To grow a steady stream of traffic, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy. As per Google’s revelations, they’ve got over 200 SEO ranking factors, with the following three heavyweights, Content, Backlinks and RankBrain. Therefore, the importance of backlinks must not be overlooked. In this article, we are going to explore in-depth about backlinks, and to introduce four important things about SEO backlinks.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are the links from others’ websites to yours. For instance, when a food blogger includes a hyperlink in his post that points to a page of the restaurant’s website, the link becomes the restaurant’s backlink. Your page rank improves as you gain more quality backlinks. For search engines like Google, they believe only reputable sites with quality content can attract backlinks. Therefore, having sufficient credible backlinks could bring a breakthrough in growing traffic and page ranks.
4 Important Things about Backlinks
When you’re building up backlinks for your website, take note of the following 4 fundamentals for a jumpstart!
1. Domain Authority
Your website could be considered more valuable when there are more backlinks from authoritative and credible sources. However, domain authority remains a controversial topic in the SEO community. Back in the early 2000s, Google introduced the PageRank score on their Google Toolbar. It was the centerpiece of Google’s methodology in assessing the importance of individual websites, from a scale of 1 to 10. The higher the score, the higher the website ranks. However, the tech giant decided to remove PageRank from their toolbar in 2013 and stopped updating its PageRank algorithms. Instead of merely chasing PageRank scores, Google wanted publishers to focus on improving the overall user experience. Nevertheless, this does not mean we can stop building backlinks, as backlinks are still a crucial part of Google’s ranking criteria.
You might wonder how you can identify opportunities in building backlinks after the elimination of PageRank. A good alternative is Moz Domain Authority. Based on their knowledge of Google’s algorithms, Moz has developed a scoring system that ranges from 1 to 100, websites with a higher score is believed to be more trustworthy. Given that Moz updates their Domain Authority scorecard regularly, it is largely recognized and may easily serve as a good reference for many.
2. Relevance of Website
Backlinks are more valuable when they originate from related websites. Take an education consultancy website as an example, if it has gained backlinks from an online store and an education website respectively, obviously, Google would place a greater emphasis on the latter because of its relevancy.
3. Make use of Anchor Text
Anchor Text refers to the clickable text of the hyperlinks. When a reader clicks on the anchor text, they will be navigated towards the target website or page. As compared to simply using the website address as anchor text, using related keywords could prove more effective. Google does not only determine a sites’ relevancy using its content, but they also take into account the anchor text to understand the content of its backlinks. Therefore, using suitable keywords as anchor text is an effective tactic in building SEO backlinks.
4. Position of Hyperlinks
You might not know that the position of hyperlinks matter! If your backlinks are placed in the footer, Google may regard them as unimportant for readers. Instead, you should always try to insert the links within your content, as they are the most important part of your website after all. You may also want to place your backlinks at more eye-catching spaces, for example turning them into call-to-actions (CTA). More attractive links could potentially drive up the click-through rate, bringing you more organic traffic as a result.
MWI provides a one-stop solution for SEO Optimization. Get in touch with us to take your business to the next level with the help of SEO.
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