Backlinking is Dead

Numerous people and businesses think that backlinking is dead. However, backlinks are essential for every search engine optimisation strategy. Therefore, if you are planning on advancing your website on search engine results, you must incorporate this element into your plan. In this article, we will help you understand backlinking in relation to SEO and teach you how to build useful backlinks in the modern online setup.

The Basics of Backlinks

Backlinks can be defined as hyperlinks coming from a webpage in one site to your website. In simple terms, a backlink is established when an external site creates a link to your website. Often, these links are referred to as external links. These are important in search engine ranking because they are an indication of the reliability of your website. Basically, they serve as recommendations. If more websites are sharing your content, it means that people find it authoritative. Therefore, Google will favour it when answering presented queries.

Achieving Good Results with Fewer Backlinks

If you are starting to incorporate backlinking into your SEO strategy, you should understand that the process of link acquisition is time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, if you want to minimise the amount of time and money spent on backlinking, you must be able to get maximum value out of every backlink. If you want to accomplish this, you must cover three basic issues in your website.

Technical Performance

If your website has technical problems, your rank will remain low, regardless of the number of backlinks acquired. In general, these types of issues and errors compromise the user experience. Therefore, Google will limit your organic traffic growth because users will not be happy visiting your website. There are multiple technical errors that you should look out for. These include mobile friendliness, duplicate content and site loading speeds. In addition, you should watch out for redirect chains, error 404, incorrect use of directives and canonical errors.

Site Architecture

You should evaluate your site structure and ensure that the architecture is exceptional. The site structure refers to how your site is designed and setup or rather, how the webpages are linked together. If your site is well-organised, the robotic crawlers which index pages will be able to find your content with more ease. Create a hierarchy for your pages such that your most valuable pages are easier to find from anywhere on your site.

Content

You should have valuable content on your website if you want to get better results with fewer backlinks. The quality of your content can elevate or destroy your website. Remember, even if you get great backlinks, people will visit your website and discover the nature of your content. If there is no value in the information, your ranking will not rise and your campaign will fail. You do not have to be an exceptional content creator. However, you must never publish useless and poor quality information.

Knowing Your Risk Tolerance

When planning your backlinking strategy, you should consider your risk tolerance. You can choose to use risky tactics which are quick to bear results. However, the possibility of getting discovered and penalised are high. On the other hand, you can use safe, clean tactics which take longer to bear results. The probability of getting penalised by Google after choosing this option is almost negligible. This method focuses on getting backlinks from real websites instead of having them ‘grown’ in a link farm or similar places. With the advances in search engine technology, the low-risk approach is better. It will keep you free from penalties and give you stable long-term results.

Five Guidelines on Gaining Quality Backlinks

Here are five simple guidelines that you can follow to improve your organic traffic rank and increase your high-quality backlinks.

Ensure Relevance

Relevance is imperative for ideal backlink acquisition. If you can get links to your site which are deemed to be relevant by Google, your ranking can improve exponentially. There are some important factors that the search engine considers when judging the relevance of a backlink. First, the general topic of the linking domain should be related to yours. Second, the content of the page with the link should be relevant to your website. Third, the backlinks in the linking domain should be relevant.

Use Analysis Tools

When building your backlink strategy, you should only rely on authority sites to avoid penalties and poor ranking. Therefore, you should use analysis tools to determine whether you should rely on certain websites for your linking strategy. Since Google does not have PageRank anymore, you can use third party sites such as Majestic and Ahrefs.

Target Real Websites

If you want to gain the best results through backlinking, you should focus on gaining some from real website with good organic traffic. These links are hard to acquire but they will elevate your status fast. In addition, they are not linked to any significant risks. If you are uncertain about the quality of a website as a target, you can use SEM Rush to get analytical data.

Use Anchor Text Wisely

When back linking to your website, you will need to use hyperlinks and anchor text. However, you should note that poor use of anchor text can have adverse effects. If you choose the wrong anchor text, your ranking will not improve. On the other hand, if you are too aggressive with your anchor text choice, you might get penalised. Therefore, you should keep your anchor text should only make up 1% or less in your content. Also, consider using naked or branded links.

Keep Your Backlinks Clean

You should ensure that all your backlinks are connected to clean websites with high websites. If a website has outgoing links to suspicious content or websites, you will end up damaging your own reputation.

Understanding the Backlinks to Avoid

There are multiple types of backlinks that you must avoid when using backlinking in your SEO strategy. If you decide to use these external links, you should be aware that the potential penalty will be high. The backlinks that you should avoid include those which are:

• Irrelevant to your website and content
• From public networks
• From DoFollow blog comments
• On sidebars and footers
• Automated

These are poor quality backlinks which are associated with scammy industries. Using them will hurt your ranking and affect your reputation.

How to Earn Your Backlinks

If you want to earn, your backlinks, you must deserve them. Therefore, the first step is ensuring that the website is focussed on the users. You should not be thinking about how to cheat the system, but rather, how to help incoming visitors. If your content pleases the users, they will endorse it through backlinks. Your content should also stand as creative and unique such that people will be willing to share your content as opposed to the competitors. Additionally, you should build relationships which you can leverage for backlinks.

Finally, you should note that black hat backlinking is dead. If you want to elevate your company through SEO, you have to earn your backlinks through hard work and consistency.