Let us delve into what backlinks are and why they are important.
To summarise, backlinks are simply a link from one website to another. Take our website for example, if you check out our footer we have a link to the thegreenwebfoundation.org, they’ve now gained a backlink from us, if the Green Web Foundation was to add a link to our website then we would gain a backlink, it’s as simple as that!
Google see backlinks as an important ranking factor. The reason for this is that they are seen as a badge of trust, the more sites linking to your site the more trustworthy you are seen as. Your site is seen as a place that holds valuable information, knowledge or resources.
Backlinks are measured on their authority, domain authority (DA) to be precise. Domain Authority is based on the site's homepage whereas Page Authority is associated with all other pages, you're about us page, a news feed, or product/service pages.
Both of these are measured on a scale of 0-100. It’s not as simple as thinking 1 backlink scores 1 point, if only it was as easy as that! There are many factors involved in the quality of the backlink but the higher the score the better, if you can get a backlink from a 100 scoring Domain you are certainly onto a winner.
A useful online tool to measure your own websites domain authority and your page authority are ahrefs.com. Don’t panic if you’re not scoring 100/100, not even Amazon have reached 100.
There is no magic wand or quick fix to obtaining backlinks. It is something you should see as a long-term SEO practice; it is one of the longest ways to improve your SEO score but certainly worth it.
If you are looking for some quick fixes there are a few things you can check. Are your social media accounts all linking to your homepage? Have you submitted your domain to all of the major business directories? A quick Google search will help you work out which ones have the highest DA score.
Another good strategy is to write articles for other websites and blogs then ask them to include a backlink to your site. This can be a time-consuming process but you will certainly see an improvement in your search rankings over time, as mentioned before, increasing your backlink count should be seen as part of your long-term SEO strategy.
Be very careful with this, remember there is no quick fix to link building, it takes time. Quite often a link building company will link you to poor quality websites with very low DA scores. Cutting corners like this is only ever going to end in tears. Think about how long it will take to get all of those bad backlinks removed compared to the time you could have spent building up good quality links?
Article Written by Matt Partridge
Web Developer & Digital Marketing Specialist
matt@madebyabstraction.com
