So you have a website and you wish you’d appear in Google searches more…and now you want to know: how does that magic happen? The answer: Backlinks.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are Inbound Links (IBL’s) that direct audiences to your website. These links are found on other sites that lead to your site and are the building blocks to good Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your website must have good SEO so that you are easily visible to all those future customers who search for your services using the internet.
Luckily, if you feel lost in all of this, Monkey VA can handle all of your SEO and IBL needs. With the right tools and strategy, we can get your website ranking in Google.
Now, back to those mysterious backlinks (or IBL’s). The number of backlinks a website has is in a good indicator of its popularity or importance with search engines. Search engines, like Google, give more credit to websites that have a larger number of quality backlinks and consider those websites more relevant—meaning, they get more customers and more transactions.
How to Obtain Backlinks
The broken link method
To use the broken-link method, first find relevant websites in your niche that have resource pages. Once you find a link they’re sharing that’s broken, reach out in a super friendly manner, introduce yourself, and let them know it’s broken–and then suggest other resource links they could use instead as well as your own website link. To do find broken links, simply search for:
your keyword + links
your keywords + resources
For example, if you owned a food truck business you might search for: taco truck + links. This simple search will help guide the way.
The infographic method
Create an infographic (visual representation of data), that jives with your niche, your brand, and your business. Once you have a graphic created (or one created for you by a Virtual Assistant or Graphic Designer), you can distribute it.
Guest Blogging
This is one of our favorite avenues. Do some research on your niche and kindly reach out to like-minded folks and businesses. You could offer them to do a blog swap: you write a guest blog for them and they link to your website, and they write a guest blog for you and you link them on yours.
Write Testimonials
An easy method to earn quality backlinks is to write testimonials for websites you are using. Testimonials don’t take long and if you’re an actual customer of the website, they’ll likely offer you a backlink in exchange.
Get Interviewed
This is very similar to the way writing a testimonial for someone else works: when you get interviewed on someone else’s website, they’ll link to your website so readers can follow you and your business.
Make a Donation
When you make a donation to a nonprofit, they’ll include you on their website as a donor—a perfect way to give back to something you’re passionate about and reach another audience by being backlinked on their page.
Spy on the Competition
Have you caught onto a theme here? You should be researching your niche and other businesses that are similar to you. Many, many answers lie in what’s working for others. See where they’re succeeding and attempt to integrate that same methodology to your own business marketing. If you notice one business owner earning a lot of backlinks through guest blogging, start reaching out to do the same.
The Do’s and Dont’s of Backlinks
When creating inbound links, one thing you should do is make sure the link you’re sharing is relevant to your website. Sometimes people share popular links to gain traction and followers, but it has nothing to do with their website content—search engines will then find your links (and website) irrelevant, and you won’t be found at the top of a Google search.
Google has become quite adept at defending its search index from spammy practices, such as attempts to manipulate search rankings either positively or negatively.
If you have a few websites that are seemingly related, don’t link each of them onto one page. When you do this, search engines don’t like it. Google looks in particular for your website’s backlinks, to understand how your pages are connected to one other and in what ways. By trying to manipulate backlinks by having too many links with the same IP address is called Backlink Bombing.
Anchor Text is also important in creating quality backlinks to your site. Anchor Text is when a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink. Instead of putting “Click Here” on your link about your food truck business isn’t doing you any favors. Instead, the anchor text could be: “Today’s Menu.”
If the anchor text is not being utilized properly on a site that is linking to you, you should request that website to change the anchor text to something that uses relevant keywords. By doing this it will help boost your quality backlinks score.
If you’re curious about learning more, we’ve got your back! Check out our blog for more helpful articles to boost your SEO and your website visibility.
