Digital marketing is a competitive arena where most businesses worldwide strive for online visibility. It is an exciting field that you might want to try. But because almost every business has gone online, marketing your company digitally might seem intimidating at first.
You might feel like you do not have anything to compete with the larger companies who dominate the digital scene, including SERPs. To get started with digital marketing, one of the best strategies you should implement is SEO. Doing this properly will allow you to get ahead of your competitors and reach your target audience much easier.
What is SEO?
Most people become intimidated by this term because they do not really know what SEO is about. Although it might seem too technical, SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the practice of improving your website or piece of content to help it rank higher on Google and other search engines. This strategy involves organic methods, meaning that you do not have to pay for the spot that your website has on SERPs.
Usually, an SEO company will provide you with a strategy that can be divided into two categories, both of which are essential to the success of your SEO campaign.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the methods used to optimize the parts of your websites that you can directly control, such as your overall content quality, page performance, and content structure. The most common optimization tactics done for on-page SEO involve using the right keywords on the page title and copy, improving the meta description to draw attention in SERPs, and using HTML codes and alt tags.
The main purpose for using these tactics is to improve your website’s position in SERPs by helping search engines interpret the webpage easier. On-page SEO tactics also provide users with an idea of what to expect on your website once they click on the result.
Off-Page SEO
Another category that your SEO strategy may fall into is off-page SEO. Contrary to on-page SEO, off-page SEO involves page ranking factors that occur outside of your website. It is mostly concerned with how authoritative and popular your domain is.
Off-page SEO can be done through your promotion materials and the exposure your brand gets from them. But the most common off-page SEO strategy is building backlinks for your website.
What is a Backlink in SEO and Its Examples
A backlink—also called inbound, incoming, and one-way link—is a link that comes from one website and points to another one. This is an important factor for your SEO strategy because Google and other search engines consider every backlink as a “vote” for a specific webpage. This means that if one of your webpages has several backlinks, it will have a higher chance of ranking in SERPs.
Link building in Ireland might seem simple. After all, you only need to place links to your webpages on other websites. However, you should learn that backlinks can be categorized as good or bad depending on where and how they were posted.
Good and Bad Examples of Backlinks
You should know the difference between acquiring good and bad backlinks for your website to avoid harming your off-page SEO efforts. Here are some examples of good and bad backlinks
Good Backlinks
Good backlinks help your website gain more authority and should be relevant to your website. This type of backlink often appears in the following.
- Local listings and directories
- Industry-specific directories
- Guest posting
- Existing partnerships with other companies
- News and press releases
Bad Backlinks
Unlike good backlinks, bad ones are low-quality and spammy. They also do not benefit your business because they often have no relevance to what you do.
Although not always harmful, you should be cautious with the following types of backlinks. They may seriously hurt your link building efforts if not managed properly.
- Paid links
- Hidden links
- Blog and forum spam
- Reciprocal links
What is a Dofollow and a Nofollow Backlink?
Aside from learning about the different types of good and bad backlinks, you should also know about dofollow and nofollow links.
These two terms describe how websites can be linked with one another. They serve as an instruction to search engines about what to do with the link, whether to consider or ignore it.
A dofollow link can help you with your SEO efforts because it passes the authority or link juice of the origin site to the destination site. Dofollow links that come from authoritative sites and point to your webpages can make search engines think that your site is trustworthy. With enough dofollow links from reputable sites, you can help your website rank higher in SERPs.
On the other hand, a nofollow link tells search engines to ignore the connection between two sites. It instructs search engines not to pass any authority to the website it is pointing to, thus not doing anything to help your SEO efforts.
Nofollow links are typically used when you do not want to share your link juice to the linked website. you can also utilize this type of backlink for sponsored and affiliate links and user-generated content.
How Important are Backlinks?
Learning how to create backlinks for your website is essential to boosting your off-page SEO efforts. Acquiring good backlinks to your website will also allow you to enjoy the following benefits:
Better Rankings
Backlinks serve as a vote of confidence for your website. If your website receives several high-quality backlinks, Google and other search engines will trust it more and rank it higher for relevant search queries.
Improved Discoverability
Search engines have more chances of finding your content through your backlinks. This is possible because Google and other search engines discover new content by going back to the pages that they already know about. So, if a popular page links to your website, search engines can find your content easier.
Gain Referral Traffic
Backlinks are a great way to drive referral traffic to your website. This happens when one website uses your content as a reference and adds credit to your website. When a reader wants to learn more about the topic, they can click the link to your website, giving you additional referral traffic.
How to Build Backlinks
Now that you know how important backlinks are for your SEO efforts, you might be asking yourself “how to create backlinks for my website?” To help you start, here are some tips on how to get backlinks for your site.
Earn Backlinks
There are three main ways on how to increase the number of backlinks of your website. The first method that you should learn about is how to earn backlinks.
Earned backlinks are organic and are created when people come across your content through a relevant query using search engines and decide to link to your page. So, if you want to earn backlinks to your website, you should create content that people can use as their reference.
Create Backlinks
Creating backlinks involves the practice of adding links to your site from other websites manually. You can do this by submitting your information to business directories. Another way of creating backlinks for your website is by leaving comments on relevant blog posts and replying to forum threads related to your business.
Build Backlinks
This is the most common method that companies use to increase the number of backlinks to their websites. You can build backlinks by reaching out to website owners, editors, and webmasters and convincing them to link to your webpage. Here are a few things you can do:
- Guest blogging: You can offer them a piece of content that is related to their website and that features a link to your webpage.
- Broken link building: Look for dead links on their websites that are relevant to your business. Then, reach out to them and ask them to replace the dead link with a working one for your website.
- The skyscraper technique: Find a piece of content that receives lots of backlinks and write something better. After that, reach out to the websites linking to the original content and propose that they link to your better-written article instead.
- Unlinked mentions: Search for pieces of content that mention your brand but do not link to your website. Then, ask the author to add a link to your website to make your brand name clickable.
Does Pinterest Count as Backlinks?
You might be aware that more and more businesses are using social media platforms to boost their SEO strategies. So, you might be thinking if you can use social media sites—particularly Pinterest—in your link building efforts.
The answer is yes and no. Pins that contain your website link can be considered as a backlink. However, these pins have a nofollow tag, meaning that you will not gain any link juice through them. You can only use these pins to determine what kind of content your users resonate with and learn more about your target audience.
Start Link Building and See the Improvements on Your Website
You can boost your SEO efforts further by adding good backlinks to your website. Doing so will allow you to improve your rankings, have your content discovered much easier, and increase referral traffic to your website. These benefits can help you get ahead of your competitors and bring your brand one step closer to success.
