The third part of this series will cover off page SEO work of which building ‘backlinks’ is the key component. If you’ve just started reading this series then you might want to check out part 1 and part 2 first. Before we get into detail about backlinks and how to build them, backlinks are, and will be for some time to come, the most important part of any SEO work. Put it this way; you could have a website which ignores almost all of the good practices that we talked about in the last post, however if it has good quality backlinks it will outperform a site which has had the best on page SEO work done to it yet has no backlinks.
1. What is a backlink?
Backlinks are hyperlinks that connect one website to another. Backlinks are important because search engines use them to gauge how popular your website is and therefore how well you rank.
Let me explain, a backlink is like a vote from one website to another saying ‘I know this website, I trust this website for this term’. Then when a user types a search term into a search engine (such as Google), Google scans all websites that it know’s contains that keyword or keyphrase (if your not sure what a keyword or keyphrase is go and read part 2 of the guide) and add’s up all the votes. The site that comes top will usually have more relevant and trusted links to it than the site which is 10th.
To put it simply, more links to your site = higher search engine rankings.
2. Backlinks = High Ranking?
Well not quite. You see, search engines also take into consideration the quality of the link. For instance, if I have a website which has a 100 high quality links from authority sites, it will most likely rank higher than another website with the same keyword or phrase which has 1000 links from less reputable sources.
So how do you tell which are websites that would give high quality links and which are websites that have low quality links? Well Google came up with something called Pagerank which gives a website a ranking from 1-10 depending on the strength and therefore ‘trustworthiness’ of the site. Now I’m not going to go into too much detail about Pagerank here as it’s an article in itself, but suffice it to say that the higher the pagerank, the higher the quality of inbound link. In case you were wondering, yes there are websites with a pagerank of 10, last time I checked there was just 14 of them. You may recognise some of the names as well; Google, Facebook, Adobe Flash player, CNN and the White House were some of the select few who made the list.
3. Link Diversity
As well as the quality of the inbound links to a site, search engines also take into consideration the diversity of links. Diversity occurs in two main ways – different IP addresses and different types of content. Search engines pay attention to where your link comes from, so if you have a lot of links from the same website, all those links will most likely carry the same IP. The weight of those links is therefore reduced as search engines know it is easier to get a lot of links from a single site than it is to get a lot of links from many sites. To use an example, if all the inbound links I had pointing to my site came from only a few IP addresses (websites) then my website would rank lower than a site which had exactly the same number and quality of links but it’s links were from many different websites (IP addresses). Similarly, if all the inbound links are from one type of source, i.e. all from blog comments or all from articles, search engines will likely penalise that site over a site which had backlinks from a mixture of sources like comments, articles, videos, social media etc.
4. How To Get Great Links
By now your probably thinking that this is all well and good but where am I actually supposed to get these high quality diverse links from?! In practice you want to get links from as many different sources as possible, thereby making sure that you have a high level of diversity and that your linking looks ‘natural’.
Create Great Content
The first and the best way to get links is to build content that people want to link to! If you create informative and interesting content on your site, people will naturally link to it and share it so make sure that your content is easy to read and understand to encourage people to spread your message.
Submit Your Site To Directories
An easy way to get links to your website is by submitting your site to directories such as DMOZ and other directories which allow free submissions. Although directory submissions is a pretty old school way of getting links it still works, just make sure the directories you submit to are relevant.
Local And Business Links
If your based in the UK, you can start by getting a link from your local chamber of commerce. Make sure you also contact manufacturers or retailers that you currently have a business relationship and see if they are willing to link to your site. Developing relationships with other non-competing business’s in the same field can also help you gain links, and also develop business partnerships useful both online and off.
Comment On Other Blogs
One of the easiest ways to get links is to comment on other people’s blogs. Just make sure that your comment is relevant and on topic and try to add something of value to the conversation. The added bonus from blog comments is that often the blogmaster track your comment back to your blog and they in turn may become more involved in your posts.
Write Articles For Other Blogs
If your writing a blog for your own company, or have a strong knowledge of a particular field, then finding relevant blogs and offering to write a guest post can be a great way of gaining a link back to your site and also raising your profile within that field. Industry leading blogs in any field often receive a substantial amount of visitors and being associated with that blog can provide a huge boost to your visability. It normally helps to have some example articles to hand as blogmasters will often want some evidence of the quality of your writing, so consider writing a few good quality blog posts and publishing them on your own site first.
Write Articles And Publish Them Online
Although the value of article directories has been downgraded over the last six months (mainly due to the google panda update) publishing articles on well known and popular article directories will earn you a link back to your site. If you write your articles in the right style then these article’s can also help to create a steady stream of traffic to your site.
Hold A Contest
Holding a contest is a great way to create a lot of interest in your site whilst at the same time generating a ton of links! It’s advisable with this tactic to have already established a solid base of visitors to your site as you need people to spread the message, but a few well placed tweets and encouragement to your blog subscribers should definitely help get the ball rolling!
Outsource Link Building
Of course you could always hire a web consultancy to help you with your linkbuilding! Hiring an experienced SEO team can help to skyrocket your rankings and is definitely preferable for people who want a relatively hands-off approach to obtaining a high web ranking.
So that concludes part three of the SEO guide and indeed the whole series! Hopefully you’ve found it useful, especially if your just getting to grips with the world of search engines and rankings. There’s certainly a lot to take in but start by making tweaks to your own site and then go from there. If you found this article or the series useful please give us some link love by tweeting or sharing it with your friends!