Last updated on March 3rd, 2021
Website backlinks play an important role in determining the rank of a webpage. A webpage that has a good number of relevant backlinks tends to rank higher on all major search engines including Google.
Sameer Panjwani, CEO of Mondovo talks about what website backlinks are and how a brand can build them to enhance its domain authority. But first let’s get to know all about Sameer and Mondovo.
About Mondovo
Mondovo is a software platform that helps you track the success of your SEO activities online and shows you opportunities for growth. The software also allows you to keep tabs on the SEO activities of your competition, thus giving you ideas on what you could be doing better for your site.
About Sameer
From 2005 till date, I have been in the field of digital marketing. I have built and successfully marketed products and services mostly around SEO. These products have served over 25,000 clients till date.
To me, marketing is like a puzzle that needs solving, and I am fascinated by the different approaches by which we can solve this puzzle. My mission is to build products and offer services that get clients an extremely high ROI on their marketing spends, irrespective of the marketing channel.
How important is SEO for any brand?
I am completely biased towards SEO since that has been the bread and butter of my business for years. I will admit though, the dependency on search engines, as a channel of customer acquisition, has reduced in the past few years with the emergence of social media as a viable alternative.
However, there is, and will always be, a very large segment of the population that still relies on Google to find information, products and services. So, search engine optimization will continue to play a very important part.
SEO is only going to get tougher with every passing day but for those who dominate the rankings for their primary business terms, they will see at least 5x the returns as compared to anyone just relying on paid advertising as a medium of customer acquisition.
What are website backlinks in SEO and how can you establish trust and domain authority through it?
The word “World Wide Web” originates from the concept that the Internet consists of a bunch of useful websites that are interconnected via hyperlinks.
These hyperlinks, more commonly known as links, are the means to discovering other pages on the web. So it’s based on this principle that search engines like Google are able to crawl the web; and it’s based on the number and quality of such links you have pointing to your site, that Google would assess your popularity.
When Google ranks sites on the web, their first criteria is the quality and relevancy of information that the sites have to offer.
However, since the web is a crowded marketplace and there are likely to be a number of similar sites offering quality solutions, a factor that helps Google distinguish one site from another is how popular the site is in terms of its’ backlinks. These backlinks, aka votes, are what help pip one site over another in the search engine results page.
If website backlinks are that important, what can one do to get more of them?
To get website backlinks is the equivalent of getting other people to include a link to your site when they publish some content on theirs.Now that’s hard.
It’s especially hard if your site consists only of pages talking about you, your company, and the services it offers. Think about it, why would someone link to a commercial site like that? So before we even get into what we can do get more website backlinks, we need to answer this question to ourselves, “Who would likely link to me and why?”.
If we think on those lines, there are a multitude of ideas that we will get. If you think deeper, you’ll figure that if you’re going to have any chance of getting website backlinks on a sustainable basis, you’re going to need quality content that others would like to reference/share from within their sites.
Having content is key to building website backlinks on a sustainable basis. It’s going to be hard otherwise.
That’s not to say that you can’t get website backlinks without content. There are many companies that do. However, those are cases of the companies either having great branding & PR or having great products; in both these cases, there is usually a constant flurry of press mentions and blogger activity around what these companies do and so there is a natural flow of website backlinks. That’s why bigger brands usually do well on search. If you fit into this category, you might get away with not needing to build any content. If not, you’ll need some content that others will have reason to link to from within their site.
There are many ways to build quality backlinks to your site, right from the simple and most obvious method of guest posting on other sites, to more advanced link building methods mentioned out here.
If most links point to content, how would one create backlinks for their brand?
As I mentioned earlier, it’s hard to get links pointing directly to your branded homepage or your product/service pages.
Some methods that come to mind are:
- Digital PR
- Getting listed in the relevant Industry & Trade Associations / Directories
- Getting your partners/vendors/suppliers to link to you
- Getting bloggers and influencers to review you/your product/your service
- Get interviewed by other publications
- Participate in podcast interviews
- Check the resources/list pages that your competitors are listed in and try to emulate those links
- Guest blogging with links to your brand either in the Author Bio or as a relevant mention within the context of the article
All these are tougher tactics to execute but they can be done and are important.
Are there any tools that you use to evaluate the quality of website backlinks?
There are primarily 3 companies in the industry that provide the best sources of backlink data: Ahrefs.com, Moz.com and Majestic.com
Each of these providers(backlink checkers) have their own proprietary scoring algorithms that they use to rate backlinks. Ahrefs has the “DR” (Domain Rating) metric, Moz has “DA” (Domain Authority) and “PA” (Page Authority), Majestic has “TF” (Trust Flow) and “CF” (Citation Flow).
Which of these is the best metric? I would use a combination of these along with manually reviewing the backlinks. These metrics can help quickly filter out any links that have poor scores.
Any parting thoughts about link building?
Link building is critical to the success of your site in competitive industries. However, it is not something that should be considered in a silo. Great content is the foundation required for link building to work. This is an area where most people go wrong, they don’t give enough importance to quality content. Then another mistake is for those who do spend time in building content, they don’t do anything to try building links to those content assets. That’s another big mistake. So those are two things that must be kept in mind with link building: build content regularly + do what it takes to get the word out to other bloggers => guest blog on others’ platforms and link back to these content assets of yours from there.
Conclusion
We would like to heartily thank Sameer for giving us valuable insights on building website backlinks. These tips are helpful in finding quality backlinks for establishing brand authority and ranking higher on search engines.
