SEO search engine optimization 

Important Part of Every Website's Marketing Strategy 

Are an important part of every website's marketing strategy, as search engines like Google rely purely on what is in the title/meta description and URL of a page to determine if it serves its purpose. What this means for your SEO is that you have to focus on providing useful information so searchers know they are looking at a relevant page. One great way to understand how much more impactful backlinks are for websites is by seeing how many organic pages a given domain receives for each backlink placed (also referred to as "link juice"). This allows us to figure out exactly what kind of content can be created for your site to optimize for backlinks, which in turn will help get links from high-authority sites as well. As such, let's start with the basics: Backlinks are links from other high authority sites. 

Linked Highly Valuable Websites 

 Those sources are typically linked by other highly valuable websites, either through editorial or advertising partnerships, or both. They're also considered quality links since their link anchor text matches the one used within the source articles, making them easily discoverable by users online.

 By giving backlinks to authoritative sources, you are establishing yourself as being trustworthy, which makes you more likely to attract reputable people looking tiio promote themselves. Now, let's look at some numbers: If you link out to 100 high authority publishers per month, there are about 4 million links you could receive.

Creating Original Content 

 If you spend 3 hours creating original content per week (including all of your weekly social media posts), you'd get 12 links from the 300+ million unique individuals online per day! In short, these numbers show just how influential links from trusted publications and news outlets really are when promoting your business online. Plus, you would already be receiving 100% of the web's traffic, leaving everyone else on the other end wondering who bought those links from you. 

That's an incredible return on investment! (And remember that most people don't always go anywhere near 4 million links, which means that you may need to do even better!) Now that we've talked a bit about links, let's quickly go over some ways to bring in the quality links that we're after. 

 You'll Want to Ensure Credible Sources

First thing first, you'll want to ensure that any links to your site come from credible sources. There are several tools that can help track the credibility of a site's backlinks, but if you don't have access to those and just want to find quality ones manually you can use our Free Site Audit tool here. We take into account a lot of factors when ranking a website, including backlinks, domain authority, freshness, category content, etc. The idea behind using those criteria is to make sure that we only include quality links to our own site. Next, you'll want to consider building backlinks that are related to your industry, services, or products, similar to how an organization might establish relationships with brands. For example, let's say you run a blog discussing gardening tips, and you link to one article discussing how to create plants from scratch. 

While this is the typical format that we usually see in terms of linking out to another web page, one major problem associated with sharing this type of information in an industry-specific manner is that readers aren't willing to trust it, especially if it's been shared inappropriately by an irresponsible blogger.

 Not Bad for New Bloggers

However, it's actually not bad for new bloggers because if you share knowledge in a relatable fashion and encourage discussion, the reader isn't going to think twice before clicking away. Similarly, if you write about something extremely relevant to someone's interests, then they'll likely find value in whatever you're sharing, no matter where your links come from—whether it's from your company, partner, co-worker, friend, or family member.

 

Finally, try to avoid links that are direct comparisons. It's tempting to link out to a few competitors or popular resources that you subscribe to, but if it's not truly a comparison, don't do it. Instead, connect with your readership to provide them with a deeper understanding of what your product or service does, what it offers, where it's located, and why they should care about your company or resources. After all, it would be nice to receive a personalized response just from reading about your content but what works best in practice is simply connecting with others and listening to them speak. Ultimately, if you link out to 4 million reputable websites, you'd leave nearly $20 billion on the table.

 

Now that we know what we want backlinks to look like

let's dive right into putting together content specifically optimized to attract links! Here's an example of a simple post about my personal experience with SEO, featuring keywords that I'd ideally like to rank for: Let's break down each keyword into categories and add them into the title: The keyword term is found in four different places throughout the post, but when you break it up into subcategories, it becomes easier to analyze how much potential we have to reach those target words and phrases. 

Some common issues that I'd address with the title would be trying to keep it on topic rather than covering everything under one umbrella. A general improvement I'd like to do would be to improve my writing style. My goal at the moment is to be succinct and clear in my prose, which means writing a large number of headings rather than splitting them up with long paragraphs.

 Another improvement 

I'd make is adding images instead of merely mentioning them, since visuals are a huge factor in ranking searches online. Here is a helpful tip from Ahrefs Blogspot, stating that using images that relate to the content in the headline helps establish the relationship between the reader and the content and drives interest in the blog. Another area I feel like I have room for improvement would be on my titles containing keywords. When we look back to backlinks as a core SEO ranking factor, we always have to pay attention to the intent of the author and whether the content is written to drive traffic or to inform the audience. Although not every title is necessary to support each search intent, some titles will be more effective than others. One thing I'm currently working on would be to eliminate too many duplicate words throughout the entire title, which often serve to clutter a webpage and are generally unhelpful for visitors unless combined with unrelated keywords. 

Create an Effective Link-Building Process

Finally, one specific area to work on is to review existing links from the same site and try to improve upon it. I've seen a couple articles done on these types of topics recently, which included very creative wording, however, it wasn't enough to actually achieve the goals of having links. To help create an effective link-building process, it's good to have a dedicated set of steps that you follow. These might include scheduling out your time slots for reading the latest articles, following the content of writers as well as current influencers, checking the quality of the content itself before publishing, and doing outreach. Once you've done all of these things, put together a list of references from previous successful efforts in relation to your topic of focus, and start building as many links as possible from the links listed.

Be sure to monitor these links regularly and take note of patterns as well as trends such as how well they're performing for a particular type of user or location, or if a certain backlink group has a higher rate of returning links. Then you can continue to incorporate that pattern into future endeavors and gradually build your brand recognition.

Backlinks aren't Always Easy

 As we've seen, backlinks aren't always easy to acquire (especially without getting involved in paid campaigns), but they're key to driving traffic to your website. If we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of links, you could have more of a hard time competing to attract quality links than with a measly handful of links. 

Feedback 

So next time you decide to send out emails to your network asking for feedback on how to improve your content and increase conversions, maybe try reaching out with a link or two. And if you happen to find that you actually like what you hear, ask nicely. Everyone loves free stuff! Keep looking around!

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