If you currently have or are looking into a website for your business, you have probably already heard about the importance of backlinks for your website.
A backlink is essentially a link that is placed on another website so that it directs visitors to your site. You can choose to put this link in the text, an image, or another option, but as long as the link in question is placed on a different website, it counts as a backlink.
There are two reasons why backlinks are very important for any website; to begin with, one of the things that backlinks accomplish is to generate traffic to a website. But even more importantly, backlinks are one of the biggest factors when it comes to ranking as high as possible in a Google search.
Having as many backlinks as possible makes your website more likely to rank higher; although it must be said that quantity alone is not enough, the links in question should be high-quality links to pack a punch.
As just about any SEO expert will tell you, high-quality is critical to make backlink strategy that works for you.
Getting high-quality backlinks for your website
Knowing that backlinks are not just a numbers game is crucial when it comes to making your website rank as high as it possibly can. Anyone can buy a ton of low-quality backlinks from one of the various possible sources but those low-quality links will produce low-quality results, and will probably even get you penalized by Google.
What you want is as many high-quality backlinks, but getting high-quality links takes time and effort. Google sees a high-quality ink as a vote of confidence from the other website; that site is essentially saying that it trusts yours and is willing to recommend it, which is amazing and leads to amazing results, namely a higher ranking and more traffic.
There are about 200 different kinds of factors that Google takes into account when it ranks websites, and backlinks are said to be among the top eight of those factors. One of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks is to reclaim mentions that happen to be unlinked.
Basically, if your brand, product, or service is being mentioned in blogs or other online sources without including a link back to your website, you can write them and ask them to include the link.
Publishes will most often comply with this request because it benefits them too by improving their user’s experience.
You might think that going around the web to find out who is mentioning your brand, product, or service without including a link will simply take too much time to make it worthwhile, but you can use Google Alerts as well as other tools to accomplish this efficiently.
Other things that you need for a good backlink strategy
At this point, you certainly understand that quality beats quantity when it comes to backlinks and that is great; but there are other things that you can do to make sure that your backlink strategy is indeed successful.
1. Quality content
It should go without saying that having quality content has to be a top priority for any website. Unfortunately, a lot of people simply put more energy into driving traffic to their website than in making sure that their content is worthwhile and engaging.
Having high-quality content will not just make provide your visitors with a better experience but will also help to earn you high-quality links as time goes by.
2. Guest blogging
Guest blogging might take quite a bit of time, but it is definitely rewarding in terms of building a relationship with websites that are more established than yours and getting backlinks that are going to be as effective as you need them to be.
3. Be selective
Some people would argue that you should take any and all backlinks that you possibly can since the bigger the numbers the better, and if those backlinks are of high-quality why not?
But you should be selective because getting traffic from websites that attract the types of clients/customers that you are looking to attract is the most ideal situation.
Obviously, this does not mean that you should turn down highly-established websites if you can get a backlink from them, but being selective can go a long way both with the people who are using those links and with Google’s algorithm.
