What Is A Backlink?
Backlink building is an SEO strategy where you get “Backlinks” or inbound links from another website. If a website takes the trouble to link back to another website, Google regards that as an endorsement of the authority and quality of the target site.
SEO link building involves building links that will enhance the user experience while at the same time creating a link to your content.
Are Backlinks Important Today
Backlinks are considered one of the more important factors used by Google and the other search engines when deciding search engine ranking, that is which pages should appear first in the search engine results for a given query.
Over the years Google has grown in its ability to judge the relevance and quality of a link to your site and by doing that is now able to identify spam linking and reduce the value of lower quality and irrelevant links. Trying to rank well in a Google search now is a different ball game from what it was many years ago. It is no longer beneficial to get any old link to your site.
Do Backlinks Still Work Today
Having said that, backlinks are still a major factor when it comes to Google working out the rank order for their search engine results pages. In order for backlinks to work today, you need to do a lot more groundwork and create an overall online marketing plan that your backlinks strategies will fit into.
What MakesA Good Backlink?
You need to make sure that any backlink pointing at your site is coming from a high-quality website. Google now looks at the standing of the website linking out to your site and if that website has a low-quality score in their eyes, then the value any backlinks from that website be greatly reduced.
Your backlink profiles still go a long way to deciding where you rank for your targeted keyword phrases.
It is not easy to get links from sites like Wikipedia, most site owners are aware of the value of their links and know a good link is a very sort after. So getting new links that will help drive traffic and help you rank well in the search results is a very important skill to have or to acquire.
In addition to looking at the quality of the website linking back to the target website, Google will also look at the content to see how relevant the backlink is.
If your website is about dog training and receives a backlink from another website related to the topic of dog training and the content surrounding the backlink is on content relevant to dog training, then Google will place a greater value on that backlink than say for example a random link placed in the comment section of an online gambling site.
So a good backlink requires:
- quality
- The quality of the referring domains, i.e. authority sites within the niche, will offer higher value from any links it points at other websites
- The quality of the content surrounding the backlink. Higher quality content will pass more value through any links it points at other websites
- relevance
- Relevance of the website linking out to the topic of the website receiving backlinks
- Relevance of the content surrounding the backlink
How Do You Build Backlinks
Technically a backlink is just a piece of HTML code, but the challenge is getting another website owner to place that code on their website, in the right place, and on the right post.
The higher the quality and authority of a website, the harder it becomes to get them to link to your website. Unless of course, you have already managed to build a higher authority site within its niche and the other website owner can see an obvious benefit in associating his website with one as prestigious as yours is.
Find sites that have great content and try and create a link opportunity. Offer something of value, case studies, infographics, resource pages, find broken links on their site and replace them with links pointing to content on your blog. These are all great examples of white hat SEO that will produce results.
What’s In It For Me?
There has to be some kind of benefit for the owner of the website to link to another website. You increase the chance of receiving free and spontaneous backlinks if you have a high-quality site with excellent content.
Another benefit that you can provide to website owners is if you provide them with high-quality content relevant to their niche. Any website owner is always on the lookout for a piece of content that is high quality and relevant to their niche and many would be prepared to allow you to place a backlink within the article in return.
This is known as guest posting or guest blogging and is a fantastic opportunity to place quality backlinks on another site. As you create the high-quality content for your guest posts to appear on their blogs, you are able to create the guest post links where you want to within the article and use the exact anchor text that best suits your needs.
Creating a resource or a resource page that offers valuable content to people within the target niche is another great way of receiving quality backlinks. The resource could be a tool (such as an interest calculator), an infographic, a video, or just a really great blog post. The skyscraper technique is a great example of this, where you write blog posts that are an up-to-date epic piece on a relevant topic, so good that it encourages website owners to willingly link to it.
There are many link-building opportunities and there are many link-building techniques to collect high-quality inbound links. But it’s important to realize that gathering high-quality links should be just one part of your overall online marketing strategy.
What Is A Backlink Strategy
The first place to start is to ensure that you have an online marketing strategy in place. Within that, you then need to create a backlink strategy. Any link-building campaign will be more effective if there is a structure to your link-building tactic. Link-building strategies should form a part of your Online Marketing plan.
Your Content Marketing strategy should work hand in hand with your digital marketing plan and acquiring links Google will value is going to be a big part of that.
As we have seen above, when it comes to link building there are many different link building tactics that you can go about building high-quality backlinks to increase the domain authority of your website. The ones we discussed earlier are nowhere near the only options that you have nor the only points you will need to consider.
- reciprocal links
- editorial links
- blog comments
- broken link building
- link reclamation
- internal links
- dead links / broken links
- contextual links
- social media
- link building tools
- link building outreach
- healthy link profiles
Organizing the way you gather each external link to ensure that it fits in with your overall online marketing goals, is a better way to do things. You should be aware that if you build links the wrong way a bad backlink rather than help your chances of ranking in search engines will more likely damage your site.
Search engine optimization and coming up with a successful link-building strategy is a specialized subject and one that can seem quite daunting for many website owners. If you feel a little out of your depth when it comes to planning your advanced link-building strategies, discussing link equity, link profiles, or reciprocal linking, then we would be very happy here at LinkDaddy to help you through that minefield.
Should I Buy Backlinks
I am hoping by now that you will understand that the answer to a question such as should I buy backlinks can only be answered after you put both your online marketing plan and your link-building strategy down on paper.
Getting quality backlinks from relevant websites is essential to ensuring the success of your website. It will increase organic traffic and referral traffic to your site and get you in front of a wider and interested audience.
You should approach the question of buying backlinks in much the same way you would go about any link-building efforts. The only backlinks that you want pointing at your website are ones from niche relevant, high-quality sites that are clean and free from any association with spam links or spam content.
Backlinks That Work!
Here at LinkDaddy, we have the world’s largest and oldest niche blog network. This network of high-quality blogs has been designed to pass authority and relevance.
We have a wide selection of niches that are covered and so it is always possible to find high authority and relevant sites to build your outbound links on.
We have a vested interest in ensuring that your website does everything that you need it to do and that any backlink or SCO services that we provide improve upon that for you.
After all, it stands to reason that for any website owner to continue using our services they need to achieve agreed goals and add value. With awesome content that your target audience will find both relevant and compelling, you will see an increase in the authority of your root domain on the route to achieving the goals we agreed for your website.
