Any dive into SEO will turn up a huge amount of information on backlinks. But what are backlinks, and how and why do they help your site?
What are backlinks?
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. It is as simple as that. For example, if you have some content on your site that contains relevant statistics and information about a particular topic, and a journalist on a new website is writing an article about the same topic, and finds your article. They may then decide to add a link to your article in their content, as they think it will bring value to their readers.
A common way that backlinks are seen is like a ‘vote’ for your website. The more backlinks, or votes, your website gets, the more that Google will see your site as authoritative. However, not all backlinks are created equal…
What is a good backlink?
If it was purely the number of backlinks that a website has that would build up the ranking, then it would be easy to just build thousands of WordPress sites so your site was at No. 1 for all search terms. Of course it is not that simple.
A good backlink is:
- From a site that itself has a high level of authority, most likely by having many backlinks themselves. For example a backlink to your site from a newspaper site like The Guardian, which has hundreds of thousands of high quality backlinks, is infinitely more power than a backlink from a small blog that has 10 links.
- Relevant. It is made even more powerful if you have a backlink from a site that is relevant to the topic or industry that your site is based on.
What Is Authority?
A big part of Google’s ranking algorithm is EEAT, which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust. The more of these a site has, in the eyes of Google, the more chance that site has of ranking highly with the search results.
Backlinks play a big role in a site’s authority, as if you can get links to your site from other sites that themselves have high authority, then some of this authority will pass to your site. Google assumes that sites that have high authority will generally only link out to other sites that are trusted and authoritative.
How to get backlinks?
Getting backlinks to your website is one of the hardest parts of SEO, and is fraught with pitfalls and dangers!
It is crucial that you understand the different methods of obtaining links, as if you do things that are against Google’s guidelines, then it can cause problems with your site in future.
Foundational Links
When you first build your site, or start your backlink building process, getting your foundational links in place is crucial. Google expect to see that these links will be the first that will be created to your site, so it has to be the first step. Foundational links include:
- Social media profiles
- Relevant industry resources such as directories
- Sites like Crunchbase and Linkedin
Whilst these links alone will not build too much authority, if they are not there, then it will look odd, as Google will expect to see these links going to any site.
At this stage, it is also worth reaching out to any friends and colleagues within the industry who may be willing to add a link to your site.
Creating Linkable Content
The first, and most important thing with any backlink building campaign, is to create great content that people want to link to, as it is useful resource for the users of their website. Some websites actually create content (sometimes known as ‘link-bait’) which is designed especially for other sites to link to. This can often be using interesting statistics, infographics, comprehensive overviews of subjects etc.
Guest Posts
These days, social media has largely ended (or at least severely curtailed) the age of the blog. However, in the past 15 years, blogs had been all over the internet, and a possibility existed to contact websites, and offer to write a dedicated article on their website in return for a link back to your website. This was always a very labour intensive task, involving sending out hundreds of emails to get a few replies, and even fewer backlinks. It is even harder these days, as many blog owners will expect payment for these links, which is against the Google guidelines (see below).
Link Insertions
Link insertions are similar to guest posts, but in this case, you contact sites to suggest to link to your relevant content in one of their articles. This method will also often see requests for payment for the insertion.
Content Promotion
Once you have your high quality content, you need to get it in front of the right people, i.e. people who will potentially link to your content from other sites. Just creating the content is rarely enough! Some methods you can use to promote your content are:
- Social media – build a following on relevant social platforms, and then promote the content to your followers. Even sites like Reddit and Linkedin can work well for this.
- Outreach – over time, you can build up a database of sites, bloggers, social media accounts and journalists that often cover the topics that your site covers. Once you complete your content, you can reach out (usually via email) to these people to see if they want to link to your content. It is labour intensive, but can be very rewarding.
Collaboration
Working together with other sites within your industry can be a great way to build backlinks. You could interview people from other companies on your site, or be interviewed by them. Podcasts are a great source of backlinks too. If you appear on a podcast as a guest, the podcast will often link back to your site. Consider starting your own podcast too, as when you have guests on, they will usually link back to the episode, and also promote the podcast.
Buying Backlinks
As mentioned, buying backlinks is against the Google guidelines. In reality, it is unlikely your site would face any penalties for buying a few backlinks here and there (unless you went over the top). However, it is generally not the best way to proceed if you want to maintain the health of your site over the long term.
Google expects to see a natural and legitimate growth of backlinks into your site, and it makes sense to work on the longer term strategies that will help you to drive your future site success.
Hard But Worth It
Building backlinks is a grind, can take a lot of time, and has many pitfalls you need to watch out for. However, it is one of the most powerful ways to boost your chances of ranking on Google for your target keywords. At Hooley we can help build backlinks to your site in a safe and powerful way, contact us to see how we can help.