Building Backlinks: What You Need To Know

‍The move towards a truly digital, integrated society has been a long, slow one that’s been going on for many years.

The recent Coronavirus pandemic has increased the speed of this evolution and led to many changes in the digital market. These include an increase in individuals working online from home and shopping on the internet instead of visiting physical retail outlets. 

All of these developments look set to continue into the future, particularly as the virus is still prevalent and has led to many ongoing uncertainties. 

That means that businesses can no longer overlook digital marketing and SEO. Any organization without a robust online presence and a strategy that aims to help it become recognized for its target keywords will soon find itself falling far behind its competitors. 

There are many strategies that businesses of all sizes and in every sector need to consider when promoting themselves online. 

One process that many business leaders are unsure of, or ignore completely, is building backlinks to your website. Not just any backlinks, but building quality backlinks is important as it builds authority and trust.

Backlinks are links from other websites to pages on your site. These might include links in lists of quality sites in your niche, links in reviews, natural links placed in articles, and more. 

Google and other search engines believe that quality backlinks from external sites serve as a vote of confidence for your site and show that your website is a quality resource that they should promote to users. 

When building backlinks, we usually refer to guest posting and showcasing your site’s expertise and insight on its chosen topic. This process requires a lot of hard work and can take a lot of trial and error. However, it will all pay off, as you will be able to improve your site’s rankings in Google and other popular search engines.

Backlinks to your site can also improve your site’s traffic, as readers might click on the link and be led through your sales process.  

If you’ve never engaged in backlink building before, then here’s a guide to why it’s so important and how to begin. 

Backlinks Are Essential For Raising Your Site’s Rankings

Spending time and effort building backlinks on external websites might not seem important, but it’s actually vital to your SEO strategy. 

That’s because Google and other search engines value backlinks and view them as an essential part of deciding whether or not a website is worth putting at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Google explores the site on which a link is placed and the context of the article in which it is placed and the surrounding keywords to decide whether a website or page is relevant to user inquiries. 

External backlinks show search engines that other content creators view your site and its pages as relevant to readers and worth recommending as further reading. This vote of confidence shows Google that your site is a valuable resource and that it should consider increasing its ranking on relevant SERPs. As such, external backlinks are a vital part of your SEO strategy and could make or break your website’s online presence. 

Quality Always Trumps Quantity In Backlink Building

While building backlinks is vital for your website’s SEO, you need to make sure that you focus on quality over quantity. That’s because toxic backlinks can do more harm than good and could lead to manual action for your website. Not all backlinks are created equally, so you need to learn how to identify quality link-building opportunities. 

Removing poor-quality, irrelevant backlinks takes a lot of time and effort, so the best approach is to avoid building them in the first place. As such, you need to focus on building quality backlinks. ‘Quality’ might seem like a vague term, but in this case, it refers to backlinks that don’t meet Google’s specifications and aren’t relevant to your site’s topic. As such, you need to ensure that when you’re building backlinks to your site, you choose relevant sites to guest post on and platforms that are relevant to your niche. 

If Google believes that your backlink is unnatural and that you’ve tried to manipulate the system, then it will manually check the article in which your link is placed. That’s why quality is important, not only in choosing guest posting platforms but also in the content in which your link features. If the link to your website is unnatural and unneeded, then Google will quickly notice and penalize your site, either by overlooking it or taking manual action to remove your site from Google, which could be fatal to your business. 

Recommended reading; How to do keyword research for SEO

Link Building Agencies Can Share The Load

Building quality, relevant backlinks can take a lot of hard work and commitment. If your business isn’t in the digital market, then you’ll need to learn a lot of new skills and take a lot of time to build a beneficial backlink profile for your site. 

Thankfully, it’s possible for you to save yourself time by outsourcing some of your backlink building. Link building agencies sometimes get lumped together as poor quality, cheap link builders, but this isn’t always the case. If you hire a link-building company that focuses on quality, then you’ll get the backlinks you need without going through all of the hard work. For example, UK Linkology has its own in-house formula for assessing links called “M-Flux”. Rather than just focussing on one metric like DA, this uses other popular metrics like Domain Rating and traffic. By collaborating with an experienced link-building agency such as this, you’ll be able to ensure that your new backlinks benefit your SEO and allow you and your team to make the most of your precious in-house time and resources. 

Google Is Always Updating Its Algorithm And Changing Its Requirements For Site Admins 

As the world’s biggest search engine, with the largest market share in the search engine sector, Google is the thought-leader when it comes to what makes a good online search result. The search engine has an algorithm that considers external backlinks and checks the keywords with which they are associated and the site on which they are placed to work out their importance. 

The search engine updates its algorithms and search parameters throughout the year and announces many of its major updates, giving them names such as Panda and E-A-T. As such, every website admin and business leader needs to stay up to date with the latest Google updates, as well as the latest thoughts from industry experts on how these developments will affect your link-building strategy. 

Check out the best SEO news sites online, and sign up for automatic alerts to save yourself time when researching. With automatic updates, you can see what’s going on and stay ahead of the Google updates. You can also adapt your link-building strategy accordingly as you go along. The digital world is fast-paced and ever-evolving, so you need to make sure that your SEO strategy is the same.  

Final Thoughts 

In this modern era that is deeply dedicated to digital marketing, no business can overlook building backlinks to their website. Without high-quality, relevant backlinks that are included in relevant, readable written content, your website will be practically invisible online.

This article should help you to understand the importance of backlink building and how you can get started and build a process. Once you’ve got started, you’ll find that backlink building is a valuable addition to your SEO strategy.