Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for a business website. Off-site SEO and high-quality link building are needed to rank on the first page. Off-page factors are a massive trust signal to search engines like Google.
Businesses on the first page of Google earn ~75% of all clicks.
Off-Page SEO Services
- Complete Off-site SEO Campaign
- SEO Strategy Development
- High-Quality Link building (Backlinks)
- Manually Built Backlinks
- Natural Links
- Self-created Links
- Conducting Link Analyses
- Conducting Outreach for Website Content
- Writing Optimized Content for Natural or Manual Links
- In-depth Off-Page SEO Reporting
What is Off-Site SEO Work?
“Off-page SEO” also called “off-site SEO” is optimization on the internet, taken off your website. Off-page SEO’s goal is to positively improve your business’s rankings within search engines and user perception of a site’s relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.
Off-page SEO is a factor in a website ranking Search engine “spiders” are looking for new links or signs a website is gaining more trustworthiness, authority, or popularity. A search engine spider or web crawler refers to an Internet bot that crawls websites and then stores that information for search engines to index. Building off-site work and building links that are seen by spiders for search engines increase a website’s reputation, therefore the ranking.
What Backlinks Are
A backlink is when one website links (hyperlinks) to another. Backlinks are called inbound links or incoming links, and the process of creating them is called link building. Many techniques exist for building links, and they vary in difficulty. SEOs find that creating backlinks is one of the hardest and time-consuming parts of their job.
Why Backlinks Are Important
Search engines determine how well a page ranks in its results by backlinks.
Moz lists domain-level link features as the highest weighted ranking factor of Google. Moz builds tools for SEOs and is one of the largest and most trusted inbound marketing and marketing analytics companions on the planet.
Quality backlinks are massively important if you are trying to rank and website. Google ranks websites that show expertise, authority, and trust EAT). If you can get quality backlinks to your site, Google recognizes that as an authority signal and will reward your site with higher search rankings.
High-Quality Link Building
Not just any backlink will do.
Link-building efforts need to be quality, not quantity.
Creating natural, organic, high-quality links is a time-consuming process. This time-consuming process is hard, but we need it. Links from other websites boost the ranking of a website. Link building gives Google something to understand besides that your website is optimized. It gives Google the ability to rank your site for its authority.
The volume and quality of links pointing to a page are both factors.
Quality is the top priority when creating links, and a quality link is more important than ever for businesses. Google penalizes websites that churn out low-quality or spammy links starting with the Penguin update.
Do not pursue any known low-quality link-building techniques. These will hurt your business in the long run.
What is a Quality Backlink?
A backlink’s quality is determined by the page relevancy, anchor text, and page content length. Search engines do not publish what makes a high-quality backlink. Some aspects are well known to Search Engine Optimization Specialists as:
- Backlinks in the content of a page are high-quality. In-content backlinks that are in the text of a page or article are high-value. They are or most likely to be editorial links. Search engines want natural links. Link in footers, sidebars, or comments sections is low quality.
- The authority of a relevant linking website is a huge impact. The higher-quality, more authoritative, more visited website gives a better “link juice” than a less significant page or site. The site should be a trusted source. Examples of trusted sites would be The Wall Street Journal, Wikipedia, or the BBC. High-quality, trusted websites are complex and difficult to agree to backlink you.
- “Do-follow” is the best. A site should have a healthy mix of both.
- The anchor text for the intended ranking should match a backlink. Search engines want to pick the right keywords. Anchor text should be keyword-specific and topic-relevant. Backlink quality increases if the term in the clickable text is the same as the term being worked on to improve.
- A link that provides traffic is key. A prominently displayed link on a page with a large amount of traffic will bring your website.
- Difficult. The more difficult a backlink is to get, the more valuable it is. A hard to acquire link is from the best sources. If a backlink can be obtained by a hundred websites or in a few minutes – it is 100% low value.
- The more data points, the better. Backlinks should be from different domains and, or IP addresses. A strong correlation exists between high-ranking websites and the number of data points (unique websites).
- The fewer backlink on a page, the better. The trust and authority get divide between all backlinks on a single page, so the fewer backlinks you have to share on the same page – the better.
Multiple types of links exist – natural, manual, and self-created.
To understand the different types of backlinks, I will provide you with definitions for each.
Natural Links
Just as the name implies, they happen naturally.
Editorially given by other website owner’s natural links require no outreach
This type of link is highly efficient in multiple ways. Not having to work to get this created saves time and provides a high-quality link since it is real.
Getting these types of links often requires that good work was done elsewhere, either on-site or with content writing. Natural links happen from someone a good reason to link to your website. Natural links are a hard way to grow a site and are time-consuming hence they are highly-valuable. Google recognizes real and true links, so these will stand search algorithm updates.
Manual Links
Manual links are done via outreach or reaching out to get these created. Manual link building is often called “outreach” link building.
Most time is spent on off-site SEO, making links happen. Outreach involves building relationships and contacting website owners or webmasters. Often a compelling reason then into linking to your website. These should make sense from a business standpoint for them to link to your website.
Self-created Links
Self-created links are easy to create and near impossible to be quality. Self-created links inherently carry less weight than natural or manual links. They are just that, self-created. Examples would be blog comments (that are not moderated), guest post signatures, user profile pages, or monitored directories.
Other than standard business listing sites as part of Local SEO, these are not worth pushing since these are not editorially given they are not worth much. In some cases, they can even be “spammy” and harmful to your site.
In general, a business link building focus should be on manual link building. While creating a site with awesome content, so natural links happen.
Additional SEO Services
Backlinks and Off-page SEO are generally not enough on their own. Businesses usually need a complete SEO campaign with on-page SEO to rank for competitive keywords, and technical SEO to resolve site issues. SEO best practice is always to conduct a full analysis with keyword research, then implement the keywords on on-page or off-page optimizations.
I offer a full array of SEO services, not just off-page SEO and link building. I also offer:
Ready for Results?
I am a Search Engine Optimization Consultant in Albany, New York, with a publicly posted code of conduct and ethics.
I can deliver amazing off-page SEO to your business and quality backlinks. I offer off-page and back-linking along with other services. Contact me to get your business a complete strategy that aligns with your goals.