How Any Business Can Achieve SEO Success with Backlinks
Backlinks are an essential part of search engine optimization, but it is much harder to build a backlink strategy than it is to focus on keywords on your website, writing a blog, or optimizing your website’s speed. This is one of the few times a brand or business will need to rely on outside sources, as a backlink is simply a link back to your website from a different website. Before diving into this article, take a second to think about how you might get a different website to willingly link your site.
When a search engine like Google sees multiple sites leading back to your website it considers you more of an authority on the internet. That makes sense, right? If you have multiple sources all pointing towards one destination it must provide some kind of value that others are relying on. This strategy is almost evergreen and will help tremendously in search engine optimization, but it is without question the hardest aspect of SEO.
What are Backlinks?
The proper name for them is “inbound link”, this is where one website directly sends traffic to another by creating a clickable link on a webpage. Once a person clicks on that link it will automatically redirect them to the new site or open an entirely new window on their browser to open the web page. The traffic is called “inbound” for you because you are the one receiving the attention of the person browsing the web. If you created a link on your website that sends people somewhere else, that would be an “outbound” link for you.
The two main types of backlinks are “dofollow” and “nofollow” links. The main difference in these can be subtle, but a “dofollow” link helps create a win-win scenario for both parties involved and registers points on Google’s rating. “Nofollow” links do not normally register anything for anyone on Google’s search rankings, it is a way to not associate your site with theirs.
Search engines like Google use something called “Domain Authority” to rank how reliable and valuable a website looks. Gathering multiple links back to your page is important, but getting backlinks from highly dominant websites can be far more valuable. Certain websites already have a domain authority score, and it is high enough it makes any backlink they post on the website extremely valuable. Getting links from sites with high domain authority is the end goal, not just a high volume of backlinks, but a good volume of backlinks from sites with high domain authority.
Backlink Building Strategies
- Become a guest blogger.
Find other companies tangentially related to your niche and write a piece of content for them. We here at Acclaim are in marketing, obviously, and we write blogs constantly for public relations, crisis management, video editing tips, you name it. Then you slap your name and website onto the opening of the blog, and you have built a backlink for yourself. This can be mutually beneficial as you could also write a blog for this other company, offer it to them, and post it on your own site as a piece of content linking back to their page. This is assuming they might not have the resources to dedicate to a person writing blogs or articles.
- Creating natural content.
Look at what you are doing right this very second, reading this article on backlinks. You sought out the information, you were curious, you had intent, and the odds of someone sharing this article are astronomically higher since it naturally garners attention. Doing this may not have an immediate payoff, in fact it takes time for a website to build up evergreen content that can just exist in perpetuity on their website, but once you start doing it you can let that SEO train just chug on ahead. Anyone who shares this on Facebook, or links to their own blog on SEO, or someone featuring this as a guest blog on their site automatically gets me a valuable backlink.
- Networking and partnership opportunities.
This might be the best approach for small businesses to build a lot of backlinks effectively and legitimately. Partnering up with another business to build backlinks together as a coalition is incredibly helpful. Sitting down and working together on linking to each other can be incredibly helpful. Let’s say you have a couple resources or articles your business has created for your website, and so have they, well start linking to each other and post just one sentence in a blog that reads, “Check out this awesome resource at [partnering business website]” and that will create a valuable backlink for them.
- Local backlink building.
Reaching out to journalists, top ten sites, or local papers and supplying them with an article, news announcement, or content piece is another valuable way to get your website out there into the universe. Say you have a mechanic shop, and you have a big sale weekend coming up where oil changes are only a dollar with any other work done on a vehicle ( if only, right?) then reach out to a local paper with an advertisement you created, or an article you wrote about the upcoming sale and ask them to put it on their website or in their paper. And then after an event like that ask customers give reviews on Google and you are creating an SEO and backlink automated pipeline.
The Power of Creating Actual Content
The importance of highly crafted articles and well-researched instructions cannot be overstated. The reason “Google it” became so popular is that somewhere out on the internet someone has run into a similar problem as you and they wrote how to fix said problem. This might be a blog post, a reddit thread, or even a Facebook post, but I promise the internet has scratched whatever informational itch you have.
Now, there are temporary and evergreen types of content. Temporary content is fast paced and will not interest people for very long, like a football player getting an incredible touchdown or a politician winning a race. These types of topics will be overshadowed by the next football game or the next election and will fall out of style quickly. Evergreen content is something that stays relevant in perpetuity. People will always look for the best diet or exercise to lose weight no matter how far off into the future we look. Making an article on balancing a budget or teaching people how to meditate or a lesson on public speaking will remain questions that will always have the same answer no matter the decade or generation. We here at Acclaim just had a big internal discussion about the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, a book written almost a hundred years ago, and how it teaches the reader to speak to others in an appreciative tone, how to motivate the people around you in a positive way to help yourself and help themselves. The reason it has stood the test of time is because talking to other people will always be a part of life no matter when you want to learn it.
You can do more than just create articles, it helps with keyword building and all, but making graphics or videos on topics is also extremely effective. People are more likely to share a video, almost six times more likely. Services like YouTube have an automatic caption function as well, and those captions will register on Google’s domain authority ranking. The effort it takes to make a graphic or video is higher than writing a blog post usually, so that type of content is considered more valuable and pushed out in front of more audiences. Also, embedding a video or graphic on another website with a link back to yours is an incredibly powerful backlink, especially if that website already has a high domain authority.
The hardest types of content to create for backlinks and domain authority are research tools and interactive tools. Research is tedious, and if you were to conduct surveys, compile test results, or read studies to compile a thesis, you will have spent way more time than writing a blog or even recording a video. Creating an interactive resource is even harder, it is like building a video game. Imagine trying to build a calculator that can help you adjust ingredients to a recipe to fit different party sizes. Where would you even begin? You would hire a web developer or programmer to write the code to run the program on a site. The planning of making interactive content is intimidating, but if you do it once it can be an evergreen tool that people use forever, so do not count it out.
The Future of Backlinks
At Acclaim we do not see backlinks going anywhere anytime soon. The internet has become essential to everyday life all over the world. So, unless a new medium is introduced to the world that can connect humans better than what we already have, backlinks are here to stay. As a disclaimer, some people reading this may be interested in buying backlinks, and we do not recommend this at all. Buying backlinks is easily identifiable, and Google or Bing can recognize this and just take you out of search completely. The benefits do not outweigh the risks.
The best we can all do is create high-value content, work together on building backlinks with partners in the industry, and to offer a wealth of articles, videos, and knowledge to anyone visiting our sites. That is the most effective and legitimate way to build your backlink count, and to receive high value backlinks from other sites with high domain authority.
If you ever want to speak with us at Acclaim, we would be happy to talk about common backlink building strategies and offer a free consultation.