When trying to improve your website’s traffic, there are many things you can do to move yourself up in rankings. But one important aspect of ranking that may not be entirely in your control is backlinking.
Backlinking can make a significant difference in your website’s performance, but you may not know what it is or why you want backlinks. At Performance Driven Marketing, we want you to understand what a backlink is and why it is so important for your business to successfully improve SEO and website traffic.
What Is Backlinking?
SEO backlinking is a link from one website that leads back to your website. Because this takes place off of your website, it is referred to as off-page SEO. Much like when writing a paper in college, backlinking acts as a citation from someone else’s website to your own, telling search engine’s that your content is reliable enough to use as a source. Backlinks are a great way for a website to gain authority. They tell search engines your brand is reputable and allows your page to show up closer to the top of search results.
Why Is Backlinking Important?
Backlinking from one website to yours acts as a vote of confidence and has a substantial impact on your SEO. It tells search engines and web users that your website is creating reliable, trustworthy content. As more brands link their content back to yours, search engines understand that this content is worth viewing and linking to.
While the number of links to your page increases, your content may begin to appear closer to the top of search engine results pages (SERP). You should try to receive these backlinks to improve your site’s ranking and visibility. You may find that as the number of backlinks pointing to your website increases, the more traffic and business you will have.
What Makes A Good Backlink?
While backlinking to your website is important, all backlinks are not created equal. There are several qualities that make a good backlink. The qualities of these high-quality backlinks include the following:
- It’s Relevant: The referring page is relevant to the link destination. If your links are coming from unrelated web pages, the users from that site may not find the information on your site relevant or helpful and will quickly click away.
- Natural Linking: The anchor text is specific. If the anchor text says “click here,” the audience may not know what website they are heading to and find the link unappealing. By ingraining the anchor text naturally and using specific language, users understand the purpose and are more interested in clicking.
- Reputable Source: The link should come from a reputable source. When reputable sources link back to you, it establishes your credibility as a reliable source and may encourage others to do the same.
While some of these things are entirely out of your control, there is something you can do to improve the odds of receiving quality backlinks. You should ensure that every piece of content on your website is well-researched and factual. By providing quality content, you tell others that your website is a reliable source, making other reliable sources more likely to use your website as a reference.
How Do I Backlink Properly?
While it is important to create reliable content on your website to receive backlinks, it is also important that you are backlinking your content as well. If you are creating original content, you likely spent a great deal of time researching to ensure it was the highest quality possible. During the research process, you likely came across several reputable sources that helped you along. It is important to cite these sources throughout your text to establish credibility and ensure your work isn’t seen as a direct, uncredited rip-off.
Many of the tips for backlinking properly are similar to the section above. You want to ensure that, when you add backlinks to your content, it is naturally engrained in the text and is relevant. These links are useless and overlooked by your website visitors otherwise.
How Do I Get More Backlinks?
There are several different ways to increase the number of backlinks to your website, though it is important to understand that each of these is not created equal. The ways to increase backlinks to your website include the following:
- Pay for them: The easiest and fastest way for you to increase the number of backlinks to your website is by paying for them. However, we don’t recommend this method for one very important reason. Paying for backlinks without a “sponsored” tag goes against Google Search Essentials and can cause you to drop in rankings. We don’t believe this is a worthwhile investment, and it is best to try other methods.
- Comment on relevant online content: While you certainly don’t want to comment on content created by your direct competitors, you can comment on relevant content online. When commenting, you should add a link to your website in the signature. While this isn’t a fast way to gain backlinks, it is certainly a way to get people in the same business sphere as you to see your content, and you may become a reliable source for their content as well.
- Earn them: Earning backlinks certainly isn’t as easy as it sounds, but it is a great way to gain organic backlinks that will ultimately benefit your business. Whether you are writing blogs ranking the best products on the market and featuring other businesses or promoting your content on social media for others to see, creating reliable, well-researched content is the best way to gain more backlinks.
Create SEO Web Content With Performance Driven Marketing
Creating SEO-rich web content is crucial for your website to show up to your desired target audience and ultimately increase the number of backlinks for your business. Without backlinking, search engines cannot recommend your brand to its users. Our team at Performance Driven Marketing is determined to create the highest quality content for your website to increase traffic and reputation.
In addition to our SEO services, we provide business owners across the United States with website development, graphic design, and marketing management. If you are ready to improve your website’s SEO performance, reach out today to request a free consultation.
