A good backlink will generate quality traffic, be from a relevant and trusted website, and come with rich keywords. A good backlink profile will include a lot of these. With digital marketing changing so fast, it can be hard to understand how to get powerful backlinks that matter long-term.
How To Get Powerful Backlinks
To get powerful backlinks, you’ll need to know that you’re working with a trustworthy link building company. You’ll want to know that they take long-term results seriously. You can determine this by getting clear on the company’s standards to create quality backlinks.
9 Qualities of Powerful Backlinks
1. Relevancy
If your website is about movies, you want other websites about movies to link to you. Search engines look at the relevancy of that link and view it as a vote. They decide that another expert in your industry has decided your content offers quality on the same topic.
If an irrelevant website links to you, it doesn’t help you get relevant traffic to your website. It also confuses the search results. Search engines aren’t sure what it really means if a casino website links to a hair salon. Irrelevant links can lead to search engines lowering your ranking.
2. Anchor Text
The anchor text is the phrase that a clickable link is placed on. When this text uses a relevant keyword, it tells the search engines to associate your website with that text. This is how backlinks can not only strengthen your overall domain for SEO but also support your keyword efforts.
When it comes to quality anchor text, strong websites want rich keywords and a variety of them. If the same keywords are being used on every backlink, the search engines will read that as unnatural. That could count against you. To vary your text, consider other keywords to rank for, synonyms, and vary the order of the words.
3. Natural Links
It doesn’t look natural for a website to have a page that’s just a list of links. It also doesn’t look natural for a cooking website to link to politics, religion, and casinos all in one article. Search engines are smart enough now to notice when unnatural linking behavior happens. They notice this and then think that something strange is going on.
Search engines want to show their users pages that have quality content. They want to highlight websites that are focused on doing natural things. They don’t want to show users a website full of spammy content and links that make no sense.
4. Do-Follow
Most websites linking to you will have do-follow links. This is the default state for linking, so anytime someone naturally links to you it’s a do-follow. However, if you pay an untrustworthy website to acquire a large number of backlinks, they may be no-follow links.
A no-follow link is one where someone wrote no-follow into the HTML code for the link. This tells search engines not to give any link authority to the website they’re linking to. While it will still be clickable and possibly drive traffic, it won’t improve your search engine results.
5. New Domains
When HuffingtonPost.com links to you for the first time, it carries a lot of weight. The second time they do it, it’s okay. By the 50th time they link to you, that link doesn’t carry as much weight with the search engines. This is true even if they linked from a new page on the website.
To really see results, you need new domains to be linking to your website. Search engines know that this means new people are finding your website worthy of a link. That gets you a lot more points in the eyes of Google. It indicates that your website is growing in popularity and gaining attention, so Google should give it attention, too.
6. Traffic
Is the website that’s linking to you likely to drive a little organic traffic to your website? When actual users are likely to read the page, click the link, and visit your website, you have something valuable.
Yes, this likely means that the link will matter more to Google. It also just means natural and relevant traffic coming your way, and that’s an amazing thing. If you are getting real traffic from a relevant website linking to you, count your lucky stars. There’s nothing better than having ideal customers naturally sent your way.
7. Domain Authority
It makes sense that quality websites have more authority than low-quality ones. To help make sense of this, Moz developed a system for ranking domain authority. This system makes it easier to predict how likely a domain is to rank on the search engine result pages.
There are a lot of different factors that are calculated to determine this. One of them is the quality of links coming to a website. The higher the domain authority, the more likely it is that a backlink from that website will improve your ranking.
8. The Quality and Quantity of Other Outbound Links
A new website has just given you a backlink and you’re ready to get excited. Pause for just a moment first and take a look at the domain linking to you. The number of other outbound links matters. The quality of the other websites they are linking out to also matters.
The quality and quantity of outbound links are something the search engines will look at. If a high authority and relevant website links to you, and they rarely link anywhere, that counts a lot. If a website that links just anywhere links to you, it counts less.
9. Variety
When you look at the full portfolio of backlinks for your website, consider variety. An amazing backlink profile will have a variety of anchor text being used to link to you. There will be a variety of domains linking to you. There will also be a variety of domains that your site is linking out to.
Another major area to watch is the pages on your site that are earning links. You don’t want to build backlinks to only one piece of content. Ideally, you want many pages on your website to be linked to regularly.
If you are working to improve your search engine traffic, you need to reevaluate your backlink profile. We know how overwhelming it can be to find backlinks, especially ones that provide the quality necessary for real results. Visit BetterBacklinks today to elevate your link-building strategy.
