Authority backlinks – what you need to know

From commerce to entertainment, the buffet of websites available to the consumer are endless. In the increasingly competitive landscape of online activity, website owners are constantly seeking different methods to reach the top results for a search engine search. One such SEO tactic to reach the top is to generate good strength of backlinks to your website. This article can be used as a beginner’s map to understanding authority backlinks, practices to avoid and actionable methods to get you started on improving your website’s backlink strategy!

What are authority backlinks?

In order to gain authority to a website, we use link building – it is a simple process of building hyperlinks from other websites to your own website. All search engines crawl the links between one page to the other and use it as an important indicator for the search engine results pages, or SERPs. This allows the search engine to discover new webpages and determine the relevance of a webpage.

According to the SERP ranking, which are used as a means for third-party votes of confidence, search engines rank the websites using the website hosting the link, to verify the quality of the content. Building a good ranking doesn’t necessarily depend on the number of citations a website may acquire, but also the quality of the website.

For example, a well renowned news website citing your website, may provide a higher “link juice” to a search engine than a bunch of unrecognized blogs may do. Therefore, part of the SEO’s job is to strategize and implement link building techniques with the wisdom that not all links are created equal. A right balance between the quality of links and the quantity of links needs to be balanced for an optimal link building for SEO.

Although there are many techniques available to boost your site’s search engine ratings, the primary factor to a successful ranking falls upon the authenticity and value add provided by the website’s original content. In creating high quality content that users will want to use and share, there is an organic growth of the site’s visibility.

There are a few other factors, similar to link building, that can help in securing high search engine rankings. They include:

• User experience elements
• Mobile Friendliness
• Content Optimization
• Site loading speed
• Trust sources and shares

Avoiding Black hat SEO

When it comes to building back links there are two ways to do it - the right way or white hat and the wrong way or black hat. Any tactic that is seen to be deceptive and manipulative have been sharply clamped down by search engines algorithms. For instance, google, the most used search engine on the planet, introduced an algorithm update, Penguin, in early 2012 to eradicate any spammy websites to improve user experience.

Google offers website makers with a webmaster guidelines to make it safe original content to build an audience base in a genuine way. This guideline allows website to avoid any black hat penalization that is built into the algorithm used by the search engine.

This penalty can be quite costly for the websites as it strips the site from their hard-earned rankings and may take a lot of time to have it removed. After which the website has to build their credibility from scratch proving to be a time consuming and expensive effort.

It also provides various resources to help build your website optimally. If gaining traction on googles search results are one of your primary goals, the webmaster can help with the following:

• Help Google find your pages
• Help Google understand your pages
• Help visitors use your pages

These resources have been carefully crafted by google in recognizing the best practices, providing for a valuable blueprint to follow for websites in their infancy.

Some black hat methods include:

• None to minimal original content
• Cloaking – showing different content to different users
• Having affiliates without providing any added value
• Using irrelevant keywords with loading pages, or keyword stuffing
• Automatically generated content
• Abusing structed data
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as – phishing, viruses, trojans, or other malware

How to gain good back links?

When it comes to optimizing to placing your website on top a search engine result, you will need to approach your SEO strategy from all sides. Here are some simple steps to get you started on adding backlinks to your site.

Market Opportunities

Your first step would be to recognize where you are positioned in the market. You can scope out what practices the competition are using and try to one up them by offering added value. This tactic is commonly known as creating a skyscraper.

Quality content

One of the most valuable ways to make your website more attractive is to produce high quality content relevant to you target audience. Ensure to routinely scour through the current trends of the industry. You can provide simple call to actions button on your site, that will allow user to easily share the valuable content on their social media.

You can use the number of shares, or user engagement to nurture better content with your team. Although this may be a more time consuming process, building an inventory of original content will attract many others to link with your site.

Finding and replacing broken links

Online tools such as Dead link checker allows you to identify any broken links that may be present on popular webpage. This is an opportunity for you to connect and pitch your website to replace the broken link. This is beneficial for both parties as it fixes the non-existent resource on the website and allows you to gain a backlink.

It is best to avoid any spammy or low-quality links on your own website. Google strongly supports removing such links, and can helpdisavow low-quality backlink if it comes down to it. Having strong and reliable backlinks within your site can help when negotiating with a popular webpage.

Leveraging guest blogs

One way of gaining backlinks is to drive high traffic and social media webs to your own website. You can do this by offering to provide guest blogs and articles on already established websites. This can help with building your own websites brand.

There are several high authority websites that allow you to post on their platform, you can look for “write to us” next to the keyword search on google to narrow the list. Ensure to find a site that seems to getting a lot of traffic.

Self-promoting

The nature of the internet is such that you will need to involve yourself in self-promotion to get noticed. Although the root to your websites value is in providing original content, branching out to influential websites, influencers, news outlets is necessary to reach your audience.

You can create a pitch template that answers the following when reaching out to these entities:

• Why do you they (host website) gain by using your article?
• How is it relevant to their audience?
• How frequent can you help contribute to their site?
• What insights can you offer to their industry that may not be on their radar?

Expert personnel

A fruitful way in getting backlinks is to getting your websites as much exposure as possible. A simple way to do this is to boost your website’s reputation by interviewing experts relevant to the industry. Diversifying the medium, for example via a podcast, can allow more visibility to your web page.

Charts and info graphics

Receiving data through infographics such as charts and graphs one of the most popular ways in which users are digesting information. You can create your visual aid and make it shareable for other websites to incorporate in their websites.

Pitching on the infographic’s validity is a far better in approaching in building a sustainable relationship with a website, as apposed to asking for a direct backlink or share. With a better relationship you can learn more about the websites needs and possibly be approached for any new content being rolled out.

Linking internally

A guaranteed relatable relevant content match is present within your own site. In backlinking your articles to each other, you will create a positive user experience to your website. Ensure not to create information loops, by creating long customer journeys that crawl through the varied content you have on your site.

Conclusion

The starting point for building an online reputation is in creating quality authentic content that resonated to the consumer and the field. Once you have established that foundation, the above tactics can help in gaining high authority backlinks to help boost your sites presence on a search engine. A guiding light while deciding your SEO strategy is answering – is this ultimately going to benefit my end consumer?

Hope this article has helped you get acquainted with backlinking and the methods at your disposable. Please feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.