Out of the 200+ factors that go into your website’s ranking, backlinks are surely one of the most important. The links that point from other websites back to your website help Google and other search engines establish how authoritative your site is, and thus help decide where you should rank.
Building backlinks will certainly help your website rank better, but the question is, how do you make your link building as efficient as possible? It’s important to remember that, in many cases, quality is more important than quantity. If anything, building lots of low-quality links might hinder your SEO efforts more than it helps them.
With this in mind, here are 3 tips to make your backlinking more effective.
1. Get Links from High Domain Authority Sites
If you were sitting on an airplane and you wanted to know what time you were going to land, you’ve got a number of people you can ask. You’ve got the passenger sitting next to you, the airhostess – and let’s imagine you can ask the pilot. Each of those people carry different levels of authority. If each of them tells you something different, then which person are you going to trust?
Search engines work in the same way. They value the links from the more authoritative sites and the way they judge this is through domain authority (DA). Just as you would trust the pilot to know when you were going to land more than the passenger next to you, Google trusts the websites it sees as high authority.
The more of these high DA links you can get, the more Google will see your site as high authority and therefore will be more likely to include your pages in its results, which means more site traffic for you.
2. Create Relevant Links
Authority is relative; therefore, your links need to be relative. If a website is about “animal migrations” and it has a DA of 60, this likely means it’s a very good source on animal migration. However, it doesn’t mean it’s relevant to your origami website.
Google’s job is to know exactly what websites are about, so it understands when a link is relevant. If your links are coming from websites in a similar field, then those links are going to carry much more weight. Combine high domain authority and relevancy and you’ve got yourself a very strong link.
Finding the right websites to get links from can be a difficult part of SEO, so it’s often beneficial to seek the help of an SEO agency like Assertive Media.
3. Keep Things Natural
The idea behind backlinking is experts linking to other experts in a natural way. In reality, the majority of backlinking doesn’t happen naturally and you’ve got to build the links yourself, but Google still wants to see a “natural” link profile.
That means the links you build need to seem somewhat natural. If you try and shoehorn a link into a piece of content that’s not relevant to what you do, then it’s not going to come across naturally.
When you’re building a link, ask yourself “does it make sense for this website and this piece of content to link back to me?” If the answer is no, then perhaps it’s not the best link to be building. Keep track of your anchor text ratios and build links that make sense, and you’ll find your links are more powerful.