If you own a website and have embarked on a digital marketing journey, the chances are you’ll have heard horror stories of low-quality links causing websites to crash out of the search results. You’re right to be cautious about backlinks, however, there’s still a place for them in your marketing toolkit, you just need to be smart about the way in which you obtain them.
Here’s why backlinks are still important, and how Healy Web Design can support this.
Google still listens to links
Every time a link is built to your website, Google looks at this as an indicator that your website is popular and authoritative, but it also looks at the supplier of the link, and it wants to see that it’s a legitimate website with user experience at its heart.
Understanding your link profile
Google is smarter than ever before at detecting spam links thanks to sophisticated algorithm updates (check out the series of Google ‘Penguin’ updates for more on this) so you need to regularly check your backlink profile. Get in touch with us if you need a hand, we’re happy to check this for you and we can disavow any backlinks deemed to be potentially harmful.
How to build great backlinks
There’s a myriad of ways to build links, but there is no ‘quick win’, as links should always be the result of fantastic content created for the user, not the search engines. It can be helpful to create a content plan for your own website and then look at how this fresh content could be leveraged for links from a trusted source.
Let’s imagine you are a travel website; you could create a well-designed resource for the different documentation requirements for visiting all major countries. Once hosted on your site, you could get in touch with legitimate travel blogs to alert them to the fact this is available to their users if they link to it. Offer to write a bespoke introduction to the content so it’s even easier for them to add the link to their website (never duplicate this, as you’ll run into duplicate content issues quickly, it must always be unique).
The golden rule in 2019 is to create content for users as the primary purpose, the link should be the icing on the cake and not the sole purpose for the content creation.
Need help? We’re here! Contact us to find out more about how we can create and deliver a backlink strategy for you.
