A lot has been said about backlinks and their importance in your website’s SEO performance. In this article, we’ll settle this once and for all—discuss how building links tie into your SEO strategy and how you can get the best backlinks from your campaign.
The Basics of Link Building in SEO
In a nutshell, backlinks or inbound links help increase your Google search rankings for your target keywords.
Search engines treat backlinks as a sign of trust online. If websites link to any of your web pages, they probably think the content is valuable to their readers. Else, they would’ve linked to much better resource pages.
As a result, search engines will put more value on your website due to the backlinks you’ve accumulated over time.
The more incoming links you have from authoritative websites, the higher your site can rank on search results. This means you can increase your organic search traffic and get more eyeballs to your site!
The importance of ranking on top of Google search results cannot be understated. According to the latest data available at Advanced Web Ranking, the first organic result on Google receives 27% of clicks, followed by a distant 10% for the second page and 6% for the third.
Let’s say you’re ranking on the first page for the search query with 1,000 monthly searches. Expect to receive approximately 270 organic visitors, which is the most out of the keyword positions you can rank for.
Now, imagine ranking on top for keywords with thousands and thousands of searches online. That will help you attract many highly qualified visitors who will become your clients or customers!
What Makes Good Backlinks?
Not all backlinks are the same. For instance, a backlink from an authoritative website is more powerful than hundreds of backlinks from mediocre sites. That means you can improve your search engine results pages (SERPs) position even from that one authoritative backlink.
The question now is: what makes an “authoritative” backlink? There are various factors you must consider to determine a site’s authoritativeness, and below are some of them:
- Traffic – A site getting lots of organic traffic means it’s ranking on top of Google for multiple keywords with hundreds and thousands of monthly searches.
- Placement – The link’s location to your site also determines its strength. If search spiders can find your link at the top of the content using easy-to-see colors, the backlink should be potent. The same can’t be said about links at the bottom of the page and has the same color as the page’s text.
- Relevance – The site that will link to your site should be related or relevant to your site’s industry. Building links from sites that are topically relevant to your site helps provide more context to search spiders about your content.
- Anchor text – Using an exact or partial match anchor text make the backlink more effective in ranking your website. At the same time, don’t over-optimize your backlinks by using the same anchor texts on all sites.
- Dofollow – Backlinks pass link juice or equity to your site by default. But some sites tag external links from their site with the nofollow attribute. That means it doesn’t pass authority from the site to yours. So, unless you have dofollow links from authoritative sites, your keyword rankings won’t improve.
- Site’s link profile – The more backlinks a website has from authoritative sites, the more influential the backlink you’ll get from it.
You can analyze these factors using SEO tools like Ahrefs. It shows you the organic traffic and link profile of websites.
Its features can help you determine the best link prospects for your link building campaign.
How to Get High-Quality Backlinks that Search Engines Love
The principle of link building is simple, but reaching the top of organic search isn’t. It would help if you as had as many links from high-quality websites as you could secure, and the process of getting them is arguably the most challenging part of SEO.
To help you understand what it takes for you to build backlinks that will make a positive impact on your site, you must follow the tips below:
Find Link Building Opportunities
The best place to start with your link building strategy is by checking your competitors’ backlinks.
To do this using Ahrefs, type in your domain URL on Site Explorer and click on Organic search > Competing domains on the left sidebar of the next page.
You’ll see websites organized according to the percentage of overlapping keywords you and the site are ranking for.
The greater the overlap means the greater competition between that site and yours. And because you rank for the exact keywords on Google, you must check out the website backlinks.
From here, you can parse down which link partners to prioritize based on Domain Rating (DR), which is Ahrefs’ metric for measuring website authority, organic traffic, and more.
Identify the Best Tactics for Your Strategy
Once you have gathered link prospects for your campaign, the next step is to determine how you should get a link from each website.
Below are the different methods you can use to help you get backlinks:
- Guest blogging – Send emails to sites that accept guest articles. Once both of you settle on a topic, write a high-quality guest post that includes a link in the site’s body or author bio.
- Broken link building -Identify the broken links a site has, then recover the broken page and recreate it on your site. Finally, reach out to the site owner informing him or her about the broken link and propose the recreated and improved content as a replacement.
- Pillow links – Make your link profile look as natural as possible by including links to your site in your social media profiles, blog comments, and others.
- Internal links – While not an off-page SEO tactic, creating content silos by strategically linking to related pages on your own website with each other is proven to increase your site’s ranking.
If you’re hands are full with your organization, it’s best to get help from us at Linkplicity to do some of the backlinking duties for you. You can buy backlink packages from us to help your website make strides on the search engine algorithm. From here, sit back, relax, and watch your site increase its impressions and clicks on Google Search Console.
Develop a Scalable Campaign
From the tactics above, choose the best and most appropriate ones based on your research. Then enlist help from your team members or freelancers to reach out to other websites and build links on your behalf.
Once the campaign has concluded, you can review the results with them and determine what worked and what didn’t. From here, carry out the best performing tactics from your previous strategy into your upcoming campaign to generate better results moving forward.
This ensures the consistent implementation and iteration of your link building campaign.
Conclusion
Learning about backlinks and how it impacts your SEO performance comes before you start building them for your site. Knowing the whys and hows of link building lets you understand what it takes to develop a link building strategy for your site.
