What are backlinks and why are they so important?

Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. Google uses these backlinks to determine how relevant and popular your site is compared to others. Google’s aim is to give the public the best possible user experience. If there are a lot of websites with backlinks to yours, then yours must be a site that is popular, interesting and relevant in Google’s eyes. The search engine rewards sites that have a high number of relevant backlinks with a high search ranking. This is why a good backlinks profile is essential to score well with Google. Do you need help in developing your linking strategy and achieving good backlinks from relevant sites of authority with Google? Request a free test with our backlink builder tool – Keyboost!

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Link building: how to go about it the right way today

It used to be that buying backlinks as you could was a successful means of boosting your organic search results. But today, it’s definitely not good to buy them in big packages. Google has declared that if you buy bulk backlinks to improve your rankings, you're breaching their guidelines. That's because Google views links as votes of endorsement. So just as paying for a vote would be dishonest, so is buying backlinks. That said, it remains true that the more backlinks you have, the better your Google ranking. But those backlinks must be high quality backlinks. They must be backlinks from relevant websites that have authority or a strong PageRank. That means that your site's backlinks should come from a domain that’s genuinely related to your market, product or service. And the backlinks must be appropriate and useful to the audience of the other website. When you’re going about your link-building strategy, bear in mind that backlinks from popular sites hve far more value than those from website that get few visitors, are new or have a poor link profile. The more authority a site has in the eyes of Google, the more the backlinks you receive from it have SEO value for you. There’s another difference with the past. Today, a certain number of your backlinks should contain the keyword for which you are optimizing. These can, and should, include synonyms or related keywords. These act as a checker indication and confirm to Google that the backlinks fit with the content of your site. It's a sign of backlinks trust. One of the most telling signals Google and the search engines employ as a checker in deciding your rankings is the clickable anchor text. If there are heaps of backlinks going to your page with the right keywords (these can be the same or related), that page has an excellent chance of ranking well for the targeted phrase in the anchor text. So should you buy backlinks today? The answer is no – not if you are buying backlinks indiscriminately, through third party companies and in bulk low quality. This is what Google describes as a 'black-hat’ technique. But if you buy backlinks from a trustworthy company that specializes in the careful work required to research and provide you with only relevant and individual backlinks to the target keywords on your website from sites of authority, then you will have back-linking success. Would you like to analyze your website to determine which keywords are important to link from and improve your search visibility? Click here for a free analysis. We’ve developed an online tool called SEOPageOptimizer to analyse the SEO content of your web pages and help you rise up Google’s rankings for your target short-tail or long-tail keyword. Use our tool for free as a checker to get your keyword use perfect and the anchor text. You don't need to pay for or buy it. Try Page SEO Optimizer online for free.

SEO Page Optimizer: Five reasons to use it

1. First, you get to see the immediate results of your work. Optimize your website following the instructions of SEO Page Optimizer and you’ll rapidly get placed higher in the search results.
2. Second, you get one free analysis daily, for every day of the week – that’s 365 a year. If you need more analyzes, you can order them.
3. Third, for every analysis, you receive a detailed and personalized report, with practical and immediately applicable advice. You’ll be given guidance as to the ideal number of words for your particular webpage, the extent to which your keyword should be used in the headers, links, and body text, and the ideal length of your meta description.
4. Fourth, the report will give you the best related keywords to use along with your own keyword. These words can be used to substitute for your keyword, so you do not use it too often. These related words provide a good context to help Google understand and index your site.
5. Fifth, SEO Page Optimizer works for more than 100 languages and can be targeted to as many countries.

Need additional information? Email us, fill in the contact form or call directly at +44 3308 084797.

How can you check which backlinks are bad for your website?

You can check the backlinks that refer to your site in Google Analytics. Use the following criteria to determine whether your backlinks are poor quality backlinks:

1. You click and discover that the backlinks don’t go directly to the named site
2. It’s one you bought at a low price with other backlinks in large quantities
3. It comes from countries you’re not targeting through your website
4. It’s from a website in a totally unrelated market to yours

If you do find you’ve gained poor quality backlinks, you don’t need to panic. Unless you’ve massively abused Google’s guidelines, you won’t receive a penalty. In its Webmaster Guidelines, Google states that such backlinks “may be considered part of a link scheme”. Note, it only says “may”. Google’s response, even in the most severe cases, is to first issue a warning. You simply then need to remove (or disavow) the low-quality backlinks. Then you re-submit your site to Google to see full recovery. So if you buythem, or have already bought them, you needn’t worry that your site is going to disappear from the rankings overnight due to its backlinks. If Google was to punish all poor quality inbound links in this way, then your competitors could easily take advantage by placing low-quality or spammy backlinks to your site. That’s why Google always gives a warning first.

So don’t buy backlinks. But to develop your backlinks profile if you don't buy?

Buy backlinks indiscriminately, you’re taking a foolish risk. It’s much better to develop a strong link profile naturally. Prioritise content marketing. That's publishing valuable content on your website. These can be articles, blogs, white papers, videos, infographics or other interesting information that can be shared with your network via an e-newsletter or social media. Doing this will create backlinks naturally. And while links from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn etc are given less value than direct website links, Google does attribute value to social links. Another technique to win backlinks is to search for relevant websites in your niche area and ask them to link to your content. Also don’t forget to register with business directories such as Yell.com or cylex-uk.co.uk. These help by placing backlinks to your site and also promote your address, niche and other data online, which makes it more evident to Google. Join any relevant organisations to your sector and get listed in their online directories. Sign up to industry forums and get engaged, answering questions where you have expertise and link to your website or better still, a relevant blog post, in your reply. Look attoo – lots of questions get asked on this that you may be able to respond to and reference your website for brand awareness and to encourage people to link to you. Do some public relations for your company and its website by writing a good press release about a new product or activity and distribute it to relevant publications and websites in your niche with a link to the page on your site that is about this. Check on your coverage. If you find that they have not provided backlinks, it's worth contacting them and asking them to include backlinks. Even if it's a no-follow as their policy, remember that still brings more traffic to you – which is your big objective. Write what is known as a 'round-up' blog post. Take an issue that's relevant to your niche and then send out a question on this to a group of say, 30, experts. Ask them 'what's your opinion on...? or 'how do you see the future of...?', then publish their collected responses in a well-written blog post. Once you've done this, contact each of them individually and let them know they're mentioned and you've linked to them. Chances are they'll want to backlink to the coverage on their own sites and may well Tweet it or display it on their own social media, so you'll get an even bigger audience, and opportunity for backlinks. Finally, it helps to provide plenty of internal links around your website, using keyword optimized anchor text. That may seem odd. Why does placing links between different pages of your website lead to a better position in the search results? It's because you can enhance the content of a web page by linking to it from another strong page. Internal backlinks are not as valuable as external backlinks, but every little bit helps, and these links are easy to achieve. Internal linking helps you broaden your backlink juice to your other webpages.

Click here for a Keyboost test, free of charge!

Try the Keyboost free test

Boost your backlinks for your target keyword now for free. No need to buy. We give you one complimentary Keyboost test per domain as long as your webpage has reached at least position 100 in Google for a given keyword. You’re also eligible to the free Keyboost test if you’ve optimized a page fully for SEO with the use of our SEO Page Optimizer tool. It’s simple to use. Fill in our form and then we’ll get to work. We’ll then give you regular updates on the progress of your site. Our results generally prove more effective than Google AdWords or PPC (pay per click) which are costly to buy. The SERPs improvement becomes apparent within just one month. The method we use is high-tech and requires intricate work. ‘Dynamic’ links are placed onto your site that lead to pages from relevant high authority websites in your specific niche. We are not in the business of encouraging you to buybulk backlinks. Be assured that we never insert poor quality backlinks. That would harm the reputation of your site. We know that each link has to be relevant to be effective. That’s why put all our technical and research expertise at your service to gain you optimum results through only genuinely relevant backlinks. We make a list of appropriate high-scoring websites in your market area. We don’t look at any that are not a good match to your site’s niche. Then we update your new links regularly. In this way, you build a natural and strong link profile. Within a few weeks, your webpage will have more backlinks – you’ll be able to check these for yourself in Google Analytics and we’ll keep you informed of the list. Using Keyboost, you’ll certainly achieve a higher position in Google search results.

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Building a strong link profile is a time consuming task. Can you do it all by yourself?

Link building takes time and energy. To sum up, link building needs you to do all the following:

1. Choose a keyword that you want to optimize for your backlinks.
2. Make a list of relevant websites you want to aim at for backlinks.
3. Find out which websites have the highest authority, so that you can prioritize them for backlinks.
4. Determine which site gets what kind of backlinks.
5. Try to influence where your backlinks will be placed.
6. Regularly check the backlinks still work. A 404 error page won’t be appreciated by either your visitors or Google.
7. Don’t do all this just once, but continuously, so that Google sees that your backlinks profile is dynamic.

Most website owners see the importance of backlinks building but just can’t afford to devote enough time to their backlinks. Is that true for you? Then Keyboost provides a solution. Give Keyboost a free try now.

Give Keyboost a free try now!

Can we help with your link strategy or wider SEO?

Keyboost Company's consultant team is part of one of Europe's leading SEO consultancy companies. We’ve helped customers optimise their websites over more than 15 years. Our team offers a range of SEO services. Not sure what you need? Get in touch with us. We'll talk your situation through. If you need a full SEO audit, we’ll do that in one actionable package you can buy and that you put in place to improve your SEO step by step.

Technical advice from Keyboost's consultants

We know that every website has different challenges. Our goal matches yours. To boost your website’s organic search results. You can mail us or call directly at +44 3308 084797.

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