How do I rank at the top of Google for my chosen keywords? Well, you need to make sure that you’re hitting all the right notes when it comes to SEO. Backlinks play a significant role in google ranking. So if you want to rank at the top you’re going to need them. In this tutorial, I’ll tell you exactly what backlinks are, why they’re so important, and exactly how to get them.
So let’s start right at the beginning.
Contents
What Are BackLinks?
A backlink is a hyperlink from a third-party website to yours. Google uses backlinks as a ranking signal to measure the validity, relevancy, and authority of your website. Generally, the more backlinks you have, the better their quality will help to higher up the search results you’ll appear for your target keyword.
So what does this mean?
Well if you have hundreds of backlinks from popular and authoritative websites such as Forbes and Business Insider. Then it’s likely that you’ll rank very highly for a particular search query.
Alternatively, if you have little to no backlinks or the backlinks that you do have are from low authority websites, then you’re likely to get buried in the search results.
But is this always the case?
Well not necessarily. Think of it as a chain. If the content that contains your link has little to no backlinks itself or all the links are a low authority then google might place a higher value on the link coming from the lower authority website.
So why do websites need backlinks?
Well, we need backlinks for two reasons. first of all to improve our ranking and second of all to increase discoverability. Backlinks are one of google’s top ranking factors. Google sees each backlink as a vote of confidence. Whenever one website links to another, it acts as a signal that the content is of value.
Alongside ranking juice. Backlinks make your website more discoverable by increasing the volume of referral traffic.
There are three ways to get backlinks.
1. Earn backlinks.
You could earn them by creating high-quality shareable content which naturally attracts backlinks from other sites. The content you create needs to be engaging and informative. And could come in the form of videos, infographics, or blog posts. This kind of content increases the possibility of it being seen and picked up organically.
However, it can be a little tricky to earn backlinks in volume via this method. You could publish
amazing content. But whether third-party websites decide to link to you will depend on other factors such as the strength of your brand and the popularity of your website.
2. Manual outreach.
The second way to earn backlinks is by manual outreach. which includes the following steps.
Research
When conducting manual outreach research is critical. You need to find the kind of websites
that complement yours and publish similar content.
Start by searching Google for blogs that are the exact match for your target keywords. Once you’ve narrowed down your options into a shortlist look for the factors that could influence the quality of the backlink you’ll receive.
Once you find a domain go to CeeVee’s Domain Authority Checker which is a 100% free tool. Here we can see the overall health score of this website and decide whether it’s worth adding to our list of bloggers to outreach to.
- The depth and expertise of the existing content
- The volume of traffic arriving on the website
- Domain authority
- And relevance to your niche
all these factors can make a big difference to the ranking impact of any backlink placement.
Outreach
Next, you need to work on contacting the blog owners. We have to develop relationships with thousands of bloggers around the world. Here are our top tips.
- Always make your pitches personal.
By including the name of the blog owner and talking about their target audience and existing content.
- Try not to rush into asking for placement right away.
Look for ways that you can provide them with value. For example, you could offer to write a product to review for free.
- You can also connect with bloggers on social media and build a relationship that way
3. Backlink services.
Alternatively, you can just skip the manual labour altogether and use backlink services. This is probably the most efficient way to build backlinks on the scale. Here you use CeeVee’s Backlink Maker to get the number of backlinks depending on your niche. It is a very easy to use and powerful service that is completely free.
If you’re building links as a brand this could save you valuable time and resources that would be required for manual outreach. Trust us it can take a long time to build a good relationship.
We spoke a lot here about keywords and anchor texts. Each backlink is attached to an anchor text. You need to choose these to make sure that your link building profile is as natural as possible.
When choosing your anchor text you have a few options.
Exact match anchors are carbon copies of the original page title. So if you have a page titled shoes, the anchor text would-be shoes.
Partial match anchors are those that include some variation of the original page title. So in this example, you might have dark red designer shoes.
Branded anchors use your brand name. So for ceevee we would use ceevee.
It’s as simple as that your branded anchors. But to decide on your other anchor text, you’ll need to research keywords and use the search intent. This is the most important step. It makes everything that you do within your SEO strategy more efficient.
The aim of this research is
- To understand what your users are searching for
- The keyword difficulty
- And the search volume
A great way to choose keywords is by brainstorming. Or if you would like to make it a little easier you could use google ads, keyword planner. Just type in your chosen keyword and it will show related phrases including those that don’t contain the original seed. Make sure that you choose keywords around your user search intent. For that, you can get help from our free Keywords Suggestion Tool. For example, if you were going to create a blog post around the “best fashion” trends. Just use our Keywords Suggestion Tool and get related keywords from it. It’s also useful to type your keywords into Google and see what it suggests. Only use those keywords that your users are actually going to be searching for.
iMPORTANT
One last thing to note before you start building backlinks you need to ensure that your existing pages can convert. It’ll be a waste of your time energy and resources to build backlinks to pages that aren’t on point.
You need a strong website infrastructure and a great user experience on every page that you build backlinks to.
You need to make sure that it’s quick to load includes engaging content and supports your visitors journey.
Otherwise, all you’ll do is drive traffic to pages that increase your bounce rate and decrease your time spent on the page. Which are both ranking factors.