Many people at ENX2 Marketing, including myself, have had the chance to write guest blogs on other sites before, and whenever given the opportunity, I always encourage them to make time to do it. Not because they or ENX2 will be paid for the guest blog, but because of the backlink we’ll get from their website to ours.
In my experience, whenever we’ve been asked or offered the chance to do guest blogs, we’re promised the ability to put a link to our site in. This is a backlink for our site, and this helps our SEO greatly.
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks are links to your site. When another site adds external links and uses one of your pages or posts to link to, this is a backlink to you. I think a good way to understand it is that when you ship something out, it’s an export, and when it comes in, it’s an import. Links work the same with external links being exports and backlinks being imports.
How do Backlinks Help SEO?
Considering how they almost seem like opposites, it should make sense that backlinks have a similar effect on SEO as external links. Like external links, they give your page or post legitimacy in the eyes of search engines like Google and Bing.
External links tell Google Search that you have proof behind what you say, while backlinks tell Google that you’re a trusted voice in your field. If people trust and believe in your content enough to use you as a source, you must be a trusted resource it should recommend to other people.
Because backlinks say more about the legitimacy of your content and are harder to get, they actually make a bigger difference than any individual external link. At the same time, because they are more difficult to get, you’ll likely never have more backlinks than external links.
What Are Some Strategies for Getting Backlinks?
Now that you know how important it is to get backlinks for your site, you have to wonder how exactly you’re supposed to get them. You can ask friends, colleagues, and partners to place links to pages you’re trying to push on their website, but that’s not entirely effective.
Even if you can convince as many as you can that it’s worth linking back to your site, you want the number of backlinks on your site to keep growing and updating. Don’t settle for a stagnant number, full of only your peers. The farther out your pages and posts get from your site and your industry, the more worth the backlinks they receive are worth.
There are a couple of ways you can do that:
- Post links to social media. For many of ENX2’s clients, we always have a link to a page or post on their website in their social media posts. While Google Search and other search engines don’t weigh backlinks on social media sites like they do backlinks from other external sites, this gets your links out there for people to see. It’s far easier for people to consider your content as something to link to when they see it often.
- Be a guest on blogs, podcasts, videos, and more. Don’t be afraid to guest on anything that gets people to link back to your site. This can be more than just blog posts but guests on their YouTube channel or podcasts they post to Spotify and Apple. Of course, never do these things if they won’t put a link to your site in the descriptions of any of these media platforms.
- Add links under all of your company profiles. This is most important for LinkedIn where professionals see your company but should extend to Facebook, Twitter, etc. as well. Make sure your site is as readily available as possible to anyone who may be looking for an expert in your field. This serves as an added social media backlink, but also to help others see you as an option for an external link.
- Write quality content people want to link back to. This is the most important way you can get backlinks. You can get your links out there as much as possible for sites to snatch up, but if they’re not full of good content, why would they want to use your site as an external link?
Don’t Buy Backlinks
There are plenty of reasons why buying backlinks is a bad idea. First off, you don’t know if these are quality websites that you want to be associated with. In most cases, you won’t know what’s linking to your site until you’ve already paid for it, if ever. Not to mention, even if they’re of quality, you can’t truly estimate whether they’re worth the price you’ve paid for them.
But most of all, you don’t want to buy backlinks because Google’s search engine will know what is going on every time it indexes the site. It’s an intelligent system that will notice when you suddenly have a lot of backlinks you didn’t have before, with no reason for the growth.
Do you want to know what Google’s search engine does to sites that buy backlinks?
Kill their SEO. They’ll flag it for the system, and give you a Google penalty that will kill all your search engine rankings, organic and paid for. Your paid-for backlinks will mean nothing, and all the work you’ve put into the SEO you have will mean nothing as well.
How Many Backlinks Should a Site have?
No one expects a new website to have a lot of backlinks. Even a site that’s only a year old shouldn’t be expected to have a healthy amount, but to have a goal to reach. You want to make it a goal to push your content over social media and with great content to reach 40 to 50 backlinks.
Once you’ve had a decent amount of experience, 60 to 100 should be your goal. Having this many backlinks is considered fantastic.
But you don’t want to reach any of these numbers and then stop. Most backlinks tend to come from posts on other websites, not pages. This means you’re getting backlinks from websites posts that will wane in relevancy in a matter of weeks, or months if the site linking to you is popular.
You want to keep working to get more backlinks because you will lose them as quickly as you gain them. Backlinks are not some one-and-done game. Like all things SEO, it’s a constant and ongoing process.
Do I Need Backlinks on Every Page?
If you want a backlink on every page, go for it, but it’s not realistic. As just stated, most backlinks are not permanent and will not help your site forever. You’re going to need to work to constantly get new backlinks. This makes getting a backlink for every page incredibly difficult the more pages you have. Work on getting many for your site rather than one for every page.
Get Marketing Help For Your SEO
Backlinks are another in a long line of complicated and difficult-to-understand SEO tools for any law firm or a small business just starting. Even bigger corporations can struggle to get their sites out there and get as much recognition as they want online. Situations like this make it necessary to reach out to a marketing firm that can handle SEO and marketing for you.
ENX2 Marketing is that marketing agency. Our experienced social media and content marketers work with our SEO experts to create optimized content and get backlinks on your most important pages. If you’re intimidated by the idea of doing all of this yourself, don’t be, contact our team at ENX2 Marketing.
