EP16: Building Backlinks

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Hello, my friends. Today, I’d like to talk about backlinks and if they matter in today’s world of SEO. So the short version is, yes, they do. And as much as I hate backlinks and I hate the fact that people still chase after what’s called link juice, we do need to be cognizant of them and their existence and how they can affect your SEO efforts.

So first, let me just talk about the difference between on-page and off-page SEO. So on-page SEO involves things that you do on your website and in particular the URL itself that you’re trying to rank within search. It’s your content. It’s your meta title, meta description. It’s your headers. It’s the internal links. It’s things like that.

Off-page is factors that take into account things that are happening outside of your website, so not anything within your actual domain or your actual URLs themselves. You need a blend of both to be successful in SEO. And off-page SEO matters because Google needs this type of information to know who you are and to understand the who and the why of you. It’s really important because they can see your content as the search engine crawls through your website. It gets your content. It digests your content but it still doesn’t have a great grasp of who you are. And that off-page activity helps them understand that.

So in particular, the off-page activity involves backlinks. And backlinks have been around forever. And basically – so the off-page activity helps the search engines understand your authority and how active and how trustworthy you are in your industry, in your subject matter or specific topic. It helps them understand whether or not people other than you mom think that your content is of high quality. That’s the whole goal of those off-page SEO factors.

And when you look – and while there are a number of them, the backlinks are those links coming into your website and in particular, into certain URLs in your site, make a difference. The reason they make a difference is because those links are kind of like votes for the homecoming queen that we have in the US. Every year, the high schools have the homecoming football game and they vote for a king and queen in the senior class and people cast the vote. The same thing with our beloved presidents.

So those votes help understand – help people understand who is popular, who matters, who is considered quality, right? Backlinks do the exact same thing. The search engines just use them to try to figure out how many people care about your content.

There are other off-page data points too, things like mentions or your social media profiles, directories, reviews and recommendations, and things like that. But today, I just want to talk about the backlinks. And that’s because the backlinks have been around forever. They’re just part of SEO and while they were super, super important years ago, they have been downgrade a little bit in their effectiveness but they are still extremely important and it is still something that you have to have to be able to really optimize your site and bring in some search.

So basically, what is a backlink? A backlink is anything that is referred to as an inbound link. It’s created by a third party website or blog and it links over to your content.

And again, links help drive brand awareness, traffic, and search engine optimization. So those links have multiple benefits and that’s a reason why people actively go after them.

So the search engines use this kind of data because it helps them understand the popularity of a given site or piece of content, the trustworthiness of it, the relevance because it can look at those links and say, “Where are these links coming from?”

And so in particular, I talk about SEO. When Google sees links coming into my content from other sites that have authority with SEO, it makes a big impact.

Now, if I have a link coming in from a site that’s selling Viagra, it doesn’t have much of an impact because it’s completely outside of what I do and it’s not relevant. So it’s important that when you’re considering going after backlinks, you want to make sure it is relevant to the who and why of you and what of you and it’s within your industry, within your niche, that type of thing.

The search engines look at the number of total links as well as links coming from domains so like a specific website. You are actually better off having less links and high quality links. So the theory that we had years and years ago of just get the most links that you can, that’s gone. Search engines are much smarter today. They don’t look at links that way. They want to see high quality links and again, from relevant websites. So you’d be better off having 10 really good links coming from really high authority, relevant websites than a thousand coming from low level crappy websites.

So we talked about the backlinks and you consider having a backlink campaign. Keep that in mind. And I’ll tell you a few reasons why in just a minute. When you’re doing those links, you need to make sure that they are coming into various points of your website. I always encourage people to pick like the top keywords that they want to rank like three or five that must haves. Those are the pages that you want build those backlinks into and then obviously your homepage as well.

But don’t just do the homepage. That’s the mistake that people do. They only do the homepage and they forget all the internal content. But that the link metrics for the internal content is really importance because again, it helps search engines to understand which pieces of your site are more important and more relevant to the world outside of your ecosystem.

So those are some takeaways. So the text that’s being used for those links matters as well. So having someone link into me and use some type of SEO term benefits me because again, it’s helping the search engines understand that link and the nature of that link. It’s all relevant to what I do.

Now, the caveat to that is years ago, we would say, “OK, if I’m optimizing for an introduction to search engine optimization and that’s my focus, I want every single link to say that that comes in.” Well, that’s no longer the case because what happens is that looks like spam. It looks unnatural.

So as you are building up those links, you need to make sure that the incoming links have a variety of texts. It’s both just the URL and its descriptive text because that is definitely natural.

Now, I’m going to tell you there are a number of ways that you can look at your current backlinks. One is Google Search Console. It provides you this data. If you go into your account, there is an option to view links to your site. Google shows you domains. It shows you domains linking in, the top ones that know about it. It shows you the content it’s linking into and then it shows you the verbiage used within those links.

All of this data matters. And the reason search engines are getting it to us is because they want us to be as healthy as possible. And we know as marketers, if Google is giving us this data in Search Console, it’s important. It wants us to take action on this. So you do need to review this information. You do need to make sure that you have a healthy link profile.

Now, why would that matter? It matters because I have met a bunch of people including one recently, an SEO client of mine who hired an SEO consultant. And when we went to go look at his backlink profile or the overall view of his links, you would die if you saw what he had. It was like porn sites linking in to this website that had nothing to do with the porn industry. And that was just an example of some of them.

And what that meant is he had hired a consultant. The consultant didn’t quite tell him how he was doing to try to drive an increase in his rank and that consultant was doing black hat SEO tactics and just flooding the internet with links into his site but they’re all crappy sites and they weren’t relevant.

So that’s not helping my client. In fact, it was hurting my client. And what we had to do is we had to process a disavowal file which basically said to the search engines, “OK. All these thousands of links that you see, they’re really – we don’t take ownership of them.” And that was because there was no way for us to actually contact these websites because they’re really low quality websites and automated to say, “Please take that link down.” That’s the first step you want to do is you want to – if you find any bad links, you want to reach out to the webmaster and say, “Please, get rid of it.” If you can’t do that, then you got to do a disavowal file.

I caution you on disavowal files because you only want to do them if you really have significantly bad links like that example of the porn site linking in and you could tell it was just to manipulate rank.

If you’re a novice, hire somebody. There are a lot of good firms that do this for you. And there are tools that you can do like Ahrefs and SEMrush. They both will help with that pursuit of seeing your links. Are they toxic? Are they safe? Do you really need a disavowal file to do that?

So there is another takeaway for you. If your link profile is bad and you see it in Google Search Console and you’re like, “Ugh! That doesn’t really look good.” Go to a tool like SEMrush. Make sure that you run it out of your links so you can get a professional view of those links on how many are really dangerous.

So I do want you to link build. I do want you to consider trying to build that off-page authority with the search engines so that they can see that you do have high quality backlinks coming in. But I do want to again, give you caution. You need to make sure that you are doing it in an appropriate way.

So how can you get backlinks? You can get backlinks through social media profiles and shares. The search engines are using that data more and more because in years past, backlinks were manipulated.

Other blogs and bloggers that you may know, you can guest post. The caveat there is if you’re doing guest post, only have a link in your bio back to you. Do not put keyword-rich links within the content itself because that goes against Google’s allows practices and then you’ll get yourself in trouble.

Press releases, if they are truly news and again, just links back to the site and not keyword-rich links based on specific words. Again, that’s another Google change. We used to do that 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago and it’s completely acceptable. But Google said no more because it was getting manipulated and abused.

If you’re a local company, local listings and local directories are extremely important for you. So, consider those. Review sites, groups and forums, associations within your industry because when you sign up for an association, a lot of times, they have a directory and that directory links back to you. It is an authoritative site. It is within your niche or your industry so it’s a very good backlink for you.

Presentations, document sharing, speaking engagements, webinars, videos, podcasts, all of those are really great options for creating backlinks. And I joke when I go to speak at a conference like WordCamps because Wordcamps do not pay their speakers. And so, I’ll go when I have the travel budget and the time to various camps around the country and I speak.

And one of the things that I say when we talk about backlinks, I’ll just stop and I’ll say, “You all think I’m here because I love you. But really, I am here for the backlink because the WordCamp will backlink – will link over to my sites so people can find out more about me.”

It is a legitimate way to build those backlinks. I am on podcast all the time as a guest because again, I get those backlinks as part of the show notes.

So there are a lot of different ways that you can go about building your backlinks. And so, let me give you a few takeaways for this podcast because I always like to have you have an overview of what we talked about and the most important takeaways for you to document and go on your way.

So the first one is I want you to consider backlinks. Look at your backlink profile within Google Search Console. If anything looks suspect, I want you to go to SEMrush and I want you to do a backlink audit to make sure that you do not have a bunch of toxic links within your profile. If you do, you need to consider disavowal file. If you don’t, then go on your merry way.

So the next takeaway is you need to find legitimate sources of backlinks. I will provide a template download for you or checklist within the show notes at SEObits.fm so you can have that as a takeaway.

They need to be again, relevant and part of your industry and from high quality sites. So don’t forget. That’s point number two.

Point number three is as you work on those backlinks, make sure that they go to all over destinations within your site or your blog. Don’t just backlink to your homepage. Do at your most important pages or posts. That’s critical because that helps the search engines understand which pieces of the site or blog are most important.

So three really big takeaways. The final one is don’t start backlinking until your house is in order. You need to make sure you’re on-page SEO is good because otherwise those backlinks aren’t going to help very much.

And the fifth one is just don’t ignore backlinks. You can do all you want with on-page SEO and while you can technically rank, it’s really hard because other websites have these links. And if they have links, they’re going to be ranking above you.

And so you’re asking yourself, “Well, how do I know if it got links or not.” You know what? KWFinder, if you put in the keyword that you want to rank for, it will show you who is ranking and how many backlinks they have coming to that specific URL which really helps you understand your competition and what you need to do with your backlinking. OK?

Very good data points for you to take away, it is something that you really do need to do. Backlinks do still matter in today’s environment. You just need to make sure that you do them in a really solid, safe so that you are not caught up with any penalties because that’s the last things I want to have happened to you. I want to protect you while I educate you.

So, I will have all of the takeaways in the show notes. Again, at SEObits.fm. I truly appreciate you joining me today and having me on your SEO journey with you. We’ll be talking again next week about local SEO. Thanks so much.