Having high-quality backlinks are extremely important to your website. This will dictate not only where you rank on the Google search results, but also how much traffic you get to your site. A backlink allows you to gain major traffic to your site, as well as broaden your audience. It can be difficult at times to differentiate between high-quality and low-quality backlinks. It is important to recognize the differences and be able to gain as many high-quality backlinks as possible. Keep reading to learn what backlinks are, the difference between high-quality versus low-quality backlinks, and the different ways you can get high-quality backlinks.
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Backlinks
Before you can learn about high-quality backlinks, it’s important to know what backlinks are. A backlink is a link from one website that directs the user to your website. For example, if you are writing a blog post about the dietary restrictions on dogs, and another website has an article written about the best foods to give dogs, you can insert a link to that article as a reference. This reference will take the user to that website, which will encourage visitors to view that site’s content. Backlinks are a two-way street. In the same way that you may reference articles or other blogs in your content, others will do the same. This is a form of marketing that allows a viewer of content to be led to a website that has similar content.Not only do backlinks allow for traffic to your site, but they also open your content up to a wider audience with similar interests. One of the best ways to make sure your content is being seen is by making sure that you have solid web traffic from search engines.It’s important to keep in mind that not all backlinks are made equal. Google ranks websites on their quality, so in order for Google to recommend your content to a user, your backlinks need to be from a high domain authority website or credible web page. When it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity.
High-quality backlinks vs. low-quality backlinks
When it comes to backlinks, their quality is extremely important in regard to how Google will rank your site. If you have a website with a lot of low-quality backlinks, you will be ranked lower than if you had fewer links, but they were high-quality backlinks. There are two major factors that will dictate whether a link is of high or low quality: authority and relevance.
Authority
Search engines determine the authority of a website in order to generate the value of a link from them. Authoritative web pages are a reputable source of information. They usually have .gov, .edu, or .org at the end of them. It is also important to figure out what your own website authority is. This can be done by visiting Ahrefs or Moz, plugging your domain into their link explorer, and you will see your score on their scale. This will tell you how likely your company is to appear at the top of the SERP, and they take multiple factors into account. Root domains and the number of total links are compiled to give you a score from 0-100.
Relevance
The relevance of a website is determined by how closely related the topic of the linked article is to the website. For example, a site that is focused on environmental activities on a global scale would be considered more relevant as a source instead of a community website with an environmental club page. Even though both pages are talking about the environment, one is more relevant to the search engine. Having your site be relevant to the topic matter is important in the credibility of your site. It is important that your readers or viewers trust your content. If they trust your content, then it is more likely that they will come back to your site again to find more information on similar topics.
High-quality backlinks
High-quality backlinks usually come from extremely authoritative sites, and they can be difficult to get a link from. You can get high-quality backlinks from big industry blogs, national news sites, and big industry brands. Having links from these types of websites will allow you to show your site’s expertise on a subject. This means that you will gain the trust of viewers who come to your site because they know that you are knowledgeable on the topic about which you are writing. A high-quality backlink can come from leaders in your industry. Being linked to these sites as a supplier or distributor, or even just mentioned as a review will give you traffic to your site. These types of links are extremely beneficial to your site and will help you grow.
Low-quality backlinks
Low-quality links are usually either irrelevant in the search engine determining your site’s authority on a subject, or they are harmful. These links may be ones that you are looking at, but they don’t benefit your site in any way. Having low-quality links, even though they are easy to find, will not provide any benefit to your site. There are even times when having low-quality links will hurt your site. If a search engine like Google recognizes that you use too many low-quality links, it is not likely that your site will be put up high on its search rankings. Therefore, your site will not gain any traffic, and can also rule out being able to gain high-quality backlinks.
Ways to get high-quality backlinks
The point of using backlinks is in order to increase your traffic to your site. If you are using low-quality links, you will not see the benefit in the search engine. If you buy backlinks, search engines such as Google will flag you. You risk your site being shadowbanned or taken down from search results. Having at least one high-quality backlink will allow you to gain more traffic to your site and broaden your audience. It will also allow you to gain even more high-quality backlinks. There are a few different ways to get high-quality backlinks: become a source for reporters and bloggers, publish ultimate guides, use branded strategies and techniques, and build links from outdated resources.
Source for reporters and bloggers
One of the best ways to rank on the first page of a Google search is by building backlinks from authority sites and blogs. In order to do this, you can use a free service called Help a Reporter Out. This service connects you to people that need sources to people that want links and exposure. You can choose from a free or paid plan, then you keep an eye out for requests to which you can contribute. Finally, you send the journalist a very brief and valuable pitch.
Publish ultimate guides
Ultimate guides are a great way to gain a high-quality backlink. They work well because they are comprehensive guides that contain a lot of content on a single page. According to SEO ranking factor studies, long-form content tends to perform better on Google than short articles. Ultimate guides also cover an entire topic on a single page. Because your guide is the “go-to” resource for a topic, people will link to it whenever they write about that topic on their blog. This is a fairly simple process. First, you find a topic for your guide. Next, you write an outline. Finally, you write the guide.
Use branded strategies and techniques
Using branded strategies and techniques can work really well by allowing you to gain a high-quality backlink. The first step to do this is to develop a unique strategy, tip, or tactic. Next, you should name your strategy. This gives you the opportunity to have your tactic or strategy be coined by a specific name and be recognizable. Last, publish the strategy as part of a blog post and show people that your strategy actually works.
Build links from outdated resources
This is a more time-consuming way to get high-quality backlinks, but it is still beneficial. The first step is to find sites in your industry that have changed names, moved to a new URL, shut down, or stopped updating a resource. Next, you want to find sites that are still linking to the old, outdated URL. This is an extremely important step. Using Ahrefs as a backlink checking tool will allow you to see which sites are backlinking from the outdated site, focusing on the sites that have the highest domain authority. The last step is to reach out to all of the people that are still linking to the outdated resource, while also gently suggesting that they add links to your site.
Increasing your backlinks
Getting more backlinks is a great way to increase traffic to your website and improve your ranking results. SEO Design Chicago offers off-page search engine optimization services such as link building. Contact SEO Design Chicago today.
FAQ
- How are high-quality backlinks different from low-quality backlinks?
- What is a website’s authority?
- What is a website’s relevance?
- How can you get high-quality backlinks?
- What are backlinks?
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