Backlinking strategies vary with regard to what will work best. Should you focus on how many backlinks you are getting or how great your few backlinks are? At Rank Fuse, our SEO experts have put a lot of time and research into our current backlinking strategy. We have discovered that quality backlinks are much more helpful than the sheer quantity of backlinks your website receives, and we want to share part of that with you.
Let’s start with what a backlink is. Backlinks are links that direct a visitor from another website back to yours. Where do backlinks come from? Your website can receive backlinks from social media, directories, and other websites. Often, backlinks are granted through blog posts on other websites. For these backlinks to be helpful, they need to be good. What makes a backlink a “quality” backlink?
What Are Quality Backlinks?
The first factor you should look for when you are trying to get backlinks is whether the websites are relevant to your industry. For a toy manufacturer, a relevant backlink could be on a blog about child development or raising children. A link on a website about dog training is not going to benefit a toy manufacturer.
While relevancy is important, there is more to consider here. After you identify relevant places from which to get backlinks, you need to check the domain authority (DA) of the websites you want to target. A website with a high domain authority is trusted by both searchers and search engines. The higher the DA score, the more trustworthy the website. The most trustworthy the website, the better quality the link. Try to find websites with a ranking between 60 and 100. However, anything below 40 isn’t good.
Why Are Quality Backlinks Good?
Like we mentioned before, high-quality backlinks will be more beneficial to your website. How do high-quality backlinks benefit your website? They increase your visibility and boost your DA score. In turn, your SEO rankings are likely to climb as well.
Additionally, quality backlinks can’t hurt your website. What a lot of people don’t realize is that backlinks from websites that Google deems spammy can do more harm than good. Instead, focus your link-building strategy on websites that have earned Google’s respect.
Are There Downsides to Quality Backlinks?
While quality backlinks are beneficial to your website, not everything about them is great. When you are focusing on quality backlinks, it is going to take a long time to see a noticeable change in your DA and rankings. Part of the reason it is going to take so long is that it is hard to earn quality backlinks. For example, unless you are already a well-respected, well-established business, you aren’t going to land an article on a website like Forbes.
If you are realistic, you are going to generate only a small amount of high-commitment traffic. When you aim for high-quality backlinks, you are going to get fewer backlinks, but they will get you more relevant traffic to your website. There is a definite trade-off between a lot of low-quality backlinks versus a few high-quality backlinks.
How to Get High-Quality Backlinks
Getting backlinks can be a little tricky. Here are a few tips for getting good backlinks:
- Reach out to publications and other websites for guest posts with links to your website.
- Create an infographic that contains good information that people will want to link to.
- Put interesting content on social media that others will talk about and share.
When you are creating content for these backlinks, you want long-form content. You should aim for making the post as long as you can without a lot of fluff thrown in just for the sake of making the piece longer. Make sure you include a few keywords that will get noticed by Google. And don’t forget to include a link to somewhere on your website and at least one image.
If you are in need of backlinking opportunities but need a little help, Rank Fuse Digital Marketing can take on that task for you. To learn more about our outreach and off-page SEO services, call us today at 913-703-7265.