It’s no secret that link building, or "backlinks", is the most important part in an SEO strategy. In fact, it’s a culmination of several different skills: you need to master content, sales, programming, psychology, and good old-fashioned marketing if you want other people to link to your website. The bottom line is, if you want more search engine traffic, building a backlink strategy is a must. This guide will explain everything you need to build quality links to your website that will improve your SEO ranking - which will ultimately build your online business and improve your bottom line by attracting more customers.
What are backlinks (and how do they work)?
A “backlink” is created when an external website links to yours. They help to increase your website traffic, improve your search engine ranking, increase your domain authority and even build business relationships. Most of the popular search engines, like Google, not only analyse the content of a page, but they also look at the links to a page - both of which effect the ranking of your pages in search results. Basically, the more backlinks you have, the higher chance you have of getting on the first page of search results.
Find high-quality links for your website
It important to understand that not all links to your website are the same. Links are graded according to their relevance to the content on your page. If you have many backlinks from websites that have nothing to do with your content, then they will be considered low-quality links, which will effect your ranking negatively. The goal is to find backlinks from other websites that are relevant to your content, which will then be graded as high-quality links.
The authority of your linking websites play a big part in this too. The aim is to get backlinks from popular websites that also have good quality content and have loads of users. For example, a backlink from a popular magazine or newspaper website is much better than a backlink from a no-name blogger.
How to get backlinks to your website
Building up the backlinks to your website is all about giving other websites a reason to link to yours, and using strategies to tell people about the content on your website.
Create great content - regularly
Ultimately, the best way to get backlinks to your website is to create great content. This is the number one reason why anyone would want to link to your website in the first place. A page with interesting reading material and good-quality visual assets are best - like punchy headlines, well written stories, photos, diagrams, infographics, charts and videos. If your website gets knows for its high-quality and engaging content, it will lead other content creators to you because they'll link your website as a resource or a reference. Creating a blog or a "news" section on your website is a great place to post new content.
Send email campaigns
Once you create great content, you've then got to tell people it's there. Consider building up an email list and send regular email campaigns to that list which introduces your new content to your audience. It not only gets your branding in front of your target audience, the emails you send will link them back to your website.
Sending highly targeted or personalised emails are effective too. For example, if you've reviewed a product or a service in your blog, let that business know about it and ask them if they'd consider linking their website to the review in your blog. Or, if you've got a new product or service, invite a magazine or a blogger to review it - making sure they link to the page on your website.
Social media marketing
The content you create on your website, will also be perfect for your social media posts, so every new page on your website should have a social media post that is linking back to it. Make sure your website is using media cards because when you add the URL to the post on social media, a clickable media card is automatically created in your feed. For example, this is what the media card post for this article looks like on Facebook:
Bottomline results for backlink strategies
Backlink campaigns, like any other marketing campaign, need to be well-planned and implemented efficiently. Take these tips seriously, but do your research first. Develop a plan that works for your business, industry, and of course, your schedule.
The overall goal of your backlink strategies should be to get links back to your site from high-quality sources, but to also get traffic back to the content you've worked so hard on creating. Ultimately, this will lead to more traffic to your website, improve your search engine ranking and lead you to new customers and sales.
Building backlinks should be part of the of your SEO strategy, but it can be time consuming and it is time that often gets in the way of getting results. Outsourcing this work to an SEO expert is a valuable investment in your overall marketing strategy.
