How To Build Valuable Backlinks

Not only do backlinks increase SEO authority and off-page SEO as they are a great way for Google to find your pages when crawling the internet, but backlinks fundamentally attract more visitors to your website.

We all want to drive large amounts of quality traffic to our website and we are doing everything we can to increase SEO authority on our websites. It really is no secret that SEO and backlinks go together like tea and biscuits.

What Is A Backlink?

Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain – essentially linking back from their domain to yours. The total number of backlinks can often include many links from the same or multiple referring domains.

Generally speaking, backlinks are considered to be a “vote” of confidence for the content that’s being linked to your domain from outside sources. For Search Engines, backlinks help to determine the page’s importance, value and authority, showing how popular or important your pages are.

What Makes A Good Backlink?

Previously, the quantity of backlinks was an indicator of a page’s popularity. Today however, due to the way backlinks are evaluated based on different industry-related ranking factors, it is more about the quality of sites from which the links are coming.

The quality of your backlink is dependent on how relevant they are to the content on your website. No matter if the link is being followed or not, being mentioned or having a link of a high quality website will give your website and brand awareness a boost.

The quality of backlinks are based on Sharing Page Strength/Page Strength Spread, there are many names for this but ultimately it is the strength of a page that is linking back to your site. These vary in metrics dependent on the tools that you use.

Equally, the backlinks that you hold on your website can also have an impact on your website value too, so always ensure that the pages you’re linking to, the anchor text you use and any Meta tags associated with the linking page are relevant to your page and overall website goals.

How To Gain Quality Backlinks?

There’s no magic formula when creating good quality backlinks, they are time consuming to gain, but a great return on investment as they are very valuable for your SEO authority. We understand that when you’re starting to gain backlinks from the beginning you will have nothing to go from, however that is where competitor research comes in, you can look at your high ranking competitor’s current and previous backlinks to see what websites and which industries they target and any that might be useful to you.

There are a many things that you can do to gain backlinks, we have collated our favourite:

• Guest blogging – I’m sure you are writing your own blogs already, (if not, why not!?) but why not write guest blogs too. Once you have found websites that accept guest blogging, you should write a blog relevant to both your business and also the website that you are looking to post on. This article is building your business reputation, so ensure it is professional and portrays the correct company values.
• Supplier testimonials – Testimonials on your website look great, you encourage your customers to write them, and as would your suppliers too! So why not write them a testimonial about how their product/service has enhanced your business, just request that they link back to your website once online!
• Sponsors / event pages – If you are sponsoring or attending an event, make sure you tell the world! Often, these events have pages for exhibitor and sponsor lists etc. so ensure you send over a logo and a link to your website!
• Increase networking – Networking doesn’t just have to be a face to face physical exchange, but you can also build up relationships online via social media, forums and blogs! Engage with people on these platforms, sharing useful advice, linking to blog posts of yours too, this will not only give you increase backlinking but also be seen as a thought leader within your industry and increase brand awareness.
• Trustworthy directories – Not only do directories provide you with more backlinks, they also are a great way for your clients to find your contact information online too. Quality directories are important, we suggest find industry or locational specific directories, as often low quality directories have been excluded from Google’s search results.

How To Manage Your Backlinks?

Keeping track of your backlinks is important, not only so you are aware which sites are linking back to you but also you can find out how to the anchor text of the backlink uses keywords relating to your website.

A few tools that we would recommend are SEM Rush and Search Metrics. These tools all allow you to discover the page your website has been referred from, how many pages from your website have been indexed and some sort of domain authority score that they hold. You can also discover your backlinks in Google Analytics, you can look into your referral traffic sources and from there you can discover the specific pages you hold backlinks from, this will also show you the behaviour statistics that these users hold too.

If you’d like any advice or some more information about how you can enhance your SEO with our range of digital marketing solution, contact us today! You don’t have to take our word for it, find out what our clients think.