High-quality backlinks are something you should strive to get with regard to your digital marketing. Here’s how to boost your efforts with great backlinks.
If you have a website, social media, or any kind of online presence, you are engaging in digital marketing, a practice so broad that it can sometimes seem overwhelming.
The best way to learn how to boost your marketing efforts is to take one topic at a time, learn it well, and put it into practice.
High-quality backlinks represent just one aspect of digital marketing that can enhance your reach.
This guide will take you through understanding how high-quality backlinks can help, what makes a high backlink quality, and how to get them for your own website.
Before we get to that, let’s take a look at why people–and search engines–care about backlinks.
It’s “Merely” about creating trust.
There’s a psychological phenomenon known as Mere Exposure Effect that states that familiarity through exposure can create trust. What this means for digital marketing is that the more your brand is mentioned, the more readers will trust you.
And if readers trust you, search engines are more likely to trust you, too!
This is why link-building is a crucial element of digital marketing.
What can high-quality backlinks do for you?
If you’re going to invest time and money in pursuing backlinks, it’s important to understand how they can help you so that you can later analyze how your backlinks are working for you.
- Backlinks can boost your online reputation.
- Backlinks can help you rank better on SERPs, or search engine results pages.
- Backlinks can bring new traffic to your site, and new traffic can mean new clients.
As you can see, backlinks can serve your reputation and your bottom line, both directly and indirectly.
However, not all links are created equal, and if you have the wrong kind of backlinks, your efforts might backfire.
For example, if you purchase low-quality links, it could hurt your reputation among readers, and search engines might penalize your website.
That means you could end up ranking worse, and you might lose website traffic.
Knowing what makes high-quality backlinks is crucial to succeeding in this aspect of digital marketing.
What makes for high-quality backlinks?
Now that you know what a backlink can do for you, aren’t you excited to get started? We’re excited to guide you through this next section.
Domain & Link Age Matters
Domain and backlink age matters. They are like fine wines; they improve with age.
If you get a backlink from a brand-new website, that’s okay, but it’s not as valuable to readers or search engines as a backlink from a domain that’s a decade old.
Better yet, if the backlink isn’t brand new, either.
This is because older domains and older links carry more authority.
Niche Expertise Matters
Just as the age of referring domain matters, so does the expertise of that domain as it relates to the keyword used to link to your website.
If you sell software, and a company whose logo may or may not be an apple link to you, that link is highly valuable because that company has niche expertise.
Authority and expertise go hand in hand with age, though this doesn’t mean that an older domain is automatically authoritative in its niche
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
These words of wisdom are often quoted because they can apply to everything from applying to universities to financial investments.
Guess what? The phrase applies to backlinks too.
If all of your links come from one IP address, they’re not as valuable as links coming from different IP addresses.
Spread the wealth, and by wealth, we mean exposure to your website.
Now you know not only why backlinks matter, but what makes them high quality. Let’s move on to the third and final part of our guide.
How can you get high-quality backlinks?
You’re doing a great job so far learning about backlinks! This may be the trickiest part of this particular practice, but it can also be the most fun because it’s where you actually get to engage with others and expand your reach.
Q&A Sites
A great way to get started with accumulating backlinks is to participate in question-and-answer sites.
The internet is full of them because one of the main purposes of the internet is to find answers.
Looking for a great weekend project? Spend some time browsing Q&A sites and maybe even try your hand at answering some more questions.
Not only will this practice allow you to up your backlink count, but you can demonstrate that you’re an industry expert.
Blog Comments
If you’ve ever written a blog or social media post, one of the most exciting times is when people comment.
That’s because the internet is a social machine, and we want to engage with people just as they want to engage with us.
Blog comments are a great way to build community and network with potential clients and other industry professionals–maybe even social influencers.
Like posting on Q&A sites, blog comments are a great way to get started creating backlinks while establishing your own expertise.
Long-Form Content
Sometimes the best way to gain attention is without asking for it. It’s like love–they say that you find love when you stop actively looking for it. With backlinks, this can also be true.
Alright, so you’re still actively looking, but you can pretend you’re not by posting long-form content.
What is long-form content?
Long-form content is typically a blog post or other content totaling at least one thousand words (like this guide!).
What makes long-form content so great?
The power of long-form content lies in its shareability. People want to share longer, in-depth content because it does more than brush the surface.
It drills down and dives deep. It provides expert information on details.
There’s that word again – “expert.” Demonstrating your expertise is a great way to attract backlinks.
Content is king, so start writing to attract high-quality backlinks.
Bonus Tip
How could we claim this is an ultimate guide without offering you a bonus? So here it is: Make sure that any backlinks you receive have keyword-rich anchor text.
Anchor text is the text that readers click on to follow a link, and if it contains keywords you want to rank for, it’s a more valuable backlink.
To learn more about how to get high-quality backlinks, contact us today.
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