Backlinks to a website are a very important part of the Google algorithm. Google likes websites that have a lot of links pointing at them. It’s the main reason webmasters build links to their own websites; to help them rank better.
What link building means
Backlinks are links on websites other than your own pointing back to relevant pages on your site. If lots of websites link to your webpage X, but no websites link to webpage Y, then webpage X would be more popular and would have a higher PageRank on Google.
How do link building for your website?
Before you start link building, you need to ask yourself this question: Do you believe your page deserves to rank well based on the quality of the content? If not, then trying to get backlinks and boost your authority may be a waste of time.
Your Website’s Content Quality
Remember, poor content cannot hide in Google, so to rank high, and maintain those rankings, you need to have high-quality content on your site. In Google’s desire to serve searchers with the most valuable search results, it’s obvious that the ‘quality of your website would be important. Read here Content Quality Check Step by Step
Improving and increasing content is often the fastest way to boost a struggling site’s ranking. This makes sense; Google tries to match the needs of searchers with websites that meet those needs.
High-Quality Backlinks
Go for quality backlinks every time, not quantity. Always consider quality as a priority in every backlink you get. The backlink should be on a quality page on a quality site The page on your site should also be quality. Only look to get links from authority sites that are relevant to your niche.
Google likes websites that have a lot of links pointing at them because this indicates that they’re popular and authoritative. Popular and authoritative sites tend to rank better because they’re usually better quality and more useful.
Link’s Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text used in a link. Example :
How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs
Obviously, clicking on that link won’t take you to a website called ‘How to Create SEO Friendly URLs’. Those words are what we call the anchor text.
The reason that anchor text is important is that it’s one of the measures Google uses to establish the topic of the linked page. For example, in the ‘How to Create SEO Friendly URLs ’ example, Google would see the words ‘How to create SEO friendly URLs ’ and associate the linked page with that phrase.
Google actually started penalizing sites that used too much “exact match anchor text”, where the anchor text exactly matches the target keyword. It’s natural for websites to get a lot of links with their company name and website address as anchor text, so this is what Google expects to see in what we call a “natural-looking link profile”.
External Links — SEO Best Practices
If you have lots of keyword-rich anchor text links to your site, is as follows:
- Try to change the anchor text from keywords to page titles/URLs or site names.
- For backlinks on poor-quality websites, remove the links altogether.
- Build more quality backlinks from authority websites that relate to your niche. If you are choosing the anchor text, use page titles, headline text, site name, or bare URLs.
- If you have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of poor backlinks to your site, the disavow tool may be the best approach.
The Best Backlinks
These are backlinks from other sites that you did not personally request. In other words, another webmaster links to your site because they think it’s worthy and offers value to their visitors. These are natural votes and are extremely powerful. The ideal backlinks to your site would have the following properties:
- The link is on a high authority site.
- The page containing the link relates to the page it links to.
- The page containing the link is a high-quality page, with high-quality content.
- The link is in the body of the article (contextual).
- There are very few outbound links (to other websites) on the same page.
- The page your link appears on has a lot of human interaction (social shares, comments, etc.).
- You do not control the backlink.
