Since we assume you’ve been following along with our blog and reading all of our articles about how to build and develop a strong online presence, we know that you’re ready for more. You know what a link is. You know why it’s important. You’re totally up-to-speed on penguins and have booked your flight to Antarctica to get up close and personal with our feathered friend. So, what else could there possibly be to learn about this Internet stuff?
Remember, this post: Good Relationships for Good Link Building ? Well, in this post we talked a lot about links and specifically backlinks and how important they are in developing a strong online presence. Google really likes backlinks and uses these to rate the importance and relevance of your website. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher the chance that your website is also of equally high quality.
So, as a refresher, this is what you want from your links:
- Like-to-like: link to other websites that fit into your niche.
- Keep it fresh: regularly audit your links to control the quality.
- Being the cool kid counts: link to the most popular websites in your space.
Okay, great so now that we’re all on the same page, let’s dive in and talk about good backlinks.
Quality, Quality, Quality
This is a theme that we come back to so often here at KNOW Agency. Everything you do online, particularly when it comes to backlinks must focus on quality. Before we get into the deep details of what makes a good backlink, we want to reiterate the importance of quality.
Your website and search engine results will suffer when you neglect the quality of your backlinks. Only include backlinks to top-notch quality websites. How do you determine quality? Read the website, click all the links, test out the search functionality, search for the company/website in Google – if any of the information you read or discover makes you pause and think twice, then perhaps the quality is not of the level you need.
Remember, it always helps to be linking to the most popular websites in your space, so if the website has better content than yours or ranks higher in search engine results – perfect. This is a quality backlink. See what you can do to be part of that site by contacting their webmaster or seeing if you know someone there that can help.
The Fundamentals of a Good Backlink
We’ll cut straight to the goods here. A good backlink is:
- Relevant: it doesn’t make good backlink sense to link to a website that is not relevant to your company, products or service. Google is looking at your links and grading them on relevance – the relevance of the website, the relevance of the exact page you’re linking to, and the relevance of the content on the page. Don’t accept a backlink just because the website is popular – it needs to fit into your business niche and overall marketing plan.
- Honest: this comes back to looking for only quality backlinks. You only want to link to companies and websites that you trust and consider providing honest content. There are so many websites out there that are delivering poor and often incorrect content, stay away from these. Google has a TrustRank that it uses to measure the trustability (we made this word up) of the website. (Hint: we are experts in this, contact us and we’ll talk about TrustRank in detail and evaluate your backlinks for you.)
- Clicked: if no one is clicking your backlinks, there is no point in having the link. Make sure your backlinks are visible and are located on your most popular pages. You could have the best backlinks but if they’re buried deep in your website, they won’t do much for you.
- Keywords: always aim for your backlinks to use anchor text (the text your readers will see and click) that matches your keywords. The key to this is you don’t want to keyword jam your page, this can make the content hard to read and Google will penalize you if you use your keywords too many times. This is not simple to get right. You need a good writer, the right keywords, the right set of backlinks, and the right page length. (Hint: we can help you out here. This is what we do and we know the science behind this, and we’ve got a writer who can dazzle.)
- PageRank: the higher the PageRank of the page you’re linking to, the better the quality of your backlink.
- Free: while it is tempting to pay for backlinks, this comes with a high level of risk. Google will penalize you if they learn that you’ve been paying for your backlinks and in fact doing so is in violation of their published guidelines.
Stay Tuned
That’s our brief primer on good backlinks.
Suffice it to say, good backlinks can do a lot for your website and your search engine results. This doesn’t need to be hard or confusing, but we know it can seem overwhelming, this is why we write these blog posts – we want to help you out. (Hint: our next blog post will be about bad backlinks – this is a must read. Don’t miss out, subscribe to our blog to stay in the know.)
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