A Powerful Ranking Activity

Written by: Gary Horsman

Backlinks – A Powerful Ranking Activity

Gaining backlinks is a popular subject. The bad feelings that people had with Google when they introduced Penguin last year have made many feel that while not as easy as before (not that it was easy) backlinks are still vital to essentially any effort to improve search position that achieves a high position.

Here are some basic tips when it comes to getting valuable backlinks for your website.

Be Link Worthy

This means to create delightful content. You cannot expect to get many links if you content is not very good. Can you improve your imagery or your graphics? Have you written copy that is engaging? Do you do the research that needs to be done so that you present yourself and your business as an authority in your area? Do you update your content to keep it interesting and up-to-date?

To do these things will make you more likely to be get backlinks from credible sites like edu’s, gov’s and news outlets.

You may want to take our Tutorials on Contant Marketing. Content Marketing can help significantly when it comes to gaining backlinks.

Optimize Your Existing Backlinks

Make sure all of your backlinks are set up to be the most effective. For example, a certain site may link to you via an image of your company logo (with no alt text or image title). Find these links and ask to have them changed.

Also, the most effective links are text links. The search engines are still very much text based. You can have an image of your logo in near the link but have the actual link be text and keyword phrase text and this will be optimal.

Lend a Helping Hand

Try not to look at every site as simply “the next link prospect”. If you can be constructive and do it in a nice way then this will genuinely help people. If you help them then they may want to learn more about you and you may be able to collaborate. A simple way to collaborate is to gain a link from them. The best rewards often come when you seek out opportunities to help others.

Strengthen Your Site’s Internal Link Structure

You should use popular pages on your site to link to and give a boost to the newer pages you’re promoting – it’s almost the same as getting a “real” external backlink.

Good crosslinking within your site is a valuable thing to do.