Ultimate SEO Guide
Backlinks are quality links that are created when another website links to your website. They are only a part of the holistic structure that helps in SEO. They are an important part of boosting your rankings and ought to be carefully considered. Marketers, entrepreneurs and anyone who would like to boost their rankings in search engines must have a great backlinking strategy. For a while, sites had found a way of manipulating and abusing backlinking. People got links from sites that had unrelated content. These links were often purchased, for example, you would find a link to a car racing site from another site that had information about kittens. This polluted the search engines and prompted action from Google. Some sites got penalized and disappeared from the search engine.
Backlinking Strategy as Part of a Holistic Approach
A backlinking strategy does not work in isolation. They have to be backed up by other features and factors that search engines such as Google consider. In order to boost your rankings, you must also have backlinks from reputable sites. Having links generated from stronger and more favorable sites boosts your SEO. A link from a weaker or newer site does not count as much as one that is from a stronger site. The traffic generated from each of these links is starkly different. Linking to any site puts your reputation at stake. This is why you cannot afford to link to just any site.
The Purpose of Backlinks
Backlinks were introduced as a way to reach out. They are not just a generic method to get higher rankings and more traffic to your site. They are designed to make you look for sites with similar content and send an email to reach out. They are designed to form an online community for reliable information to be better provided.
This is why Google frowns upon irrelevant backlinks and those who pay to get these links. In order to boost your SEO through a great backlink strategy, one of the things to learn is how to reach out to people in a personal manner. This could be through emails, phone calls or even face to face meetings if that is possible. Bloggers and journalists always need new content, and so they will be interested in hearing how you can add value to their sites. If you have a product, they are also more likely to be open to featuring it on their various platforms, as long as it is relevant to what they do. It is a way for them to get more content.
Important Technical Properties
There are some technical properties that go hand in hand with any backlink strategy. Some of these include 302 redirects, duplicate content, redirect chains and 404 errors among others. You also need to consider the loading speed of the website by using Google’s Page Speed Insights. Another important technical feature involves how friendly the site is to mobile users. This can be checked using Google’s Mobile Friendly check. If you have these properties in check, you are better placed as a candidate for backlinks from other sites. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo have bots that prefer visiting sites that have all these technical properties handled. If your site has fast loading time, UI and UX, Site Maps, a good response time and Site Structure, your rankings improve, and other sites are more open to the idea of backlinking.
3 Tips on Backlinking
So, what are some of the general tips that you would need to learn in order to get a grasp of backlinking?
1. Know Your Audience And the Sites That Appeal To Them
The first step is to know your audience. What do they like? What kind of information are they looking for? If you have answers to these questions, then you are well on your way to formulating a great backlinking strategy. Once you know the type of information the audience wants, you can go further and find out which other websites they like to visit. Obviously, these sites have to have information that is relevant to what you are also providing. It is easier to reach out to other sites that offer related information as part of your SEO strategy.
2. Have Well-Researched Content
In order to boost your SEO, you need to grab a hold of your audience’s attention by giving them relevant and informative data. No one wants to read half truths or get misinformed. Some of the readers you target, depending on your niche, already know a lot about the subject matter and are only looking to complement this information. The content always has to be amazing and mind-blowing. Presentation is also crucial. Ensure that your articles are properly punctuated and adhere to the rules of language. It does not matter how great your information is if it is not readable.
