Having popular and authoritative sources link to your website will improve your site’s organic rankings. Here are our latest thoughts on link building.
Read MoreGoogle and other search engines put a lot of emphasis on who’s linking to your content to determine how well to rank your website. This makes sense since being linked to by popular and authoritative sources is a reasonable metric for evaluating a website’s quality. After all, the company you keep says a lot about you, so if you’re hanging with the cool kids and the smarty-pants it’s reasonable to infer that you’re a person of substance. But how do you attract the attention of quality backlinks? It certainly takes more than producing high-quality content!
To begin with, it helps if the website linking to your content is itself thematically adjacent to your content. Did you just get a shoutout from the most popular bird calling website on the internet? Nice! Is your article about the role of water scarcity in the future of Middle Eastern politics? Womp womp; that link’s not doing all that much to improve your rank.
Another consideration, where are you within the body of the article recommending your content? Are you a footnote? Aww, that’s too bad; being directly linked to within the text would have been much more helpful! Is there a keyword within the text that actually links to your page? Yay! Is the text linking to your website an exact copy of your headline? Boo! That’s a red flag for Google. Are there keywords or semantically linked keywords near your link (meaning words and phrases related to your keyword)? Great!
Basically, you want to create the sort of high-quality content that itself is linked to within high-quality content. And there are four types of content that are most likely to earn that sort of attention.
Once you’ve created some high-quality content, how do you get peepers peeping at it? Outreach! You can email people, share your content on social media, intentionally establish yourself as an authority and disperse your creation on various platforms, and you can interact with influencers. There are even tools you can use to narrow down social media influencers based on keywords, geography, and demographics!
These are the most basic of approaches, but these are also fundamentals that never fail. Everything else is built upon these principles, so make use of them to create shareable, meaningful content. Tips, tricks, and trends are only worth keeping up with if they improve the quality work you’re already doing, so check back in with us regularly and, like true friends, we’ll help bring out your magnificence.
