While each one of us wants our website to rank on the first page of Google for the specific keywords, do we ever wonder how many websites are present online? With more than 1.86 billion websites existing on the internet, it becomes increasingly important to understand how google ranks your website.
Moreover, with 75% of searchers never going back past the first page of search results, it becomes essential for your website to rank on the first page and win customers that you could lose to your competitors.
The question remains the same – How do you rank on the first page of Google? While there are more than 200 factors that the algorithm considers while determining your page ranking, creating ‘high-quality content’ and ‘link building’ remain among the topmost factors that affect your page ranking.
Today, we will be focusing on a powerful backlink strategy and how having high quality backlinks can skyrocket your organic reach within a short span of time. Let us begin!
Understanding Backlinks: Getting the Basics Right
Backlinks (also known as ‘one-way links’ or ‘incoming links’) simply refer to the links from someone else’s website to a specific page on your website. The process of obtaining or building these links is known as Link Building.
This is how a backlink looks like on any website:
(In the above example, ahrefs.com, in one of their blogs, has given a backlink to campaignmonitor.com for one of their blogs)
Note: Backlinks and Internal Links are two completely different things. An Internal link is one that points to another page on the same website; whereas a backlink is one that points directly to a page on another website.
Did you know that 91% of all pages never get any traffic from Google, mostly due to the fact they do not have backlinks? Having many quality backlinks makes the search engine believe that your content is worthy enough to be shared across the internet. Having these backlinks can help improve your SEO trust score and have a positive effect on your search visibility.
Characteristics of a high quality backlink
It goes without saying that not all backlinks carry the same value. While a high value backlink can give a big boost to your SEO, an undesirable backlink can do more harm than benefit to your SEO. Therefore, it is important to focus exclusively on earning high quality backlinks for your website.
Fortunately, high quality backlinks share some common characteristics that help them stand out from the undesirable ones. Some of these are:
1. Domain Authority
Let us assume that you have two offer letters from two different organizations and your most important factor for selecting the organization is compensation offered. Obviously, you will choose an organization that is offering you a higher package.
Similarly, one of the most important factors that search engines consider while ranking your website is the Domain Authority of the backlinks earned.
Domain Authority is basically a metric that measures how successful a website is when it comes to its ranking in search engine results.
Below Is an example of Domain Authority of MOZ.com. A domain authority of 91 means that google considers MOZ as a highly authoritative domain.
Note: – A single high quality backlink can have a more powerful impact than hundreds of undesirable links from websites having a poor domain authority. Moreover, you might see a significant rise in your organic search engine traffic immediately after earning a backlink from trusted, authoritative website.
2. The site linking back to you belongs to your niche
Gone are the days when you could trick the algorithm by linking a group of unrelated websites with each other. Getting backlinks from websites that are not even remotely close to your niche will add no value to your organic reach.
For e.g.: – If you are running a Marketing Consulting Firm and get a backlink from a website that publishes sports news, then that backlink will not have an impact on your SEO. However, if you are able to earn a backlink from a website that publishes blogs based on Marketing, then you might see a big boost in your reach in sometime.
Hence, it becomes extremely important to aim only for websites that are topically related to your brand and then maximize your efforts in earning a backlink from them.
3. The link must be ‘Dofollow Link’
While building your backlinks strategy, it is important to understand the difference between a ‘Dofollow’ and a ‘Nofollow’ Link. A Dofollow link is basically an HTML attribute that helps the search engine bot to ‘follow the link’ present at the time of crawling the website.
The default state of a link is generally of this attribute only. Therefore, we can also say that a Dofollow link is a one that does carry a Nofollow attribute with it.
A website user will be generally unable to differentiate between these two links, as they would appear exactly the same. However, a ‘Nofollow’ link can be differentiated through a small piece of code that is added along the link. This code instructs the search bot to not follow the link at the time of crawling.
A Nofollow link generally consists of a code which looks like this:
Since, a Nofollow link will not directly impact your search engine rankings, it becomes essential to focus more on earning Dofollow links for your website.
Note: In some cases, Nofollow links can be common. However, it is still recommended to have a higher proportion of Dofollow links for your website.
4. It is a unique Link
It is great that you were able to earn a high-quality backlink for an authoritative website. However, if your focus is only on getting more backlinks from the same website, then the next set of backlinks earned won’t be as powerful as the first one.
As a result, Law of Diminishing returns can be applied in the case of Backlinks, i.e., with each new backlink earned from the same website, the less will be its impact on your search engine rankings.
Therefore, it is highly recommended to earn backlinks from a pool of websites in your niche and not just focus on a single website.
Best practices for building high quality backlinks
Now that we have understood the importance of backlinks and the characteristics of high quality backlinks, it’s time to learn the best practices that must be followed for earning a plethora of high quality backlinks for your website.
Below are some key points that will go a long way in helping you build high quality backlinks and boosting your Search Engine Rankings:
1. Quality of your Content matters the most
All your efforts will be useless if your content fails to provide any valuable information to your users. Creating unique and relevant content goes a long way in boosting your SEO ranking.
Having articles, blogs, and other forms of content along with detailed infographics and engaging visuals will attract more visitors from your niche and will also lead to earning natural backlinks from other websites that find your content informative and worth sharing.
2. Collaborate with others by writing guest posts
As it turns out, guest posting is still one of the best ways to get links to your site. In fact, if you are just starting out, then guest posting will not only help you in sharing your expertise with others but will also make people in your niche aware about your existence.
Writing guest posts for quality sites in your niche will help you showcase the authority of your brand and boost your organic reach in a short span of time.
Note: Most of the websites that allow guest posting have their own set of rules that must be followed. To save time and effort, it is recommended to go through the rules properly and then reach out to the owner with your post.
3. Make your competitors your best friend!
If you are a beginner, you might have a difficult time in building your initial backlinks strategy. The best way to overcome this problem is by doing an extensive research on your competitors backlinks strategy and trying to replicate the same for yourself.
Select your competitors who are ranking above you in the search results and with the help of various tools available online, you can easily find those websites that link back to your competitors. You can then reach out to these websites yourself and try to earn backlinks for your own domain.
Moreover, if you can spot any broken link, you can immediately inform the web editor about this, and they will be more than happy to replace the broken link with your link; provided your product/service/piece of content matches with that of the broken link.
With this we come to the end of this blogpost. We hope that by now, you must have understood why backlinks are so crucial for your Search Engine Ranking & must be excited about building your own backlinks strategy to take your business forward.
We will be back with another blog on Backlinks. Till then, Keep learning! Keep experimenting!
