Backlinks. Semalt Advice On How To Get Useful Backlinks For Your Site 

How do you get good backlinks? In this article, you will learn everything about the backlinks and the link building. The backlinks are the links coming from the other websites to yours. These backlinks have always been the basis of Google's algorithm (SEO) because the robots considered it as recommendations. 

When Google first came into existence, the basis of the rating system was settled on the displaying of the search results.

The SERP or the search results' page is the main page on which there is an internet search engine based on how many backlinks a site had. Google found that if a lot of sites link to a certain website, that website must have a high value and thus it is placed high in the search results. 

Each link was seen as a 'vote' for your website. These votes (backlinks) together determined your ''website popularity'' and to measure this popularity of your website Larry Page called the so-called Page Rank.

This is a sort of a 0-10 score for your website, determined only by the number and value of inbound links. Initially, Google counted the number of backlinks to your website. The more backlinks you had, the better your website scored in Google. Later on, the quality and the relevance of the backlinks were more considered and less the quantity.

As mentioned, it is very important that you only apply the 'link building' (gathering backlinks) techniques that still work today and thus add value to your website and reputation in Google's evaluation systems. Below there is a list of a number of certain things that you should or should not do in terms of link building.

What is a qualitative backlink? For this you have to take a number of things into account:

If the site that links to you has nothing to do with yours, Google will also find the link irrelevant and will therefore yield very little to you. For example, a link from a website about entrepreneurship to a website with information marketing is relevant and therefore added value. 

A gardening website with a link to a marketing website is irrelevant and will therefore contribute less to you ranking

Ranking literally means 'to put in order'. When it comes to internet marketing ..

Building a natural link profile ensures that you will be less likely to be punished algorithmically or manually by Google through the backlinks' practices. A natural link profile means that the links come from all kinds of the different websites and refer to all kinds of different pages and articles within your website. 

Google wants to know what a link represents to another website, so a piece of text that is linked is generally of better quality than mentioning a domain name. For example:

Adobe was always first in Google when you searched for 'click here'. This was because many websites on the internet added a piece of text to their pdf downloads with "click here to download Adobe Reader". The words 'click here' would then be clickable to the Adobe site and so Google found that the Adobe site was relevant to the words 'click here'.

Make sure that the links coming from the other websites do not all use the same anchor text. It used to be good to make your most important search terms clickable to your website. However, since Google's Penguin had been updated, anchor text over-optimization is being penalized. Nowadays you also want to have a natural profile of incoming clickable texts. 

You can compare a title attribute with an alt tag for a picture. It is the title of the link. When you hover your mouse over a link, it will appear. This title shows, as it was the title of the underlying page and contributes to your findability on that word combination.

This is a very important one, Google also looks at the reputation of the webpage (not the website) where the link is on. If I get a backlink from a page on a website that doesn't have a strong reputation at all, it won't have any impact. For example:

Twitter.com has a PageRank of 9, which is extremely high. My account (although helped by this strong domain name) only has a PageRank of 4. My account page is therefore much less strong than the homepage of Twitter. A backlink from my account will therefore also have much less value than from the homepage. 

Now you may also understand that when you direct all your backlinks to your homepage, your homepage will also be the page that will be the strongest in your website. When you get a blog then this is fine, your new blog posts are always on the homepage and immediately take a strong position. However, if you want to score specifically on the certain search terms with the specifics articles, make sure that you have the specifics backlinks for those articles.

There are many different ways to get backlinks. Below we discuss the most important and the most common, also we recommend you to use or not the relevant link building technique. If you spend fifteen to half an hour every day building links, the number of backlinks you get will grow enormously in the long run and then the process remains natural in Google's consideration.

To start your "link building" you can sign up on a few start pages. Today this tactic is less powerful than before. Because a home page passes less value to each link, the more links there are on the page, some home pages are not very valuable. Also, try to pay attention to the relevance by choosing a start page that is as close to the topic of your website as possible. 

You can choose to go on Google and to start the pages such as startpagina.nl, startgids.nl, Snelstarten.nl, Handystarten.nl, Startkabel.nl and hundreds of other similar pages. Then, check those start pages and on which subpage you can best register. After registration, look for a button "add link" or contact the administrator. Do not be alarmed if you do not receive a response or if your link is not posted. That is usually the case; you have to rely on those few who post your link. 

Another method to get backlinks is article marketing. Article marketing is a form of a link building where you have your articles published in as many places on the internet as possible, with a link to your website. Via these articles, you get visitors by including a link to your website under each article, or possibly by making a few words in your text clickable to your website. This way you have an extra channel for visitors but at the same time, you also work on the backlinks of your website. 

There are several places on the internet where you can place the articles, an example of which is Artikelplaats.nl. Here you can, as the name has already said, place the articles with the link of your website. The other users of Article Place may then take over these articles and place it on their own websites when they have a shortage of content. They will of course also take over your link. Make sure you don't overuse this link building method either because that will make your backlink profile (as discussed earlier) unnatural.

A third option is to become a guest blogger on someone else's website. You can then place your blog posts there with a link to your website. Many website owners need good inspirational writers to supplement their blogs because they simply don't have the discipline or inspiration to do so themselves. You can also reach a whole new one via someone else's blog  and you can therefore also work on the reputation of your website and of your own as an author. 

Another way is to use Twitter Search to find people who blog about the same topics as you. Retweet and favorite a tweet from this person and send him or her a message in a relaxed tone. That way the first contact has already been made, or at least this person has already seen your name. Then contact him or her via email to post the blog post. 

Since guest blogging has been widely abused for the links, Google has become a bit more skeptical about the links that are obviously amassed by guest blogging. 

Google has already indicated a while ago that it will also look more at social media when it comes to Search Machine Optimization. This means that the links from social media will also have more and more impact. By incorporating social media into your website you can control the number of the links.

Google adds up all social media links and also looks at how regularly you get the links from the social media platforms. Getting a lot at once will not help you in the long term, but getting a number of tweets, pluses and "likes" per blog post certainly helps!

A common question is whether you should link to the other websites yourself, because many website owners think that this will undermine the power of your own website. That is not the case ... However; Only link to the websites that are relevant to what you write about and make sure that the outgoing links on your website are also qualitative. Google appreciates it when you refer the visitor to a website with additional information in addition to your own site. It must therefore be an addition and preferably to a website with Google's good reputation.

A link exchange simply means that you take a link from your website to another website and that website in return places a link to your website. This is a tactic that worked well in the (distant) past, but now it is hardly given any value by Google, because everyone could exchange the links in this way. 

A backlink from a "link partners" page with 100 other links on it will not add value to you. The more outbound links there are on a page, the less value each link has in Google's appreciation.

A link from another homepage says all. With link swapping, always make sure that you complement each other, then Google will not be a problem. If you are going to exchange the links, it is better to go to ABC-linking, which works with 3 websites A, B, and C. 

Suppose you have 2 websites (A and C). You would like to have a backlink from another website (B) but B would like to have a backlink. You can then place a link from your second website (C) to B as a return link in exchange for a link from B to your website (A). This way there is no linking to each other and so this is better for the search engines. There may then be no further connection between website A and C and this tactic is also the best applied in moderation.

You can easily check your backlinks via a good "backlink checker", you have advanced but also very simple tools for this and almost all of the tools give the different results. You can get a first impression of who sent all the links to you with every checker. Via the backlinks checkers, you can also check the backlinks of your competitors and thus see where they get their links from.

Briefly the difference between the internal links and the backlinks: the internal links are the links that point from your own website to the other places within that website. Because these links are your own and have less value. Of course, Google is not so confident in your objectivity to your own website, to allow your internal links get the same value as the backlinks. Nevertheless, the internal links work like a kind of recommendation. 

When you link from page A to page B, page A actually gives a kind of recommendation to page B. The anchor text is also important for the internal links. For example, do you score on a certain keyword combination on the first page but not in the first place in Google? Then try to include an internal link to that article in the new articles you post for a certain time. Then make that keyword combination clickable. You will see this influences your Google ranking.

So, I hope our tips will help you. For the companies that are already our customers, these methods are effective and a good addition to the link building that we are doing for your company.

What you may notice is that these methods not only provide the backlinks but also generate immediately extra customers. Obtaining the extra links gives you more power in the search engines and more visibility.

Do you have any questions about getting the local links for your business? Or are you curious about how you can use this for the best of your company? Then contact us, we are happy to help you.