Hot Tips to Improve SEO with Backlinks

What exactly are backlinks? You may ask. Well, backlinks are those links that direct one from one webpage to another.

When you’re on a specific website and you click on links to take you to another web page, these links you click are the backlinks.

They are used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as the search engines can find out the relations between the links as well as rank pages through them.

Links have for a long time been used to determine the relevance, importance, and legitimacy of a webpage. Web pages and sites can actually be assessed by algorithms in search engines using the link data in them.

The engines analyze the pages’ popularity, authority, spam and trust through their algorithms.

This is based on the fact that sites only link to similar sites in terms of trustworthiness and authority.

Thus, a spam would most likely link to another spam, while trustworthy sites tend to link to other such sites and not to spam.

Using such knowledge enables you to determine the legitimate documents and sites on any given subject.

Elements of Links

What makes some links more valuable than others? Search engines usually assess several elements of a link to determine its value. These include:

Trust

Trustworthiness of a page is an important factor to consider in valuing links. You know those annoying spam pages you land on sometimes when you’re browsing through pages?

People tend to try and avoid those at all costs. Search engines remove such irrelevant content by measuring trust of a page.

The trust of a page is measured by the links there. What you want to do here is to earn links from highly trusted domains.

These include government websites, institutions like schools, universities and hospital sites.

They increase your score in trustworthiness, ranking you higher than if you didn’t have them.

Global Popularity

Here, a site that is known of globally would have links that have more weight than one that has no global recognition.

Search engines measure importance through the links on your page, thus you would require partnering with such sites with international recognition to be viewed as a trusted site.

An example would be Wikipedia as sites from different locations link to it, making it one of the very trusted sites.

Local Popularity

Imagine a site that sells beauty products and then has links from sites about motor vehicle spare parts.

Compare that to a similar site whose links are from the field of cosmetics. The one bound to have higher scores is the one with links in the same field or community.

Have links in your site that are within your field for better success. This concept began with a search engine known as Teoma.

Link Neighborhood

The saying goes, show me your friends, and I will show you your character. Similarly, depending on the sites your page associates with, search engines are able to determine how valuable your site is.

This is based on the notion that spam usually links to more spam. Select the sites you link to with this in mind, so that you are not discredited for linking to spam sites.

Freshness

Freshness is literally just how fresh the signal of a link is. This is what people refer to as FreshRank, as search engines estimate how popular a site is depending on freshness of the signal.

Keep revising your links over time, adding more links since older links may go stale.

Anchor Text

Search engines use the anchor text signals to rank the links. Thus many links all directing to a page with the right keywords would have higher ranking.

The phrase or text that is being targeted is what adds value to the link.

Social Sharing

Anyone in the internet world knows how far the reach of social media has gone; the vastness of it, how it is used globally today to connect people.

A lot of content whether in written, image or video form is shared on sites from Google+, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, making social media a force to reckon with even for these backlinks. Thus links that are socially shared also play a part for search engine ranking.

How to Build a Link

Building backlinks is a task in itself for an SEO. It usually depends on your website and on the ones building the links.

Links are built by acquiring more links, and for one to do this, they need to be creative and have a set budget. There are three types of link acquisition namely:

Editorial links. These are links that are given by sites that want to link to your page and require only that you have relevant and quality content as well as the ability to share the information, such as in the form of a good following if it is a blog.

Manual Link Acquisition (Outreach): Here, the SEO is required to contact the sites they would like to link to and selling to them why they should create the link, what benefits they will receive from it. It is manual as it requires one actually finds the links themselves.

Self-created (Non-editorial): Here websites offer visitors the ability to create the links themselves such as by blog comments or guest book signing.

Most links of this type have lost value for search engines over time. They are often looked at as spam.

You need to be very cautious in deciding which option works for you. Do try to have a link profile that is varied to have the best results for the search engines.

Determining Value of Pages

To determine how valuable a link is, there are several metrics that you can look at.

• Relevant Search Terms. You can search for the keywords targeted by that page, so as to find pages that rank high for those specific keywords.

• MozRank. This shows popularity of a webpage. To score highly on MozRank, you need to source for links from popular pages such as CNN.

• Domain Authority. This is how relevant a domain is compared to queries in Google.

• Competitors. Look at the backlinks for your competitors, as this gives you ideas which you can then use for your pages.

• Number of Backlinks on a page. If a page has many links to it, its value as a link for your page decreases. Thus aim for pages with fewer links.

• Traffic. Amount of traffic directed by a page is important. Find links that get targeted traffic as they are more valuable to you in the long run. This may be determined from site analytics.

Finally, here are a few important steps to gain links.

1. Create a fun, informative blog for your company.

2. Have creative and quality content for viewers to create the need to share. You may use humor to achieve this.

3. Get your loyal customers to link to you, by providing loyalty badges for them to put on webpages.

4. Strive to get the attention of bloggers and news sites, as this creates awareness of your products or services and would make you a viable candidate for backlinks.