Backlinks are the cornerstone to any SEO strategy and can easily make or break your business’ website search engine ranking.
Google explains backlinks perfectly:
Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice’s original post. Now Alice’s post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.
It’s easy to find what your site’s backlink profile looks like inside of Analytics. Once you have the lay of the land and get an idea of what type of backlink strategy you want to take on, it’s time to build on what you already have.
Nine Ways To Strengthen Your Backlink Collection
Authority
The more authoritative the source of your link is, the more authority you’ll gain from it. The sites with the highest authority are .edu and .gov domains, but other high-authority sites, such as major publishers like CNN or Wired, for example, and other well respected sources, are also very valuable.
Relevance
If you’ve done your site set up correctly, then Google knows what your company and industry are, so it’s going to evaluate your backlink sources and decide how they fit into that description. For example, if you work in agriculture and have links pointing to your domain from agriculture trade magazine sites or forums, then that’s considered a relevant source.
Context
Google and other search engines also look at links to decide not only how relevant they are to the source, but also how relevant they are to the conversation. For example, if you post a comment on a particular blog post and include a link to your site, the text of your content needs to be related to that blog.
Social Value
Not every post you share on social media is going to boost the authority of your site, but Google does gauge how much engagement your posts are getting and how many people are sharing your content.
Natural Support
Search engines love to see organically-built links, so that means you’ll need to built situations where people will naturally want to link to your content. The most effective way to do this is to be constantly creating pieces of high-quality and easily-sharable content, such as lists and infographics.
Landing
Where your links land is also a contributor to your domain’s authority. If you’re responding to a forum question about camera settings, then it’s better to link to a blog on your site that talks about camera settings than it is to simply link to your home page about photography in general.
Consistency
Google is always crawling sites to see when links are published and consistency is important for a good backlink profile. If it appears that you have one big shower of backlinks followed by a quiet period, it can reflect poorly on your site. If you’re writing and distributing content steadily, your profile will grow at an appropriate rate.
Timing
Your site needs to have traffic from links built in the past few days as well as the last few weeks, months, and even better, over the last year. As long as the pages are active and relevant, the more spread out your links are, the more your site will appear relevant.
Anchors
Ever since Google released the original Penguin update, deliberately writing keyword-heavy text can appear spammy and harm your website’s positioning. Instead, make sure your links are placed organically and that they don’t feel forced and can offer a meaningful value to the reader.
Want to Know More About Backlinks or SEO?
If you are struggling to get your website to show up where you want in search results, we’re here to help! We talk a lot about search engine optimization around here, but if you want to rank higher and see long-term results for your business’ website, reach out to us and let’s see how we can partner together!
