Backlinks are hyperlinks on external websites that direct to your own website. Having a high-quality backlinks strategy is an important component of SEO if you want to have your website rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Building Your Backlinks
Building your backlinks is often a tedious job and when building a website, many businesses focus on quantity at the expense of quality. That is a mistake to avoid. The websites linking to yours play key roles in your domain authority and should be strategically selected to generate great results. In this article, I walk you through six tips on building an effective backlinks strategy.
1. Be Strategic About Your Guest Blogging
It’s no secret that guest blogging is a great strategy for link building when it comes to improving your offsite SEO. Heard that guest blogging is dead? This is true when it comes to blindly publishing articles on irrelevant or low-quality websites. In fact, if you aren’t careful, Google could penalize you for bad links.
For a long time, businesses blindly published guest posts on just about any website. You don’t want to do this. Not only is it ineffective, but it also reflects poorly on your business.
When you select websites to publish on, take a look at the website and ask yourself, “Is this the type of website that my target audience is going to browse?” and “Is this the quality of website I want my business associated with?” If the answer is no, then don’t bother reaching out.
Also use tools like Ahrefs to check the domain rating. This rating is on a scale of 0-100, the higher the number, the better the domain rating is. Another metric to consider is the organic traffic. If the website has low organic traffic, your article is less likely to be viewed. With this metric, the higher the organic traffic the more likely your audience reads your article.
2. Keep a Tracking Template
When you start researching websites that accept guest posts, you will notice that each website owner has their own guidelines and rules. Some allow 1 authority link while others allow multiple. For SEO purposes you’ll want to get a ‘do-follow’ link from the guest post instead of a ‘no-follow’ link. Do-follow links strengthen your domain authority by telling search engines to link back to your website, while no-follow links do not improve your search engine ranking at all.
In order to save time with the back and forth with the editors and website owners, a well-laid out tracking sheet will do you some good. Your tracking sheet should include things like website name, domain rating, contact e-mail, article guidelines, follow-up dates, and more. Click here to download a simple and convenient template.
3. Set Up Google Alerts
Google Alerts allows you to set up e-mail notifications for keywords that are found in articles, websites, research, or blogs. With this tool, you can set up a Google Alert to notify you any time your business or services are mentioned. This way, if your business is mentioned in an article that is written by someone else, you can simply reach out to them and ask them to link to your website.
4. Monitor Your Competition
If you are looking for backlinking ideas, use tools like Ahrefs to look at what your competitors are doing. By using Site Explorer and reviewing the backlink profile, you will be able to access a list of all of the websites that are linking to your competitors, what type of content it is, what their domain rating is, and more relevant information to guide your own strategies. This is a great way to identify opportunities for your own business and an easy way to find websites that accept guest posts.
5. Take an Active Role in Your Community
This strategy is a great way to build your reputation within the community and increase brand mentions. By either hosting events related to your industry or sponsoring a non-profit organization, businesses are more likely to be mentioned or thanked on partnering websites or have their event promoted on news sources or community sites.
6. Work With Leading Professionals
Applying these key learnings can be a time-consuming and challenging task. Especially when you are first getting started. Instead, you can look into working with leading professionals in content creation and digital marketing such as SEO professionals and Copywriters who can elevate your digital content and implement your backlinking strategy.
