Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the search engine visibility of your site. In practice, this means that you rank higher on search results. Thus giving you better chances to get clicks and views.
Optimizing pages for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing Yandex, etc. Isn’t easy. They require a lot of knowledge and skills to do properly. Search engines use bots called crawlers to analyze your website. They take a lot of factors into consideration. After analyzing your page, they give it a score and your page gets ranked on a list based on its score. The higher this score is, the better you will fair in search results. Sadly, this score is not visible to the website owner. There is a lot of guesswork needed to have success in ranking.
While it’s not known what exactly these bots rank, and how much value they give to each metric. Some general rules are proven to work effectively. The following factors are considered the most important:
- Security and Accessibility to The Page
Secure and easily accessible pages rank much higher. - Page Speed
The faster your page loads up, the better. This is especially important for mobile. - Mobile-Friendliness
The more mobile-friendly your page is, the better. - Domain Age, URL, Trust, and Authority
Older pages, that are trusted and hold some authority, outrank newer and untrustworthy pages. - Optimized Content
The better your content is optimized, the better for your rank. - Technical SEO
Things like keywords, proper code, right tags, metadata, screenreaders, etc. - User Experience
If the users have positive interactions, your site will rank higher. - Link Building
The topic we will cover today!
How Do Links Impact SEO?
SEO is a very complicated thing. It requires a lot of work and effort to understand the basics, let alone master them. In Search Engine Optimizations, pretty much everything matters. Some of the most important things for SEO are the links. They play an integral role in driving organic traffic in competitive fields from search engines. By some estimations, they might even be the #1 factor that determines your ranking. So it’s obvious that you shouldn’t joke around with this topic.
Okay, so they play a big role, but what even are these links, and how does someone “build” them?
What Is Link Building?
Link building is the accumulation of one-way hyperlinks (also known as backlinks). These backlinks connect a page to another page and direct users to it. This means that the author of a said website decided that your website is good enough to link his users. In short, websites put references in their content to your website.
Search engines love this. Naturally the more backlinks you have the better your visibility will be. Also, these backlinks improve your authority score as well. As people link you as the defacto place to learn more about your said niche.
Nowadays, building backlinks is like great marketing. The sooner you realize this the better. You need to influence page owners that you are a great candidate for their users to visit. The better rank the site that backlinks you have, the more that backlink is worth.
This is sadly not obvious to newcomers. So they often waste time and money building links from poor sources which can cost them a lot and even hurt their rank. There are countless ads on services like Fiverr and others that advertise great backlinks. The truth is, these are of extremely poor, and spam-like quality, and they will only hurt your bottom line. This can be such a great issue that some SEO guys use it as a way to undermine their competition.
What is Known About the Ranking Algorithm and Backlinks?
Sadly, not enough. Google and other search engines try to hide specific details as much as possible to prevent exploits. Their page rank algorithm analyzes the content on your page and looks at how many websites have links directing to your content.
Of course, not all links are the same. The biggest factor that determines how good a backlink is is the authority of the site. The bigger the domain’s sitewide authority is the more impact a backlink from that site will have. Random links without context from websites that are not highly ranked won’t matter much. Let’s do a quick example. You are the owner of a dog nutrition page. If a spammy website that promotes home remodeling links to your site, that link won’t matter much. But if a popular pet blog links to your product, that would be a high-quality backlink.
What Can You Do To Build Better Links?
You can do a lot of things to ensure that your links are as good as possible.
Let’s start simple and slowly increase the difficulty and knowledge you will need to better do this. Good things to remember are to also link back and help others. Reciprocal linking is always a good idea and it can only help you. You should try things like making and hosting guest posts to better intertwined your content with others. Don’t buy low-quality links as they can seriously mess your ranking up. Google is not stupid, and they know when something fishy is up.
Simple Techniques For Acquiring Backlinks
- Simply Ask for the Backlinks
Sometimes the most simple solutions are the best. By simply asking you can get some great backlinks that can help you rank higher. Most likely you will have to compensate in some way. Sometimes that will be some financial compensation, while sometimes you will have to have backlinks pointing to their content as well. - Build Good and Fruitful Relationships
Continuing on the previous tip, you should build relationships with others. This means befriending your competition and trying to help each other out. Start with your niche community. Help one another and you will see bigger growth than if you tried it by yourself. - Utilize Guest Posts
Continuing the friendship thing, you should try guest-posting. This means you write content for different websites and that contains links back to you. The article you write has to be high-quality and not an obvious link grab promotion. Your friends can also do the same on your site and guest post on it. - Give Testimonials and ReviewsTestimonials and reviews are incredible ways of building links. Businesses love it as they get valuable feedback on their products or services, and build customer trust. For you, on the other hand, it’s all about the backlink. This can even work with comments on some pages, where you can place the link to your page on them.
- Start and Promote Yourself on a Blog
Who can be a better friend to you, than you? Jokes aside, this is a technique that is easy to implement for solid backlinks. You will have to run an active blog and put some effort into it. If you have a blog with one blog post and just a link towards you, you will have a bad and low-quality link that will just waste your time. Try keeping your blog active and alive. Link to different sites and creators including yourself! - Check That You Got Linked Where You Deserved
It’s not often that you pr your company gets mentioned in an article, blog post, or whatever. When it happens you should expect a link to your page. But weirdly enough, this isn’t always the case. There have been countless times where this doesn’t happen. It is your duty to find these articles and request the proper links. This is the only way you will get the link for sure and build your links! - Utilize Dead Links
Sometimes links break and become dead. These mostly happen when you migrate your page or your webmaster makes some mistakes. The result is the same, your pages will have a big fat 404 error on them. When this happens you can find these pages and recreate them, or put a redirecting link. - Use The Tried And True Method - Email
Email is a cheap and easy way to advertise your business to people. You can send a newsletter and a bunch of other content that has the chance of getting shared and even linked! - Try Giveaway Campaigns
A cool thing SEOs noticed is that .gov and .edu backlinks have a lot of trust tied to them. So the idea popped to create “Scholarship” contests. These contests would always scholarships to students that write a blog about a certain topic and fulfill some requirements. One of them would be to link to your page. This turned into a quick and easy way to get high-quality backlinks fast. - Infographics
A picture is worth a thousand words. That is true, and infographics have multiple pictures and words inside of them making them ideal. Infographics are a great way to teach people new things. They are not too hard to make, and the great ones get shared often. You can create some incredible infographics and spread them around the web. After a while do a reverse image search and check if your infographic is posted on blogs or websites. If yes, contact the admin and ask for a link. Simple as that! - Try Going Onto Podcasts
Think of this as the ultimate guest post. Nowadays there are podcasts for pretty much every topic. Find one that is within your niche and ask to join for an episode! - Case Studies
Similar to infographics, you can create incredible case studies. These case studies can spread across the web and you can ask for credit and a link. Of course, for your case study to spread anywhere, you will need to make a good one. And even if you spend a lot of time creating one, it might not be popular at all.
So Let’s Sum Things Up!
SEO is not easy. There is a lot of things that go into it and even the pros can get confused sometimes. Because of this, you should always try to keep up and with the trend and newest developments. One thing you should definitely focus on is link building.
There is no easy way to do this. You will need to put in some effort and do the work yourself. But if you do it the right way, you will see great results. Follow these strategies and you will quickly get some incredible backlinks that will help you rank to the first positions of the front page!
Have you dabbled in SEO in your career? What are the best link-building strategies you have found? Share your knowledge with us!
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