- in Tips by Bobby Owsinski
Why Backlinks Add Value To Your Website
There are a lot of factors that Google looks at when determining your website search ranking, and one of the biggest is still backlinks. Backlinks are links to other websites from your page, and links on other pages referring to your site. While many have downplayed the significance of links, they’re still useful for SEO, so it’s best to understand what works and what doesn’t.
OutBound Links
Google likes it when you have links to expert sites that are relevant to your topic. For an artist, that could mean a link to a nutritional expert in your blog post about food on the road. If you have a spot on your bio page where you talk about the gear you use or endorsements that you have, a link to those sites can also give you some SEO juice.
On the downside, links to what Google considers a “low quality site” can be harmful. These include syndicated press releases, discussion forums, directory submissions, blog comments, links to Fiverr or other cheap services, and generated links from automated link building programs.
Incoming Links
On the other hand, incoming links are what you covet, since that instantly sends a message to Google that you have content worth looking at. Links from a high quality site like a much-followed blogger, popular review site, or an expert in the field are golden. In this case, the linking page will actually pass some authority onto your site.
You might be thinking, “I’m friends with lots of experts so I’ll just contact them and ask for a link.” This sounds like a good plan except that they just can’t sprinkle a page with your links for it to work. It has to be connected to relevant content on the page to be useful. Plus, Google gets suspicious if too many links show up over a short period of time, so these have to be added slowly.
Improve Your Links
There are a number of ways to make your links more valuable in Google’s eyes. First of all, the longer the content the better. Posts and pages with over 2,000 words get the most juice, but over 1,000 can work as well. That’s not to say that you won’t get links on shorter content, just not as many of them.
The second thing is to not focus on social shares or engagement. Yes, that sounds like blasphemy in this social media age, but it’s been proven that shares don’t always equate to links.
Finally, posts that answer What and Why get more links than videos and how-to’s (notice the title of this post).
I know how difficult it can be just creating content, let alone worrying about SEO while you do it. A little extra effort is worth it though, when you find your post or page ranking high in the search results.
You can find out more about backlinks by checking out this infographic.
[Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay]
