Backlinks affect google rankings the most.
Backlinks are when one website links to another website, which is something that Google looks at as “votes”. The more links you have, the higher you will rank (and the higher the trust). Essentially, it is another website vouching for the content on your page.
You want backlinks that are relevant to your website.
Google looks at:
– How many backlinks you are getting
– How many you get over time (it has to be natural and consistent)
– How related those websites are
– Domain authority (how authoritative the website is) From a score of 0-100
If you do all of these correctly then you will rank higher on Google.
Ahrefs.com = put in a URL and they will give you the domain authority (paid)
Open site explorer (free version) will take you to moz.com
Backlinks help Google and other search engines determine which page should rank the highest for a certain query.
Backlinks will give you referral traffic, therefore generating more visitors
Backlinks will help search engines discover your pages faster.
To rank high on Google backlinks are necessary, but they aren’t easy to get. Paying for them will get your website banned as it is against Googles policy.
Topical relevance: The likeliness of a link being clicked relates to its importance of the content.
Domain Authority: The page ranking of where you are being linked from. This requires third party metrics to measure this for you. (Domain rating, URL rating)
You want to get backlinks from ideally both topically relevant and authoritative pages to receive the maximum benefits.
You don’t want to get backlinks from low quality sites. What is meant by this is websites with minimal content that exist only to link to other sites. Search engines respond to this by giving less value to sites that try and manipulate the search results, resulting to drop in search ranking.
Don’t just get anyone to link to your website but think intelligently about getting links from trusted websites.
Create content that is better than your competitors
1. Neilpatel.com/backlinks – In the search bar enter your competitor URL and it will show you all the people which link to your competitors. Here, search for the most popular pages.
When you find the right articles that a competition is going after, look at the backlink count for that URL.
When you are in the backlinks report in the side bar, click on top pages and it will show you the top pages that your competitors are writing on. Look at most similar ones and you can click the backlinks button there.
2. See what articles your competitors are writing and which ones that are being linked. Write a better version of that article by making it more detailed and therefor increasing the wordcount by adding specifics.
Don’t just make it long for the sake of it and shove in key words. Instead, make it more detailed whether that’s with images, videos you add to your articles, or even create graphics for your article.
3. Email out everyone linking to your competition and break down why your article is better. This can be done using custom emails. When you create a detailed email (If you want to provide more value to your users, feel free to check out the article, I would appreciate if you linked it) Make sure you are not too pushy!
Most of it is manual labour and takes a lot of time which makes them more valuable.
This is a long term approach and if you’re willing to do it you will rank higher than your competition.
Ultimate guides
Ultimate guides work well because they contain a big amount of content in one page with all the detailed information you could want for your chosen topic. Long form content performs better in Google than short articles.
This will make your guide the GO-TO when people search for a topic as it will have all the information they need.
Cover everything there is to know about your chosen topic and try and find a topic that not many people have written “ultimate” guides on.
Guest articles
Publishing articles on other popular websites will gain you more readers and will help you reach a new audience and increase your exposure.
There are different ways to find websites that accept guest articles, such as:
Google search queries: Google Search Operators: inurl (ryte.com)
Social media
There are many other options on social media for writing guest articles. On twitter for example, if you search for “guest post” or “guest article”, you will find many opportunities.
You can even set alert notifications for the keyword using a third party tool such as Brand24 – Media Monitoring Tool
Roundups
If you know how to promote your content in the right way, you will get more backlinks as more people will see it.
Roundups are posts are content or opinions from experts in a niche. There are two types:
Contact bloggers or websites that run weekly/monthly roundups. Here you can again use the google search queries such as “Keyword + roundup”. Make sure to choose recent results from the last week or month.
Contact the web owners and send a link to one of your best guides/blogs/tutorials with a quick introduction. As they are constantly looking for good content, they will be keen on hearing from you.
Never ask directly for a link!
Outdated resources
There are many sites in every industry that have changed names, moved to a new URL, stopped offering a service or have simply shut down. Finding sites that still link to these old outdated URLs will give you opportunities to build backlinks.
Often they will be more than happy to add your link as you are helping them out AND adding value.
Backlinks through Infographics
1. Go to org and type in popular keywords within your industry
Go to the content ideas report – It will show you all blogposts that have many shares, traffic and backlinks based off of popularity.
Look for data driven ones and go to their pages
2. Go to Canva.com or https://biteable.com/infographic/ and create an infographic with that data, make it visual and easy to understand and visual so that people can get the information easier
Cite your original source and link out to them. Add extra bits of content if you can
3. Go back to ubersuggest, on the content ideas report and you click the dropdown of links, it shows you all the people who link to that page.
Email those people saying you noticed they linked out to X website and that you created an infographic with the same data. Tell them they are welcome to use the infographic in their content to help their readers understand the data easier
4. Publish the infographic to your site for people to link back to it. Use a plugin when using WordPress “WP embed code generator” so people can copy and paste this easily for their content. This will allow a bigger range of people to link back to this, rather than only the people that you emailed.
