Backlinks The Right Way
How to start getting those powerful links to your website…
Backlinks are a vitally important tool and key factor in good SEO. Get it right and it will improve your website ranking ten-fold, but get it wrong and you could be in trouble with not only the search engines, but with the ‘wrong’ traffic coming to your site.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links directed at your site, known as inbound links. Usually a higher number of inbound links means your site is popular and will rank well in the search results because of it.
But, having a high amount of backlinks, doesn’t mean the search engines will put you at the top. They measures the quality of the backlinks coming into your site, if they are not up to the high standards of quality and reputation when passing through their algorithms, your rankings won’t be affected positively.
- If links are coming from websites relevant to yours, the search engines will consider them to be high-quality links.
- If backlinks are not relevant to your site, they will be considered low-quality links (basically not worth your time and possibly harming your websites reputation).
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing all like to see websites gaining relevant links over time and not manipulated for quick gain, that’s why it’s important to have an effective back linking strategy, so you avoid creating potential problems.
Link Farming
Search engines like Google now employ sophisticated algorithms that are now even stricter when it comes to scoring backlinks, most definitely a good thing enhancing customer experience and relevance. Google found website owners who were using hidden links and automatically generated pages, where they provided easy inbound links to websites. The older search algorithms didn’t pick this up and the ongoing development of algorithms and releases makes it near impossible to manipulate the links.
Many off-shore businesses sprang up in the pay for links format, so Google took a stand against these dubious websites and the websites that used these link farmers by banning their sites, some even permanently.
Why Get Involved With Backlinks
The main reason anyone with a website gets involved in SEO and back-linking is simple… TRAFFIC! The cornerstone of any website, why you create a site in the first place. Driving potential clients to what you’re offering, whether it be a product or service.
Back linking is one of the best traffic generators around and also instills users with an element of trust, as they are more likely to click-through if they see your website on page 1 or the top 3 results. Being honest, trust levels start to go down if what you’re looking for goes beyond page 1.
How Do You Backlink The Right Way
It all start’s with the website experience itself. The site should be easy to navigate and enable first-timers to easily be able to access a wealth of content and/or contact you for more information. It’s about building that trust level and reputation as a recommended website to visit, but also making it easy for the Search engine crawlers to find the content that’s relevant.
A lot of effort should go into making great quality content and a minimal amount in link building (not only does great content help with back linking but also makes the user subscribe into you and the website experience). Once you have made the site easy to navigate and produced relevant, high-quality content (blogs, in-depth pages, services you offer, contact, about you etc.), it’s time to begin getting those backlinks.
One of the best way’s to go about this is researching similar websites to yours. Other websites and businesses that share in your interests, who you could build relationships with so they link to your content. The same rules apply as with your website, their site should be easy to navigate and have high-quality content, then the search engines will see both as genuine, relevant and a natural link to each other, which is what we want.
A great tool for this is: Similar Site Search
Other great link building strategies:
- Leaving comments on other websites/blogs
- Guest-blogging
- Social Media
- Reviews
- Many more…
Summary
Google has been getting stricter over the years, with Panda and Penguin updates increasingly putting off webmaster’s from investing in link building, worried about Google planning more updates that are similar in the future. If you keep to the principle of better quality content that is interesting and engaging to your target audience. Gaining backlinks in the right way reaps the benefit, so plan it and nurture the links.
If you would like more information on backlinks, SEO, or anything Digital Marketing, then get in contact with us today. We look forward to hearing from you!
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