How do I create quality backlinks?

FAQ: ALL ABOUT THE WAYS TO GET QUALITY BACKLINKS FOR YOUR WEBSITE

As the pandemic caused markets to shift and introduced new and challenging ways to interact with our customers, our every effort to rise above the situation counts. With our operations transitioned online, social media presence and visibility become a whole lot more critical.  

If you want to increase your website’s SEO performance, you have three tasks to fulfill: to publish dynamic content, optimize the website’s text elements (on-page SEO), and score relevant backlinks that direct to your website (off-page SEO).

What is a backlink?

Backlinks, known for their other names, “inbound links” or “external links,” are links from one website’s page to a page on another website. As an external link, these links should be from third-party sources and point to your website.

If you’re new to SEO, you might not know how quality backlinks affect your SEO efforts and influence the traffic your website gets. It is one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so you have to pay attention to backlinks if you want to see website traffic from Google grow.

The following are other reasons why backlinks are important:

• Great backlinks pointing to your website help you to land at the top of keyword search.
• Backlinks from other websites influence your website’s reputation. They act as a vote that your website is a trustworthy source.
• Google can index your website content quicker with just one link from a trusted source.
• Links from other websites send valuable referral traffic to your website.
• They boost your site’s credibility and popularity among interested visitors.

The SEO world is a highly competitive industry where businesses use different strategies to make it on top of the Google search console. Backlinks will always be an integral part of your SEO efforts because even if time brought drastic changes in SEO trends, they could hold up in the long run.

How to earn quality backlinks for my site?

For Google to acknowledge a quality backlink, it must be editorially earned and not paid or sponsored from a topically relevant, authoritative website. You are free to search for methods to acquire backlinks for your website, but in your quest to link building, make sure that you play by Google’s rules.

The agreeable methods that align with Google’s standards are called the white-hat SEO practice, and ensuring that you abide to clean practices when building backlinks is the first step to creating quality backlinks. 

Good content is another key to having someone else place a link to your website, au naturel. Content marketers should publish unique and relevant content. It is a way to gain popularity across the internet community and increase the chance of having someone vouch for your website. 

Other ways to earn quality backlinks are:

1. Resource Link Building: it is the process of building backlinks from your list of linking pages and get your site included on the page as one of their resources. To start with this tactic, you need to identify the external websites where your business can add value to your audience.

1. Broken Link Building: this strategy requires you to find informative web pages with external links prompting dead pages. You must have (or create) similar content to which the broken links pointing to 404 pages are initially linked.

1. Business Association Links: you can have the opportunity to build high-quality backlinks by being a member of any business association. You can get your website listed on your association’s member directories so that you can score another backlink.

1. Link Gap Analysis: This strategy allows you to see the websites that link to one of your competitor’s websites. When they link to a business that belongs to your exact niche, there could be a chance that they will also link your website – provided that you can justify why your website is worthy of their time.

How can one identify the quality of a backlink?

To give you an idea of how to evaluate the health of your backlinks, consider these three characteristics of a quality backlink:

• It drives quality traffic to your website.
• It must be from other web pages of related content and covers a similar theme to your own.
• It came from a trusted source, authority sites, or blogs that create high-quality articles and other published materials.

In contrast, here are the characteristics of a backlink to avoid or what Google calls “toxic backlinks.”

• It came from websites that owners set up for the sole purpose of linking out.
• Acquired from sites and content that are topically irrelevant.
• Linked from web pages not crawled by Google index.
• Links are forced into blog comments.

How do I create quality backlinks?

While you might be excited about backlinks, you have to understand that not all backlinks are the same. Some will be advantageous to your site ranking, while you must avoid others at all costs. Below are some of the factors backlinks that you need to understand first to create quality backlinks.

1. Follow and No Follow Links – a no-follow link has an attribute that notifies search engines that they don’t pass the trust metric used, PageRank. In contrast, a follow (also called DoFollow link) passes the PageRank and therefore does not have an added no-follow attribute. These two types of backlinks from a localized website are equally valuable to local SEO strategy.
2. Anchor text – refers to the visible and clickable words or characters that display an HTML hyperlink within the content. Anchor text is an underlined and blue-colored text; it is often deemed an SEO-friendly type of backlink. 
3. High Authority Links – these are backlinks that came from trusted sources or an established website that has earned Google’s trust. Backlinks from high authority websites are the recommended practice to rank your site higher. 
4. Link relevance – you can never outsmart Google in terms of backlinks. Even if you get a significant number of links from a website, Google won’t like it unless relevant. You have to gain links from a website or blog post related to the industry you belong to so Google can acknowledge it.
5. Link number – one backlinking myth that is not always necessarily true is that the more links you have, the higher you will rank on SERPs. You have to focus more on building valuable links at scale rather than listing hundreds or thousands of them.

Bluish Business Solutions: Unrivaled backlink and other SEO services for you

At Bluish Business Solutions, we help companies leverage the benefits of backlinks and other SEO factors to pursue organizational growth. We actively work with small businesses, all industries that need a special care on their journey to achieving local SEO success.

Learn more about our comprehensive SEO services and pricing packages today.