If you are new to the world of SEO backlinks is a word you may have heard but might not have understood or appreciated what a powerful role they play in determining the search engine results.
Backlinks are links from an external website back to your website. The image below is a good illustration of the connection between two sites through a backlink.
Search engines continually change their algorithms, but one thing has remained consistent, good quality backlinks are vital if you want your website to rank highly for a competitive keyword. The reason backlinks are so valuable is that they are seen by search engines as a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another.
If your website has lots of external links back to a page or news post, this is a good indicator to search engines that the content on that page is interesting and worth linking to.
When it comes to building backlinks one of the most important things to aim for is to build links from quality websites. Links from websites with higher domain authority, such as an online news resource, carry more weight than websites that are seen as spam.
So how can you start building your link profile? Below are just some of the tips for an effective backlink building strategy.
Top tips for building your backlinks
- Build a Company profile on LinkedIn with a backlink
- Create a Google my Business page with a link
- Guest Blogging on other websites
- Comment on other blogs discussing the same topic with a link back to your content
- Sign up to online business directories such as Yell.com
- Link to other businesses and ask them to return the favour
We hope this has been helpful and we have offered some practical advice on how you can earn more backlinks. Our last piece of advice in this blog is to caution against taking the quick route of buying links. Websites that sell links rarely have high domain authority and are unlikely to provide quality links that have a real difference to your performance in search engines.
If you would like to know more about backlinks, a great resource is the Backlinko website, on here there are lots of great articles and case studies exploring the power of backlinks.