Search engine optimization remains an integral part of your brand’s reputation. Google remains the dominant search engine, and its algorithms keep getting more sophisticated (read: it’s harder for low-quality sites to rank well). If you’d like to improve your site’s credibility with Google, you can make significant progress by earning high-quality backlinks. Interested in learning how to optimize your site to rack up backlinks? Here are some tips to help you get started:
What Are Backlinks?
If you’ve never heard of backlinks, we’re here to help. This terminology simply refers to a hyperlink that points back to your site. When you publish helpful information or engaging content, other sites will likely link to yours. The trick is to collect high-quality backlinks, so the goal is for legitimate sites to link to your page(s) naturally. We’ll cover how to do that next!
Tips For Collecting High-Quality Backlinks
You can do a lot to increase the number of backlinks you’re getting, and it starts with performing an audit of your current backlink profile. Using Google Analytics or a tool that analyzes incoming backlinks, you’ll want to review your link history and where they’re coming from. Take some time to check out the sites linking to yours and determine if a specific type of content attracts shares.
From there, you can identify your site’s most popular content and find which keywords or phrases bring in the most traffic. You’ll likely notice that relevant, engaging, and/or informative content is getting the most attention. This is a great place to start and can help you (or your marketing consultants) generate ideas to drive traffic to your site.
You can start creating the content once you have ideas for blog topics or guides. A word to the wise: long-form content tends to attract higher levels of backlink activity. A study revealed that the average first-page search result had at least 1,889 words. This doesn’t mean every post has to clock in at more than 1,000 words, but at least a few pages on your site should contain long-form content.
Finally, consider collaborating with other bloggers or websites. This creates natural linking activity, and having a rapport with others in your industry or realm of interest can be advantageous. Pitching an idea for a guest post is a great place to start and may lead to consistent collaboration. You never know unless you give it a try!
Earning more backlinks is a must if you’re hoping to improve your Google rankings. Attracting meaningful traffic that will link to your site is a science and art that takes time to master. If your goal is to skip the guesswork and get straight to results, our team would love to help. Please contact us to schedule a consultation.