Best Practices To Gain More Quality Backlinks
Off-page search engine optimization (SEO) is all about the tactics that you do outside of your website, including social media marketing and link building. With the latter, you maximize your efforts to acquire high-quality backlinks, which play a significant role in building your domain authority and helping your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Backlinks are also called inbound links because they direct or ‘link back’ traffic to your website from external sources. Search engines, like Google and Bing, continue to use backlinks as ranking signals. This means that your domain is likely to rank high in the SERPs for your target keywords if a lot of third-party sites are linking to your content.
Nonetheless, you must take note that the quality of your backlinks is more important than the quantity. With this, you should channel your efforts and resources into finding high-quality sources and opportunities.
Here are some tips to help you out:
1. Focus on Writing Excellent Content
The primary thing you should remember is that other people will be more inclined to keep using your website as a reference if you’re consistent in publishing high-quality content. Nobody wants to read, let alone share, articles that are sloppily written and without substance.
Whether you’re running a blog for your business or personal reasons, you should set editorial standards and make sure to only publish well-written articles. Aside from ensuring that your content is free from typographical and grammatical errors, you should also plan the format of your blog posts as well as the style of tagging and categorizing them. Thus, uniformity and consistency are key factors that you should consider.
2. Conduct Original Research
Another off-page SEO strategy that can boost your backlinking efforts is to become the original source of relevant information, which you can achieve by conducting your own research.
It doesn’t have to be a grand experiment that takes time, money and considerable resources. Something as simple as surveying your reader or consumer base on a particular subject can give you valuable data that can provide insight into your company or even industry.
If you run a women’s lifestyle blog, for instance, you can create a poll for your subscribers asking them about their preferred running shoes. Depending on the data that you’ll collect on your survey forms, you can gather more information aside from their preferences, such as age and the types of exercise routines they have.
3. Create An Infographic
Infographics are visual representations of data and statistics, and they’re highly-shareable content that can help you acquire backlinks. Similar to conducting a study, you can be the original source of this visual material, allowing you to gain inbound links. Plus, when designed properly, infographics have the added benefit of being attention-grabbing, increasing the chance that your content will go viral.
4. Check Your Competitors’ Backlinks
If you find yourself running out of ideas on how to acquire inbound links, you can also take a look at your competitors’ backlink sources by using specialized digital marketing tools. Once you’ve compiled a list of potential sources, you can reach out to them and ask them about the backlink opportunities that they provide.
Typically, you may have to submit a guest post and insert your link in the content. With this, you’ll need to go back to the first point–create an engaging and compelling write-up that’ll provide valuable information to the publishing blog’s readers.
5. Be On The Lookout For Brand Mentions
One significant backlink opportunity that you might be missing out on is brand mentions. If you’re selling something, chances are good that a customer has written about your product or service online. Sometimes, they may tag your account on social media. However, there are also times when people forget, meaning you’d likely miss the mention.
Don’t miss a potential backlink opportunity ever again by setting up Google Alerts for your company name so that you can track this type of feedback or review anywhere on the World Wide Web. You can then reach out to the web user who mentioned your brand and ask them to add your link to their post.
Overall, backlinks continue to play a significant role in a website’s rank in the SERPs. However, you should remember to focus on quality more than quantity. You can gain high-quality inbound links by, first and foremost, creating excellent content that provides valuable information to web users.
Another way is to become an original source of data, which you can do by conducting your own research and creating shareable content, like infographics. Lastly, take a look at your competitor’s backlinks, potential opportunities, and scour the web for brand mentions.
