In this article, you will learn how to generate quality backlinks for your website.
Building quality backlinks is not as simple as asking other websites to link to yours. Search engines value individual links differently, depending on their relevance, domain authority, and timeliness. An inbound link from an established website with high traffic and similar content is considered more valuable than a link from an unrelated website with low traffic. Timeliness is also important, as some links lose their value over time. While specific link-building strategies differ, to generate quality backlinks for your website you should focus on getting inbound links from websites with an eye on relevance, domain authority, and timeliness; the same criteria used by search engines to evaluate links.
Relevance is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO) and building backlinks. In this regard, quality is generally more important than quantity. While the number of inbound links to a particular website does factor into search engine rankings, the most valuable links are those from websites with similar or relevant content. For example, links between a sports news site and a sporting goods supplier will be considered more valuable than links between a sports news site and an online dating site.
Like relevance, domain authority makes a big difference in the perceived quality of your backlinks. Domain authority is simply the estimated search engine ranking of a particular website. Search engines consider websites with high traffic and many inbound links to be more authoritative than a website with less traffic and fewer links. Inbound links are the method by which search engines determine the popularity of a website. If there are more inbound links, search engines assume that a website's content is of interest to a wide audience and therefore give it more authority than another website with fewer backlinks.
The purpose of building backlinks to your website is to get higher search engine rankings, which in turn increases traffic. This is an ongoing process throughout the life of a website. Website owners must continually add backlinks to maintain their search engine rankings, collectively known as pagerank. Therefore, timeliness must also be the focus of building backlinks. Older links already indexed by search engines are not as valuable as newer links, which tell search engines that a particular page is still of interest to readers.
Additional factors and elements, such as anchor text, also determine the quality of a particular backlink in the eyes of search engines. Anchor text, the words used to link to another page, must be relevant to the website to which it links. A link to a sports news site, for example, should involve the use of words related to the content of that page. For search engines, irrelevant anchor text is a strong indication of linkspam, backlinks are used only to increase pagerank without considering the context. Penalizing a website by lowering its rank is common when search engines consider certain backlinks as linkspam.
