The term backlink simply means having a website link from their website to yours. When trying to improve your rankings on search engines like Google, this is very important and effective SEO practice. Focussing on a high-quality backlink is key because some backlinks won’t have any affect on your rankings and some may have a negative impact, if the search engine doesn’t trust the source. You want to build trust.
With not all backlinks equal, we look at what factors can determine a high-quality backlink. Of course, it’s not realistic for all your backlinks to tick all the boxes all the time, but in meaning mindful of certain aspects, you have a good chance of building your search engine rankings quicker.
Include A Relevant Source
Backlinks need to make sense on the page they appear on, as Google will analyse whether they are logically related. The source needs to be relevant. If your website focusses on digital marketing for example, it makes no sense for a cooking recipe to appear on that page, it’s out of context. Links in search results are evaluated by search engines based on their relevance to the content directly surrounding them. The overall relevance of the linked site, and the specific relevance of the page that has the link. When you use a backline, ask yourself if it fits naturally in its surroundings.
Use A Trusted Source
Sources that are trusted by search engines are classified as high-quality websites. We’re talking about a website that has a high DA (Domain Authority) score. This is ranked between 1-100. The higher the DA score, the easier it becomes for Google and other search engines to rank you in its higher pages. Google uses a set of trusted high-quality sites to determine whether a website is trustworthy. Links from reputable sources, such as Wikipedia, BBC, and news websites, are harder to come by than others. These are high-quality links and the fewer links a site has away from a trustworthy site (also knows as a seed site), the higher its rank of trust.
Using Anchor Text
The keyword or phrase you’re trying to rank for should appear in your anchor text, which refers to the clickable text of the URL. The phase should match or be a similar match as the words you are trying to rank for. This practice will improve the quality of the backlink. Having variations of these words is also common practice because you want the fit to feel as natural as possible in its surrounding environment, as this is important to Google.
Traffic Streams
Directing visitors to relevant resources adds value to the page. You’ll find the link is highly effective because a position on a highly visited page will continually bring your website targeted traffic. If sitting within evergreen content, this traffic stream can bring visitors to your website over months and years and this will continually have a positive impact on your rankings.
Positioning of Backlinks
If a high-quality backlink appears higher up on the page this will have a good impact on your search engine rankings. If the author values the link enough to put it higher in the piece then Google will assume the same. A link that appears in the main article, higher up on the page carries more value than one found at the bottom of a page, so give its positioning the thought. Also, practice quality over quantity. It’s much more effective to have a handful of links from different websites, rather than lots of links from just a few. In other words, for a link to your website to be classified as high quality, it needs to come from a website that hasn’t linked to you before.
Stay On Brand
A link to your website that features on a page linking to high-quality sites, especially those within the same category as yours, will inform search engines that yours deserves to be in that same niche. If a website links to a lower quality website, the website may not necessarily be considered low quality, but search engines may choose not to consider the other sites on the page at all.
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