Driving traffic to a webpage is no simple feat. If you want to be found online through search engines like Google and Bing, you’ll need a solid SEO strategy - and every SEO strategy should build a strong backlink profile. In this guide, we’ll discuss what a backlink is, and what makes a high-quality vs. poor-quality backlink profile.
What is a Backlink?
If you’re unfamiliar, a backlink is exactly as it reads. A link... that takes users from a separate website to yours… These links support your webpage, affirm it, back it. Hence, the name- backlink.
The more backlinks you have leading to your pages, the greater your site’s credibility will be. Therefore, the higher your site will rank.
Take a note that, credibility online is measured as Domain Authority. So, the higher your site’s domain authority, the more people will see it.
The job of search engines is to give the most relevant and trustworthy results to users. And having a strong backlink profile gives your domain a stronger authority in the search query. This makes your content visible to relevant audiences.
Now, what makes a solid backlink profile?
Four Primary Factors for a High-Quality Backlink Profile
The overall quality of your backlink profile depends on several things.
We like to look at four key factors when crafting the finest backlink profiles for our clients:
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- Quantity
- Authority
- Relevance
- Trust
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Ultimately, your goal is to have a large number of high-quality backlinks.
Quantity
Google looks at backlinks as if they are “votes.” The more votes a site has, the higher the rank.
Search engines look at the number of backlinks leading to your site as an indicator of the quality of your content and the authority of your site.
Simply: Power in numbers. The more people who reference your work, the better.
However, you should know it’s much better to prioritize backlink quality over quantity.
Authority
Another aspect search engines judge is the authority level of the backlinks. If a site is authoritative, this means they have trusted, relevant, and high-quality content.
Domain Authority is a metric that can be evaluated on a scale from 0-100. Search engines measure the domain authority of each backlink, which is why it is crucial to have high-quality, high-authority backlinks.
Simply: Get links from authoritative domains that are well-known in their niche or community.
Relevance
Make sure the backlinks to your webpage are coming from relevant sources. For instance, you wouldn’t want a backlink from a housekeeping company linking to your content page about fitness exercises. That doesn’t seem relevant, or natural - and if you’re writing about fitness but getting a lot of links from unrelated sites, that can cause a lot of confusion for search engines.
Now, What Makes a Natural Backlink?
When a backlink is natural, it typically means another site owner genuinely found your content useful and decided to link to it. This happens most often when your content is relevant and valuable to their topic.
Truly relevant content is achieved through topical authority. When you create consistent, high-quality content that thoroughly covers a topic, this is considered topical authority.
Simply: Focus on links that are in your niche/community.
Trust
Backlinks must be trustworthy too. Search engines measure trustworthiness by analyzing the content and links to and from a site. While it seems complicated, it’s all tied together in a circular way. The complex algorithms judge your page by the quality of your content, and by the quality of your backlinks.
Simply: Get links from trustworthy domains that follow best practices and aren’t blatantly gaming the system.
Summing It Up
The simplest way to think about a backlink is like a vote. So, the more votes a site has, the more credibility it builds.
Checking your own site’s backlinks is simple and can be done anytime. We recommend leveraging powerful tools such as:
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- Majestic
- Moz
- Ahrefs
- SEM Rush
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If you aren’t happy with your domain authority score and need to acquire some backlinks, here are some ideas for choosing a good link-building approach, with 7 tactics for creative link building in 2022.
Once you make the necessary changes to give your webpage a strong backlink profile, along with a higher ranking... users won’t have to look very hard to find you. And that’s how we want it.
If you’d rather have someone handle your backlink business, we got you.
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