How to Safely Increase the Amount of Backlinks to Your Website

For those interested in improving SEO for your website, backlinks are one of the simplest, most effective means of accomplishing that task.

From website owners to professional SEO services, backlinks are one of the cornerstone methods of improving search engine rankings and providing greater authority and presence for your site.

But what are backlinks, how do they work, and why try to increase their number to make your site more visible on the internet?

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is a link to your site that originates from other sites. The link that is provided is designed to validate to search engines such as Google that the page being linked is worthy of being ranked. Basically, if the content of your web page can be augmented by a link to a more authoritative site, then that boosts your SEO efforts to bolster the search results rankings that give your site more visibility.

Generally speaking, the more backlinks you have, the more it will work for your site. While there is no guarantee that a single backlink will improve search engine rankings, having a number of them will have an impact.

A good backlink will not only come from a more authoritative site but be related to the topic that is the subject of your page. The use of backlinks goes back to the beginnings of search engines as they represent a solid foundation that your site is worthy of being ranked.

However, getting good backlinks are not easy for a number of reasons, but mostly because there is no advantage to the more authoritative site to have your page be the subject of their backlink. Plus, if all sites had good backlinks, the advantage would be lost in separating good pages from not-so-good pages. What follows are a few ways to get good backlinks that are safe, effective, and can help boost your search engine rankings.

Community Outreach

There are companies that have public relations staffs that reach out to their community for posting news and information, quite often blog posts. They are designed to grow online connections that further advance their causes. You can take advantage of that if your website is related to the content they offer by having it posted on your site.

By working with the PR representatives, especially when explaining how valuable SEO is in terms of getting links, you may be able to post what a PR team sends to you or allows you to copy which means having a powerful backlink on your site.

Create Interesting Content

The easiest and arguably best way to get more backlinks is to create content that will draw them to you. Of course, this is a bit “Catch-22” because in order to improve your content enough to earn backlinks, it will have to be worthy of backlinks. Still, this advice is the most straightforward means of garnering more visibility in searches.

Social Media

While this is a more indirect form of finding valuable backlinks, it does offer a means to locate websites and find those who are interested in sharing them with you. The key is not to ask for links, but rather find those in your industry to talk to and share ideas. If they find your content interesting, they may offer to create a link for promotional purposes.

It’s a fine balance between searching for backlinks and not asking directly for them, but if you can master this art form, it can be quite beneficial. You can be subtle by offering a teaser and link back to your content when you post on social media. At least that might draw interested parties. Working to get your content popular on social media is a key part of digital marketing.

Charities & Events

One of the simplest and most effective backlink strategies to bolster SEO for your website is by providing links to charities, events, and local event pages. When your online business donates to a cause, be sure to create a web link to let others know what you have done. It is a deceptively effective tactic and is part of the professional SEO services that makes your website more visible.

When you consider that most charities, particularly the ones with higher visibility are usually more than willing to backlink in response to your donation, it is a great way to boost awareness of your site. Plus, you make people aware of your interests outside of your industry.

Look at the Competition

Tools such as Moz and Majestic allow you to look at the public information of competitors in your industry. From that, you can see their link profiles and pull the ones that are most closely related to what you do. If a site has listed the top retailers in your industry and your site is not present, then reach out to them and make the case that you are worthy.

While you may not reach the heights of large online retail stores such as Amazon, you should attempt to have your site noticed within your niche or industry. Speciality sites are often included in “best-of” lists, so make the attempt with yours as well.

Become an Expert

You may wonder what it takes to become an expert on the web. If there is something that is part of your company which sparks passion in you, then you can create a series of online courses, host webinars, podcasts, or work with local universities. By doing this, you are expanding awareness of your expertise which can translate indirectly to getting backlinks.

When others see you as an authority, it provides a pathway to getting backlinks to your site. Consider that when you speak to an organisation or university and provide a biography of yourself, include a link to your site.

Effective SEO for your website mean using backlinks as much as possible. This ensures that your site gets notice and is one of the best SEO services that you can use. While getting effective backlinks can be difficult, if you are persistent the effort will eventually pay off.

Backlinks to your website can form an important part of your SEO strategy

Good quality links from reputable websites are difficult to get but can work wonders for your ranking

As you launch your website one of the most important things to try and do is to get other sites to link to yours. Not only does this speed up the process of the search engines knowing your site exists, but it also counts as a ‘vouch’ from those websites to your company. Adding your website to directories is a great way of accomplishing this, as there are plenty of well established directories online that let you add your site to their listings for free.

Although most people don’t use directories to find things they are looking for, there are still people that do, so not only might you benefit from more visitors, you will also gain a backlink from a website to your website.

The amount of backlinks that your website has does affect your search engine rankings, although the links have to be of good quality to count, and if you pay a company to get you hundreds or even thousands of backlinks, the quality of these links is often very low, and could even get you penalised if they are worthless spam / junk sites. Link building can be a useful tool though.

So one of the best things to do either before or after your new website launches is to add your site to as many directories as possible. Most directories will not charge you to add your site to their listings, however some do. It’s up to you to decide whether any particular sites are worth the fee, but there are plenty of places online that do not charge.