The Power of Link Building: How to Get Backlinks

Building backlinks for your website is an integral part of gaining more visitors onto your site, and essentially more customers. If your website is ranking for keywords on the top pages of Google, but still not performing well, you may not have established a strong backlink profile yet. Doing so will take time and strategy. In this article, we share with you the importance of backlinks, how to get backlinks, and how to track them. 

What are Backlinks?

A backlink is when one website adds a link to another website. This can be done within a blog post, article, business directory, and more. Typically, the link is included within anchor text to point toward more information on a specific topic. See what we did there? 

There are two types of backlinks: Follow and Nofollow. Follow links help your SEO website rankings and are earned organically. Nofollow links appear when you comment on a blog post which links back to your own. The goal is to earn follow links which directs website crawlers to your page from other sites.

Below is an example of a follow link: 

                 <a href="https://example.com">Anchor Text Goes Here</a>

Below is an example of a nofollow link:

                 <a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a>

Why are Backlinks Important?

High quality backlinks help your website gain more visibility by readers. A backlink from a website with 500 monthly visitors might not get you much traffic. But, imagine gaining a backlink from a website with 500k+ monthly viewers. Not every reader of the article is going to click on your link, but your chances are much higher with the numbers in the second example. 

Building a strong backlink profile will increase your domain authority (DA). Moz (an SEO tool) ranks websites by a DA between 1-100. A higher DA means a more authoritative website. Having a strong backlink profile tells Google that your website contains valuable information within your niche and will rank higher in searches. 

How NOT to Get Backlinks

Before we discuss how to get backlinks, we want to share with you what NOT to do first. About a decade ago, internet gurus figured out that backlinks helped a website thrive and began selling backlinks. An owner of a website would purchase thousands of backlinks to get more visitors on their site. However, Google soon started catching onto this tactic and began penalizing the website and marking it as spam. There are still businesses that sell backlinks. Be warned that this is not how you want to build your backlink profile.

How to Get Backlinks

The best way to get backlinks is by earning them. This can be done in a variety of ways. Most importantly, you want to create excellent content that is helpful, inspiring, or entertaining, that other websites will want to share. Below are a few examples of how to get backlinks to drive more traffic to your website and gain more customers.

Register Your Website Under Business Directories

Having your website link on business directories will grow your backlink profile organically while also allowing your business to show up in search results. Most business owners know to have their website listed on Google My Business, but may not know about listing it on sites like Foursquare or DexKnows. 

Moz Local gets your business listed on a number of business directories at once, rather than adding them manually. The image below shows the distribution of directories Moz will connect your website to. Keep in mind that you will need to have a subscription with Moz in order to be distributed to all of them. 

You can also get your business listed on local directories like a chamber of commerce or other various networking groups. 

Research the Backlink Profiles of Your Competition

Search engine tools like Moz also allow you to research your competitors’ backlinks. By doing so, you may find where there are gaps within the context of the original source. You can offer a backlink to the original website to strengthen their article or replace a link that no longer exists. 

Once you have found articles that could benefit from linking to your site, reach out to the marketing department or owner of the site to share why linking to your website would be beneficial to theirs. 

Write Guest Posts

There are many opportunities to write guest posts for other websites by providing expertise pertaining to certain topics. Reach out to a website owner and offer to write an article with a topic in mind that would benefit their audience in exchange for a backlink to your domain or a specific page. You can determine a website’s strength through Moz’ free domain analysis tool. Again, getting backlinks from higher DAs will strengthen your website more than smaller DAs. 

These are a few simple ways of how to get backlinks for your website. At Ironistic, we help our clients build their online presence through website development, SEO, content, and other digital marketing services. We would be honored to help you build your business online. Contact us to learn more!