how to generate backlinks to your website

If you build it, they will come.  This may be true for magical baseball fields in Iowa. But to boost your website’s search engine ranking, you need to do more than just build a site and wait.  Search engine ranking, or where your website lands on a search engine results page, is inherently linked to website traffic volume. The higher you rank, the more traffic you tend to see.  Many factors play into how well your site is ranked, including quality of content, page authority, and even URL length. One of the most important, and often overlooked, elements of achieving a desirable ranking is generating high-quality backlinks. A backlink is created when another website links to yours. Search engines view these links as recommendations or votes of confidence for your site. The more authority a linking site has with a search engine, the more valuable that backlink is to your authority.  Below is a simple diagram depicting types of hyperlinks.  Read on to learn how to generate backlinks to your website like an SEO expert. Why You Should Generate Backlinks Because the cool kids are doing it.  No, really. Envision a quality backlink as that popular friend at school who will introduce you to the people you want to know. Generating backlinks is a way of networking your website to gain audience and authority. And much like when you network in person, the more people who link to you, the stronger your industry presence becomes. Rank Higher on Search Engine Results Pages A recent SEO study conducted by Backlinko found that the “#1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions #2-#10.”. Additionally, sites with backlinks from many different domains ranked higher than sites with less diversity in their links. The following chart depicts the correlation between backlinks and ranking. See an Increase in Referral Traffic  A high-quality backlink, from a trusted source with a solid web presence, can provide a steady stream of new traffic for your site. Even “no follow” links, or those that don’t directly count toward search engine ranking, can ultimately benefit your website’s SEO by increasing traffic to your site and adding diversity to your backlink portfolio. Get Indexed by Web Crawlers Faster Search engines use website crawlers (also known as spiders) to gather and parse internet content. These search engine bots scan a website’s pages and index its information. Then, when you perform an internet search, an algorithm is applied to this index and the websites with relevant content appear on the search engine results page (SERP).  Given that there are billions of web pages, the spiders start with a list of known sites and look for hyperlinks to add to the crawl list. More popular and authoritative sites tend to get crawled first.  Getting a backlink from a quality source can put you on the fast track to getting noticed on SERPs. Increase Authority and Brand Awareness Think back to the school metaphor. If a friend you trust and admire introduces you to a new person, you might immediately feel more positive toward them given the common ground. Similarly, when someone clicks on your link from a site with authority, it can help improve your authority through association.  Website backlinks from popular companies can also help increase your brand awareness. It’s like distributing your product through a major retailer versus selling it at a local market. The more people who see your name, the more potential customers you have.  4 Website Backlink Strategies That Will Boost Your Ranking An experienced backlink generator knows that link building can yield bountiful results, but they also know it can be a long and arduous process.  Luckily, there are many ways for you to successfully generate quality backlinks and rank higher on search engines. A little bit of hard work and patience will go a long way in helping you develop a robust backlink portfolio for your website. Here are four industry-proven backlinking methods. 1. Generate Foundational Links on Social Media and Business Review Sites Aptly named, foundational links are some essential building blocks of an SEO strategy. These types of backlinks are a natural step forward after publishing your website and they’re the first chance for your site to gain traffic and get crawled.  The links that you place on your business’s Facebook page or LinkedIn profile to direct people to your site are two common examples of foundational links. Social media links don’t technically count in page ranking, but they’re still a valuable contribution toward your internet presence, especially when first starting your SEO campaign. Guest posting for websites in your niche is also a good starting point. In these posts, you can include relevant links to your website that help build your backlink portfolio and boost your domain authority. Bonus — you get the benefit of building professional relationships with your peers. Internal links, though they’re not technically backlinks, can be considered foundational as well. They are hyperlinks on one part of your website that link to another part of your site. These early internal links can help you begin to rank on SERPs for low-competition keywords in your niche that you highlight with anchor text. 2. Pack Your Pages with High-Quality Content People Want to Share While this should be a no-brainer, you’d be surprised how many website owners leave their pages devoid of good content. A sparse number of blog posts or a lot of poor-quality posts can equally work against your domain authority. Consistently publishing content that’s of high value to your industry, combined with an effective backlinking strategy, is a surefire way to get noticed. Start by doing industry research into trending topics and keywords and studying the content of popular competitors to get an idea of the type of well-ranking web pages. Note that content format also affects ranking. For example, “why” posts and infographics tend to get more clicks than listicles and general posts.  Once you’ve compiled your research, write similar (but still … Read more