Getting backlinks – links from other websites to your business’s website – is the most effective way to improve your rankings. Not all backlinks are equal though. Some backlinks won’t improve your rankings at all, and some might even have a negative effect.
Therefore, your focus should be on acquiring high quality backlinks. Since the late 1990s search engines have treated links as votes for popularity and importance in the ongoing democratic opinion poll of the web.
The engines themselves have refined the use of link data to a fine art, and use complex algorithms to perform nuanced evaluations of sites and pages based on this information.
Linking building is certainly one of the most important factors for improving search engine page results. Perhaps it’s the most important factor. As a result, SEO pros, webmasters and marketers constant seek methods to create backlinks that improve search results and increase website traffic.
Backlinks are a major part of any SEO operation. When you are able to get people to link back to you, the search engines understand that to mean that you know what you’re doing. If you work consistently at a good backlink plan, your efforts are going to pay off after a while.
• Provide something useful. Read blog forums to find what issues and problems your audience faces and create content that answers their questions and resolves their problems.
• Focus on creating evergreen content that maintains its value over time.
• Engage in content marketing. Reach out to others and convince them to link to your content. A “build it and they will come” philosophy is doomed to fail. Link building requires more than simply creating content and passively hoping others will link to it.
• Identify top influencers and high-ranking websites in your niche. Find a way to connect with them.
• Conduct a competitive analysis to find websites that link to your competitors. Open a relationship with them.
• Pursue public relations strategies that establish relationships with influencers, and obtain news coverage and publicity. Those natural links won’t prompt any Google penalties and will boost search rankings.
• Arrange to be included in expert interviews. The tactic will develop your standing as an authority, create networking opportunities, and promote your name since other interview participates will cite the interview on their social media networks.
• Publish round-up posts. Ask outside experts to contribute their input for a post.
They’re likely to link to the post and promote it on their social networks. Plus, they’ll provide a fresh perspective to your blog. Some experts say they pursue linking building to increase website traffic but not to intentionally increase their Google rankings, and some expressed dislike for the expression “link building,” saying they prefer the term “link earning.” Blogging Cage also asked SEO pros for their favorite link-building tools.
Although several mentioned tools, like BuzzSome or BuzzStream, many said they don’t use link-building tools, other than backlink checkers. Tools that build links quickly and automatically can prompt Google penalties. • Reclaim links to 404 pages. Find broken links with Google Webmaster tools and redirect them to relevant pages or rebuild lost pages.
• Monitor your backlinks. If they disappear, ask the site’s webmaster to restore them.
• Find websites that link to your social profiles. Request their webmasters to also link to your website.
• Find websites in your niche that are no longer maintained. If necessary, recreate and update their popular content. Ask websites linking to them to link to you instead.
• Find websites that mention your brand without linking to you. Then ask them to link to your site. Building links to your website is not bad, as long as you are concentrating on getting high-quality links from authoritative domains. There’s nothing wrong with building backlinks through the broken link building method, for example.
Just pay close attention to doing this the right way. Don’t waste your time and money on sloppy methods. Bad backlinks, or low quality backlinks, is a topic that is often mentioned in the intake form of our reviews. Websites that have made the mistake of hiring some shady SEO company to buy bad backlinks for their website and have lost almost all their rankings often turn to us for a proper analysis of the drop.
Although buying bad links might give you short-term wins, it will backfire in the end; when Google finds out. Unnatural links indicate that your website might not have the quality or content to be interesting enough to get proper back links on its own. At the end of this article, we’ll mention a way to get great back links without buying any. If a website has a ton of articles that lack all coherence, chances are the website is set up solely for the purpose of linking other websites.
If the website is a WordPress site, most of the times a default WordPress themes like TwentyEleven is used. These websites are usually not linked from other websites, or are part of an odd link network designed just to link these lousy websites. Bots populating your website’s comment forms telling you ‘great article, love the info, hope you can elaborate more about the topic soon’.
Personalized comments even, including author name. Spam bots get more intelligent by the week, unfortunately. We have reviewed a site that replying to all of these comments, thanking them for the kind words.
Don’t get fooled. Comment spam links are bad for your backlink profile. It’s logical that a high quality backlink would come from a high quality website, and that a high quality site would also be a very trustworthy site. To determine if a website is trustworthy, search engines use a set of trusted seed sites (for example, Wikipedia, BBC, The Huffington Post, etc.), which they know are high quality and which are difficult to get links from. The fewer the number of links away a site is from one of the seed sites, the higher its TrustRank is, and the higher the quality a link from that site is.
These results might not always appear in the top ten, but are undoubtedly promoted due to this social influence. The potential power of this shift towards social for search marketers is huge. Someone with a large social circle, who shares a lot of material, is more likely to see that material (and her face) promoted in search results.
For publishers, its beneficial to have your content shared by these highly influential folks with large social followings. For Google searches, this is especially true of content shared on Google+. If a backlink to your business’s website is included on a page that links to high quality sites, especially ones in the same niche as your site, then it indicates to search engines that your site should be put in the same bracket as those high quality sites.
If the other links on the page are to low quality sites, then your site won’t necessarily be classed as low quality also, but rather search engines may opt not to include those links as a factor, either positively or negatively, in their ranking calculations.
Therefore, your focus should be on acquiring high quality backlinks. Since the late 1990s search engines have treated links as votes for popularity and importance in the ongoing democratic opinion poll of the web.
The engines themselves have refined the use of link data to a fine art, and use complex algorithms to perform nuanced evaluations of sites and pages based on this information.
Linking building is certainly one of the most important factors for improving search engine page results. Perhaps it’s the most important factor. As a result, SEO pros, webmasters and marketers constant seek methods to create backlinks that improve search results and increase website traffic.
Backlinks are a major part of any SEO operation. When you are able to get people to link back to you, the search engines understand that to mean that you know what you’re doing. If you work consistently at a good backlink plan, your efforts are going to pay off after a while.
SEO Experts Tips for Backlinks:
• Create “killer content” that provides a compelling reason for others to link to your site. Work on building those natural backlinks over time.• Provide something useful. Read blog forums to find what issues and problems your audience faces and create content that answers their questions and resolves their problems.
• Focus on creating evergreen content that maintains its value over time.
• Engage in content marketing. Reach out to others and convince them to link to your content. A “build it and they will come” philosophy is doomed to fail. Link building requires more than simply creating content and passively hoping others will link to it.
• Identify top influencers and high-ranking websites in your niche. Find a way to connect with them.
• Conduct a competitive analysis to find websites that link to your competitors. Open a relationship with them.
• Pursue public relations strategies that establish relationships with influencers, and obtain news coverage and publicity. Those natural links won’t prompt any Google penalties and will boost search rankings.
• Arrange to be included in expert interviews. The tactic will develop your standing as an authority, create networking opportunities, and promote your name since other interview participates will cite the interview on their social media networks.
• Publish round-up posts. Ask outside experts to contribute their input for a post.
They’re likely to link to the post and promote it on their social networks. Plus, they’ll provide a fresh perspective to your blog. Some experts say they pursue linking building to increase website traffic but not to intentionally increase their Google rankings, and some expressed dislike for the expression “link building,” saying they prefer the term “link earning.” Blogging Cage also asked SEO pros for their favorite link-building tools.
Although several mentioned tools, like BuzzSome or BuzzStream, many said they don’t use link-building tools, other than backlink checkers. Tools that build links quickly and automatically can prompt Google penalties. • Reclaim links to 404 pages. Find broken links with Google Webmaster tools and redirect them to relevant pages or rebuild lost pages.
• Monitor your backlinks. If they disappear, ask the site’s webmaster to restore them.
• Find websites that link to your social profiles. Request their webmasters to also link to your website.
• Find websites in your niche that are no longer maintained. If necessary, recreate and update their popular content. Ask websites linking to them to link to you instead.
• Find websites that mention your brand without linking to you. Then ask them to link to your site. Building links to your website is not bad, as long as you are concentrating on getting high-quality links from authoritative domains. There’s nothing wrong with building backlinks through the broken link building method, for example.
Just pay close attention to doing this the right way. Don’t waste your time and money on sloppy methods. Bad backlinks, or low quality backlinks, is a topic that is often mentioned in the intake form of our reviews. Websites that have made the mistake of hiring some shady SEO company to buy bad backlinks for their website and have lost almost all their rankings often turn to us for a proper analysis of the drop.
Although buying bad links might give you short-term wins, it will backfire in the end; when Google finds out. Unnatural links indicate that your website might not have the quality or content to be interesting enough to get proper back links on its own. At the end of this article, we’ll mention a way to get great back links without buying any. If a website has a ton of articles that lack all coherence, chances are the website is set up solely for the purpose of linking other websites.
If the website is a WordPress site, most of the times a default WordPress themes like TwentyEleven is used. These websites are usually not linked from other websites, or are part of an odd link network designed just to link these lousy websites. Bots populating your website’s comment forms telling you ‘great article, love the info, hope you can elaborate more about the topic soon’.
Personalized comments even, including author name. Spam bots get more intelligent by the week, unfortunately. We have reviewed a site that replying to all of these comments, thanking them for the kind words.
Don’t get fooled. Comment spam links are bad for your backlink profile. It’s logical that a high quality backlink would come from a high quality website, and that a high quality site would also be a very trustworthy site. To determine if a website is trustworthy, search engines use a set of trusted seed sites (for example, Wikipedia, BBC, The Huffington Post, etc.), which they know are high quality and which are difficult to get links from. The fewer the number of links away a site is from one of the seed sites, the higher its TrustRank is, and the higher the quality a link from that site is.
The Power of Social Sharing
How Google+, Twitter, and Facebook Change the Game
The years 2011-2012 saw a huge rise in social sharing and its effects on search. Google, in particular, began to incorporate a huge number of social signals into its search results. This involves serving personalized results to logged-in users that include content shared by the searcher's social circle (Facebook, Twitter and others).These results might not always appear in the top ten, but are undoubtedly promoted due to this social influence. The potential power of this shift towards social for search marketers is huge. Someone with a large social circle, who shares a lot of material, is more likely to see that material (and her face) promoted in search results.
For publishers, its beneficial to have your content shared by these highly influential folks with large social followings. For Google searches, this is especially true of content shared on Google+. If a backlink to your business’s website is included on a page that links to high quality sites, especially ones in the same niche as your site, then it indicates to search engines that your site should be put in the same bracket as those high quality sites.
If the other links on the page are to low quality sites, then your site won’t necessarily be classed as low quality also, but rather search engines may opt not to include those links as a factor, either positively or negatively, in their ranking calculations.