Building Backlinks

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors. In fact, a large proportion of SEOs believe backlinks remain the most important ranking signal.

When building backlinks to a website, the old mindset used to be, “How can we trick Google?” 

Some people said, “I’ll pay a webmaster to link to my site, and I’ll get a really good reputation”. Or they said, “I’ll get another website to link to me with the keyword I want to rank for, and that means Google will think I’m relevant for that keyword”. 

These approaches break Google’s guidelines and are inherently risky.

The modern mindset is to earn backlinks through useful and valuable content rather than trickery. So, when you create high quality content based on solid keyword research that addresses your audience’s needs, it’s far more likely to attract backlinks than any low-quality content. Remember, no one is going to link to low quality or useless content, so creating high quality content from the beginning is a cornerstone of effective link building.

Leading with quality content is a good approach to take, because with backlinks, you are essentially building up a website’s reputation. Like a real-life reputation between friends, it can take weeks, months, and even years to build up – but it can be gone in an instant! So, it’s important to build backlinks in an authentic way, rather than to try to trick search engines through fake or paid backlinks.

You can earn backlinks from having a great product and by having valuable content. You can also earn them by researching the influencers in your industry, and trying to connect with them. 

When you’ve got really good content, you want to promote it within your industry. And, because you’ve connected with key influencers, you can promote it to them as well. It involves getting smarter with your outreach and smarter with the content you create, so that your industry and influencers want to read and share it.

Building links the wrong way

Google says that you shouldn’t pay a webmaster to link to your site. As a rule, you shouldn’t do this; it’s an unapproved SEO practice. 

You shouldn’t manipulate other websites to link to you with your important keywords as the anchor text in the backlinks. So, if you want to rank for “Australia Holidays” and you’ve asked five bloggers to link to you with that phrase as the anchor text, you’re breaking Google’s guidelines. 

Also, avoid outdated link building techniques. A decade ago, people built links through directory and article submissions that were done on a mass scale. While they were never considered to be high quality, they were often effective. These are outdated techniques that are now considered to be ‘spammy’. 

Best practices for building backlinks

When building backlinks to a website, you can follow these best practices:

• Build link-worthy informational content, such as guides, rich visual content, blog posts, quizzes, proprietary data-driven content, and topic clusters that attract links naturally.
• Build a social media following on appropriate channels to promote link-worthy content. 
  • Links from social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on) tend not to directly influence SEO but they can indirectly benefit it. Your content will get more exposure and re-shares, and some of those people, such as journalists, bloggers, and influencers, may pick up your content and link to it from their sites 
• Promote content through email, push notifications to subscribers, and social media.
• Outreach content to key influencers. And 
• Research competitors’ backlinks.