What Is Back-Linking?
The nuances of search engine optimization, or SEO, can be intimidating to the non-practitioner. It’s confusing at times even for the experts! Thanks to changing platforms and algorithms, the “rules” of SEO are never exactly finite. It’s easier to think of it as an art form; one that shifts with online user preferences and with their behaviors. One concept integral to SEO is back-linking. A backlink is created when website #1 links to website #2. We get a lot of questions on this one, so we decided to put together a primer just for you.
How Do We Strengthen Our Website’s Competitiveness Using Back-Links?
We get this question every month or two from new clients. They’ve been told to build quality back-links, but it’s easier said than done. There are two primary perspectives to this question and we are going to look at both:
The Public Relations Perspective
If your company is featured on CNN.com and they link back to your website within the article, that is a high-value back-link. Every time a credible and high-authority site links to your website it counts, essentially, as a digital “vote of confidence” for both your audience and for search engines. A public relations team works to do this on your behalf with frequency: securing articles on these types of sites and ensuring back-links are always included. The goal is to teach search engines to recognize your content as worthy of linkage and high-ranking, and relevant and credible to your industry. This boost takes place whether or not anyone clicks on your link.
The other really big benefit of back-links is the building of credibility and trust in your brand. This visibility won’t happen with one back-link or two. It will happen with steady, focused PR work.
The Digital Marketing Perspective
Google considers up to 200 factors when ranking a website for search queries. (See, we told you it’s a little complicated!) Domain authority, which is boosted in part by back-links, is one of the most influential factors.
For example, if someone searches for keyword phrases such as “gold jewelry San Diego", Google then scans all websites containing these key phrases. It decides which web page or blog post is the most relevant and useful to the searcher—and that result goes to the top of the list. In some cases, there may be two closely competing websites that have both been optimized for this keyword phrase. But one will likely have more "authority" than the other because of backlinks (and there is also a strategy behind what types of links and where to place the links in question).
We mentioned a news site earlier: CNN. Getting back-links on news sites is a big deal because Google considers them very high-authority. This is why good PR is so effective. One of the services we offer as a PR and marketing firm is an analysis of competitor websites to see which backlinks they are using. We also make recommendations for your website to create a lengthy list of back-links with solid domain authority.
To talk further about back-links, how they work, and the impact they can have on your business, contact The Forum for a personalized consultation.