The Power of Building Authoritative Backlinks in Digital Marketing

Once you have set up a website for your business, the next natural step is to find ways to drive traffic to the website. Before you embark on this task, ensure that your website is good with great content that will sell your service or product. This allows you to focus on driving traffic to it. How do you drive traffic to your websites? Well, one effective way is by the use of backlinks.

What are Backlinks?

It is a link that appears on a different website which directs the viewer to your website. It may be in different forms such as an online news story, citation, directory or earned media.

Backlinks are measured according to their popularity and trustworthiness by search engines. That is to say that if you have backlinks from websites of high quality, you will be able to drive more traffic and rank higher on Google.

The search engines will reference you and take their users to your website. When you’re dealing with backlinks, there are some terms that you will most likely come across and may wonder what they are. Here are some of the terms;

• Link profile – This refers to the status of all links whether earned or built. You can look at your link profile to keep tabs of any changes, new links or removal of previous links.

Do remember that backlinks work in two ways. You can either have your link appear in other websites or display links of other websites on yours. Help others to help yourself.

• Referring Domains – These are particular websites that link back to your website.

• Anchor Text – The text that the viewer can click on in a link. This should be relevant to and descriptive of the page being linked to, as opposed to a vague form of wording. They may be in the form of an image or text.

• Link Juice – This term is used by digital marketers to mean the value of links from different websites. Thus if you have links from high quality websites, then your site has more link juice.

Backlinks are quite powerful in digital marketing. Some of the things to consider making them even more powerful are as stated below.

1. Quantity

The number of backlinks you have may determine your success rate. Consider however that the number of individual websites linking back to your site matters more than the total number of backlinks to your site.

So if you have 300 backlinks from the same site, and another has 300 different individual websites linking back to them, the other website is of more value.

To decide on the quantity of backlinks to have, look at your competitors to get a better idea. Generally though, more backlinks usually lead to better rankings. Having more backlinks also exposes you to a larger field of audience.

2. Quality

The number of backlinks goes hand in hand with the quality of these backlinks. Where exactly are the backlinks linking from? How credible is the website? Google analyzes this critically, thus it may affect your ranking.

To achieve quality, first ensure that the websites you reach out to are within the same niche as you. Having backlinks from irrelevant websites only pull you down, despite their high number.

The second thing you may do is ensure that the websites linking back to yours are legitimate and with high authority. You would rather have fewer links from high authority sites than more links that will pull your rank down.

Find websites that rank high to link back to your website as these boost your site, and you will pass the search engines legitimacy test, without penalties.

3. Anchor Texts

These tell the users more of what to expect by clicking on the backlink. The impact of anchor text links has been on debate for quite a while.

Before, it was quite a useful tool in raising your rankings on Google. Google however released an update that reduced the worth from anchor texts. This was the Penguin update.

If you do decide to go the way of the anchor text however, ensure that you have texts that are descriptive of the website they are linking to. You can also include your brand name and the main things you have to offer for the users.

4. Search Engine Manipulation

This was a thing in the past where some people tricked search engines into giving higher rankings by linking multiple fake pages to their website to make it look more popular than it was.

However, this move would be almost impossible to work for you today due to changes by Google on how they analyze links.

You do not have to manipulate the search engines to get higher rankings. You can instead use backlink builder tools to show you websites you can have link back to you, and help you see which sites are within your niche using keywords that you intend to rank for.

Take caution while using the services of such tools. Try to avoid those that offer to do everything for you as to come up with quality backlinks you will need to do the work yourself.

Acquisition of Backlinks

Put in the Work

Acquiring backlinks is not easy. It involves hard work and resources. You can put in the work by having great content.

The information on your website must be useful, so that other websites link to yours having the assurance that it will be worth the time of their audience.

Reach Out

You also need to be able to build relationships with potential linkers. A major step towards link building is approaching other sites to display your link.

To do this, you must have good relations with the sites. This would earn you organic backlinks which are better than the kind of backlinks you have to pay for.

Reaching out to other sites may be done by guest writing, comments, through social media, or the classic email sent to the ones that run the website.

Ensure Smooth Running

Of course while doing all this, ensure that your site is running well and that it is technically optimized for backlink building.

Having technical issues may lead to you losing potential linking sites. They too want their visitors to access only quality sites, and yours has to pass their quality test.

Be Patient

Building backlinks is not an automatic thing. It hardly happens overnight. Building quality backlinks take a lot of time. You may have stayed for months before it starts to work or to deliver.

The amount of time it takes is also a way to show Google your legitimacy. This should tell you that any offer of shortcuts to achieving high-quality backlinks for a price is not legitimate and is most likely a scam.

Backlinks are an extremely powerful tool in the world of online marketing. Not only are they budget friendly in that they may not cost you any cash, but they are also reliable and result-oriented.

If you have been thinking of trying it out, now you know how beneficial it is, so go ahead and start.