As website owners, we all want to increase the amount of traffic to our sites and building good quality backlinks is a good way to do this. In this article we’ll look at the benefits backlinks can bring to your SEO efforts and some of our top tips for attracting quality links.
Why do you need to build links to your website?
When another website shares a link from their domain to yours it is called a backlink. Backlinks work as a form of endorsement and show search engines that the other site recommends yours as a trusted and valuable source of information. The more websites that link to your site, the more search engines, like Google, see it as a good quality website, and award it more points (or ‘authority’).
Tips for building quality backlinks
Before you ask just any website to link to yours, it’s important to remember quality over quantity. You only want to attract links from good quality websites. Links from low quality websites can have the opposite effect and drag your domain authority down. You can also be penalised by search engines for ‘link farming’ – the practice of paying for lots of links from different sites.
Here are five of our best tips for building backlinks that will boost your website search results.
- Use industry data to compile your own research and reports. If you work in an industry that produces a lot of data, you can use this to your advantage. Use the insights you collect to create reports that are useful for your target audience. The statistics that you produce can be used by others to benchmark themselves and assess their industry. Verified statistics are also used by businesses to give validity to their content, so every time your data is referenced you should earn a link.
- Create insightful infographics. Following on from our previous point about harnessing your data – you can also use it to create infographics. Infographics are an easy way to present complex data and helps to highlight important points. Infographics often attract good engagement rates on social media platforms like Facebook & Twitter. Encouraging others to share your infographics and link back to your website is a great way of building backlinks.
- Build trusting relationships. Great relationships are the foundation of good backlinks. Research other websites that fit with what you do and try to build trusting relationships with them. You can do this by writing guest blog posts for them, sharing your research., and building friendships with them on social media. This is the best way to attract good quality backlinks.
- Offer free resources. Do you have a tool that others would find useful? Or are you able to offer a free trial version of software that you already sell? Providing something of value for free will attract people to your site and build trust in your brand. It’ll also help you to gain good quality links over time.
- Use PR techniques. One of the best ways to build backlinks is to get the word out about your business. Compile a list of journalists and publications that write about the sector you work in and pitch them your latest news stories. This could be a new product or service you’ve been working on, or a recent achievement you’ve made.
Remember, when building backlinks to always prioritise quality over quantity. If you need help getting started contact the Expand Digital Media team today.
