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Ever since the earliest days of Google’s ranking algorithm, links that point to your website have been a critical part of online marketing. They help the search engine understand your site – and the value of your site – so marketers have spent years devising effective ways to build a solid foundation of backlinks.
So, let’s start at the beginning and explore how you can make efficient backlinking a part of your SEO strategy.
What Is an SEO Strategy?
Before jumping into the technical aspects of backlinking, every strategist must understand the importance of building an SEO strategy and how Google Search works.
An SEO strategy includes planning, executing, and measuring all the components/changes you are doing to your website to rank higher in the search engines for the keywords that are relevant to the services or products you provide.
The strategy includes on-site SEO, things that happen on your website (optimizing content, internal linking, title tags, load speed, etc.), and off-site SEO, things that happen off of it (backlinks, citations, influencer mentions, etc.). Both have to be aligned to make your strategy/campaign successful.
What Exactly Are Backlinks
As explained by MOZ stated, a backlink is when a website/domain links to another website to share relevant information.
Every time you publish something on your website, the search engines scan it, index the information, and serve it to users when it matches a search query.
This means that when someone else publishes some content that includes a link to your website, the search engines gather that information and weigh it according to some specific criteria.
This is an important part of your off-site SEO strategy, so you can’t just go for any old link. The quality of the content and the website as a whole from which the link is coming are critical to this process because it shows that trustworthy sources find your products/services/content useful. And if they find it useful, Google will have a reason to increase your ranking.
Getting backlinks from quality domains is complex, and it can take time. Before you add it to your strategy, though, take some more time to research your competitors and where they are getting their links, as well as other domains that already rank for the services or keywords you want. This exercise will help you to understand where to focus your efforts and kickstart your SEO campaign.
How To Implement Backlinks in Your Off-Site SEO Strategy
Once you set your goals and put together a list of quality domains, you are ready to go after those backlinks. This addition to your strategy can impact your website ranking as long as you continue to build SEO-friendly landing pages, improve the user experience, and optimize the loading speed.
A critical aspect of the link-building strategy is to monitor the number and quality of your backlinks. You can do this via different applications such as SEMRush or Moz.
Best practices dictate that your strategy should stay away from backlinks from websites that have a Domain Authority (DA) below 20. Links from such poor sites can harm your rankings, and strategies that do nothing but focus on such low-quality sites can be penalized. This practice is known as black hat SEO.
We know that content reigns over marketing strategies and advertisers should understand how it is crucial to proving relevancy. Backlinks are a driving force of any SEO strategy. Without them, you’ll be relying only on your on-site work, which means you’re only reaching half your potential.
Conclusion
Backlinking is among the most important exercises that can strengthen your digital marketing strategy. Whether your agency already offers SEO services or you are looking for a new way to augment your PPC efforts, these foundational aspects of digital marketing can help you stand out in a competitive marketplace.
