When it comes to search engine rankings, a variety of factors are used by search engines such as Google and Bing to rank webpages. However, not all the factors are given equal weight. Some factors such as backlinks have a much higher weight in the ranking algorithms.
Simply put, a backlink is nothing but a hyperlink from one web page to another. If you click on that link, your browser will take you to the destination web page. These links are regarded by search engines as a trust vote for the destination website. In the initial years, the number of backlinks played a much more important role but these days, the quality of backlinks is much more important as compared to just the number.
This is the reason, earlier site owners were able to rank their websites by building thousands of spam links but these days, such links do much more harm than good. Therefore, the best way to increase the rankings of your website in the search engine result pages is to get as many high-quality links from other authority domains as possible.
Here are a few tips on how you can get high-quality links naturally:
1. High-Quality Content
People like to link to content that is high quality and useful. Therefore, the best way to get links naturally is to publish high-quality content on your website. Make sure the content is relevant, useful and factual. It is also important to regularly publish different forms of content.
For instance, you should publish long-form content (articles that are a few thousand words long) along with articles in FAQ format and various other formats.
Listicles or articles with lists are really popular and attract a lot of natural links.
You should also publish video content on your website as many people these days prefer watching a video over reading a long article.
2. Make It Easy to Share
Your job isn’t done after publishing high-quality content. You also need to put it in front of people and the best way to do it is to use various social media platforms. If you are using a popular CMS such as WordPress, there are several plug-ins that allow you to add social media buttons on each post. If you are using some other CMS, you should be able to find equivalent plug-ins to add social media buttons.
3. Resource Pages
This is a really popular way to get high-quality links from websites of established institutions. These links carry a lot of weight as the institution websites have higher authority in the eyes of search engines. Such websites usually have a resource page to help their visitors discover other high-quality content online.
Use a search engine to locate such websites with the help of custom queries. You should then get in touch with the Webmaster of such websites and ask them to include your website on their resources page.
4. Help Others
This is another popular way to get authoritative links from high-quality domains. There are many huge websites on the Internet and many of these websites have a number of broken links. They might have linked to a certain web page a few years ago and now that web page no longer exists. This results in a broken link.
Broken links are not good for the Internet and for SEO of that website. You can use various online tools to find such broken links on authority domains and make them aware of such broken links. When you get in touch with them, ask them to consider linking to your own website as a high-quality resource in place of the broken link.
5. Help a Reporter Out
This is a service wherein real journalists can ask experts in different niches for help. You can sign up for this service through their website and whenever a query is posted by a journalist regarding a topic that relates to your website, you can provide them the relevant information along with a link to your website.
6. Never Buy Links
If you search online, you will find several shady websites and forums wherein they sell backlink packages. Keep in mind that Google is against buying links. If you buy links in order to increase the ranking of your website, rest assured that those links will get discovered sooner or later. Your website might get penalized and in some cases, Google has also completely de-indexed some domains. So, you should never buy links and instead, focus on the above-mentioned tips in order to earn high-quality natural links.
Conclusion
Overall, backlinks remain the backbone of search engine optimization. However, the quality of links plays a much more important role as compared to the sheer quantity. You should make use of the above-mentioned tips in order to naturally earn authoritative links to your website.