What are backlinks?
Essentially, backlinks are viewed as votes of confidence in your website from others, helping to boost Google’s assessment of its quality. This is essential for building authority in search engines: the more domains directing traffic to one site, the more valuable it is deemed to be.
For several years, all digital marketers regarded backlinks as a crucial aspect of good search marketing, but with the various changes to Google’s algorithm (such as the Penguin and Panda updates), some professionals may have placed less importance on them than before, scaling back on them.
However, backlinks remain an indispensable component of a solid digital-marketing campaign for any business. Like most search-marketing techniques, though, there is a right way and a wrong way to integrate them into your strategy.
For maximum results, keep the following points in mind while building your backlinks.
Choose Websites with Higher Page Ranks
When building backlinks, using smaller sites with a lower page-rank than yours is a bad move. Not only is this unlikely to make any positive difference, it can actually damage your campaign in the long-term, devaluing your site. Make sure you choose domains that have more authority than yours – the idea is to piggy-back on the success of others.
Embrace the Power of the Press Release
Press releases are a great way to generate backlinks. Write these on a regular basis (provided your business actually has news to reveal; if not, consider creating some – holding a fund-raising event in the office for a local charity is a worthy topic), and submit them to sites such as PRWeb.com.
While many free PR websites offer their services, the quality differs. You should mix up your distribution between free and paid services, as there can be quite a difference in reach and success.
Avoid the Temptation to Spam
This feels like a redundant piece of advice in 2016 – but big businesses have been penalized for spam-heavy tactics in recent years.
You know spam when you see it: you visit a website, and each page carries extreme repetition of the same keywords (even worse, most of them will be long-tail). Google has long-since gotten very wise to this, and for companies of any size to be penalized is somewhat embarrassing … and can also set you back.
Write Guest Blogs for Other Sites (Not Direct Competitors)
Writing guest posts on popular blogs can help you to establish quality backlinks on sites with higher readerships. Bloggers need to keep publishing fresh content to maintain their ranking, so most will welcome an additional post contributed by another writer.
Work one link into the post, and make sure it is well-written, informative, and engaging. Provided you do a good enough job, the blogger’s audience may well be become yours, too.
At Nett Solutions, we are passionate about providing expert advice across all areas of digital marketing, and backlinks are just one technique we will use to boost your online performance. Want to know more about how our Orange County SEO agency can help your business? Give us a call!