What are backlinks?
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours and are critical to boost our Google ranking. Our original ranking can be boosted by the quality traffic that come in from these trusted sites and ensure good engagement rates.
Over time, the types of backlinks you get has become even more important! Initially, anybody who reads the content and comes into our site would add up as a worthy audience. But at the latter stages, we focus more on the conversions.
We may think- are backlinks still important?
Yes, because based on surveys, the more backlinks a page has, the higher search rates and position it has on the server. These backlinks need to be of high quality and safe. Because of done wrong,
1. Bad backlinks can lead to a penalty from Google
2. It is not easy to acquire good backlinks
Anyone can paste some keywords on to a page to boost ranking, but that does not help us convince trusted sites to have our backlinks, promoting to the right people with the right value of proposition.
A good backlink will have these 5 characteristics for awesome performance :
1. Relevance
You should prioritise link opportunities that are closely related to your website and what services or products you offer. But there are two problems- one is, your competitors will not be willing to backlink to you and the pool of opportunities will be tapped out very quickly. Getting backlinks from good authority sites like New York Times and Forbes is more significant though they may not be very relevant
2. Traffic
If a site has organic search traffic, then Google somewhat trusts it, and vice versa. Build your backlinks on websites with such organic traffic.
3. Authority
Always look out for websites with good domain authority and bet on their authority score.
4. Link quality
It is easy to manipulate third party metrics! So it’s important to analyse the actual link profile of the opportunity. Always check the backlink performance and ranking
5. Editorial standards
Anyone can get a backlink on Facebook, so it holds less value, but not many get get a backlink in the New York Times – so it’s considered more valuable.
Some of the easy approached of link building are:
1. Creating linkable assets
Create content that people actually want to link to. Create content that is valuable to people and they naturally approach you to backlink into their relevant domains! Your content is your asset!
2. Find ideas that have proven linkability
Look into websites and articles of competitors with whom you don’t compete with. The top pages of their backlinks analytics show what are the topics that people like to link to!
3. Using link building tools
This is probably the easiest method, but do take time and prioritise the prospects before delving in.
4. Relationship accelerator technique
It helps score links with less effort. You can host expert roundups, host interviews or ask for content contribution from experts.
5. The longer content attracts more backlinks
Keep the content long with quality takeaway, so that a few backlinks can be sprayed here and there. Too short a content causes distraction and guests tend to pull away.
