Creating great backlinks is an important part of building your website’s domain authority, but too often backlinks look artificial.
In their enthusiasm to talk about their company and to ensure that potential clients notice their link, businesses do themselves a disservice and end up placing links so that they stick out like sore thumbs. It can turn into a real mess – but it doesn’t have to be that way.
If you’re working to build backlinks for your website, these 3 tricks can help ensure that they look natural, and that makes it more likely that they’ll perform well. It will take a little more effort, but you’ll find the results make it well worth it.
1] Put It In Context
There are plenty of sites that feature a diverse assortment of content, as well as highly specialized pages. Each has its merits and its roll in today’s digital ecosystem, but its easiest to place natural backlinks on a site that shares your niche.
The flipside of placing links on such a site is that it can take more effort than it would to place a post with a lower quality site. The benefits of working with these sites makes it well worth it, though.
2] Create Quality Content
Ensuring that you place your content on a suitable website – one where it will blend in – will go a long way towards making your backlink look natural, but it’s not the only important element.
You also need to make sure the new content and the content you’re linking to is of sufficient quality, and that takes effort.
To make sure you’re pairing quality content with the best placements, SEO.co recommends working with a link building specialist that can help your company craft top-ranking content. Most small businesses just don’t have the expertise to do this on their own.
3] Phrase It Right
There are lots of ways to slip a link into a sentence. In some cases, it’s enough to tie a website to relevant anchor text and keep moving, especially if the other links in the article focus on different topics.
In a more focused article, though, it can help to make your anchor text more distinctive. That includes linking to direct quotes, statistics, or branded information that will stand out from the surrounding content.
While there are number of ways to phrase anchor text that will all be effective, one thing you should avoid is specifically directing readers to “click here” or “follow the link.” Generic phrasings like this look suspicious and don’t perform well with search engines.
4] Where You Start Matters
While building natural backlinks hinges heavily on the websites where you place them, the content you start with is the most important element of all. Building high-quality, content rich pages on your own site will not only give you meaningful content to link back to, but it will also drive more organic links.
Building backlinks is all well and good, but there’s only so much you can do on your own, or even with the help of an SEO agency. The only way to get real volume is to create content that other people will want to link to without any nudging or incentives.
Backlinks matter when it comes to increasing your website’s domain authority and search rankings, but they’ll only serve you if you can nail down the context, the content, and the phrasing. Follow that formula and you’ll be on the road to success.