anchor text, but also the text surrounding it plays a major role in ranking. One of Google’s patents says that the Data surrounding the link both on the left and right side of the link and the anchor text associated with the link will be used to determine the overall context of the link. Google expects anchor text to be specific about what resource will be displayed when a visitor clicks on it. Google in its SEO Starter Guide has clearly mentioned that an anchor text should i) Use descriptive text – This should provide users a gist about what the content linked to is about. ii) Have concise words – Never try to stuff your keywords in your anchor text. Keep them concise, and meaningful. iii) Keep it short – Also, make your anchor text short and to the point, Don’t make your anchor text long. iv) Make your links obvious – Highlight your anchor text with bold and bright colors and make it stand out from the rest of the text. Types of anchor text There are several types and variations of anchor text. Here we have listed them all with their explanation and an example for better understanding. a) Partial match – A Partial Match anchor text contains a part of the keyword of the linked Page. If the linked page is about Different Types of Diets. The anchor text might be How Diet Helps. Here the keyword diet from the linked page is being used. But not all the words. b) Exact match – Using exactly the same word or phrase that the linked page is targeting or is about. Eg: If there is a post on different types of diets. The anchor text would be exactly the same that is, Different types of diets. c) Generic – These anchor texts are the ones that you can find almost everywhere. Anchor texts with common and generic words like Click Here, Read More, etc.., are a few examples of generic anchor texts. d) Branded – Using the name of a brand or a company as it is as an anchor text. An example would be Coca-Cola, Dominos, etc.., These types of links are hard to build. You can use platforms like HARO to build branded anchor text for your website. e) LSI – Using the related keyword phrases within the anchor text. This type of anchor text produces a high click-through rate. At the same time, it is possible for your site to get penalized if you overuse this magic wand. f) Naked – The

Content marketing is the practice of publishing relevant, valuable content to attract and retain a target audience. This article will answer all your questions about what it is, how is it different from traditional marketing, and whether or not you should adopt this strategy for your business. Not many people are aware of the term. In fact, there are many reasons why businesses of all types should incorporate this strategy into their long-term plans. Let’s explore what this new concept is, some of its benefits, and potential pitfalls you may encounter when implementing this tactic into your company. What is Content Marketing? Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing relevant, value-added content to attract and convert a specific audience. It is a strategic process that integrates all aspects of business operations with the creation, distribution, and analysis of content to drive marketing outcomes. This process involves strategies such as creating content that resonates with your audience, interacting with your audience through different types of content, and measuring the impact of your content. Content Marketing helps companies create, distribute, and consume relevant and valuable content to attract and engage their target customers. How is Content Marketing Different from Traditional Marketing? Traditional marketing attempts to attract customers through paid advertisements in print, radio, and/or online media. Instead of using paid advertisements to create brand awareness, content marketing involves written, visual, and audio content that your target audience can consume. It’s like using a “sales elevator” to let your audience know about your products and services without having to actually “sell” anything. Why You Should Care About Content Marketing If you’re not using content marketing, you may be missing a key opportunity. The more you know about this strategy, the more advantages you’ll see in your company. The 3 main benefits of content marketing Increased brand awareness – Content marketing is a great way to build awareness about your brand and increase its visibility. It’s a great way to reach a large audience regardless of where they are in their decision-making process. That means that even if you aren’t attracting new customers, you can increase your brand awareness by increasing your marketing content. Increased sales – One of the most common reasons businesses use content marketing is to increase sales. Even if you aren’t directly selling your products or services, you can use your content to show your target audience how your business/products can help them. You can do this by demonstrating your expertise in your industry or providing useful information. Increased customer engagement – Using content marketing not only increases your brand awareness but also increases customer engagement. Customers who consume and engage with your content on a regular basis will become more loyal to your brand. They may also share your content with their own audiences, leading to an exponential increase in brand recognition. 3 pitfalls of content marketing 1. Overwhelmed by a mountain of content – It’s important to remember that you don’t have to create content for every single niche and topic out there. Instead, you should pick a few key areas that your brand is best suited for. From there, think about what types of content you’d like to create. 2. You’re not as influential as you think – It’s important to remember that content marketing isn’t just about publishing articles and videos on your website. It’s also about creating content that people want to consume on social media, such as Facebook and Instagram. 3. You’re not measuring the impact of your content – When you start creating content, it’s important to remember that you are measuring the impact of your content. You should be measuring the engagement level of your posts. This way, you’ll know when you need to create more content that people are actually consuming. Conclusion In this article, we explored what content marketing is, how it’s different from traditional marketing, and some of its benefits. We also explored its potential pitfalls, so you can avoid some of the drawbacks that may occur when adopting this strategy. When you understand what content marketing is, what it can do for your business, and which pitfalls to watch out for, you’ll be well on your way to implementing this strategy in your company.