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The question you must be wondering is What Makes a Backlink High Quality?
To understand this I am going to show you 12 tips for creating high quality backlinks in 2022.
Backlinks are essential to help build your reputation and presence online.
Yet, not all backlinks are equal, for example, some can improve your rankings and some can ruin your rankings.
This should make you focus on acquiring backlinks of high quality.
Most would agree upon a good quality backlink comprise of several factors.
There are specific factors to consider when finding and developing high-quality backlinks.
- Staying Relevant
- Trusted Sources
- Traffic
- Anchor Text
- In-Content
- Page Rank
- Authority Websites
- Existing Backlinks
- Not Reciprocal
- Backlinks on Page
- Not Acquired Easily, and Free.
- Free, or No Charge
These factors can help guide and will teach you what you should look for.
1. Staying Relevant
Relevancy is the most important criteria for effective link acquisitions. Google basis relevancy on three things.
- General contents theme of the linking domains.
- The linking page’s content.
- Backlinks hitting the domain’s relevancy.
Relevance is a consideration when evaluating Backlinks.
A backlinks relevance can be judged by different levels.
Search engines provide relevance to linking sites, the specific page with the links on it, and the content around the link.
2. Trusted Sources
It’s incredibly logical to say that a high-quality backlink would come from a high-quality site. There are a few things you can do to qualify if a site is trustworthy.
My favorite is using a great browser add-on Mozbar to check the spam rating of any given site. It comes in a simple browser toolbar that also shows your Domain Authority, Page Authority and Spam Score of any site your currently browsing.
You wouldn’t want links from a site with a high spam rating. These factors also determine the effectiveness of the backlinks you receive.
3. Traffic
This factor is somewhat forgotten, and it’s most vital.
The purpose of links before the time of search engines was being used to factor in the algorithms. This was to add value to a page in directing visitors to relevant sources to the topic of the page.
Visitors would click these links often when the internet was first being developed. Having a link in a prominent position on a site would bring your website a continuous traffic regardless of rankings.
Getting backlinks from sites with real traffic is another way to solidify your tier one.
These are the hardest backlinks to get, but they are also the most rewarding. You can find the traffic data using a tool like SEM Rush or Ahrefs.
4. Anchor Text
Using the Exact phrase, or synonyms to match the text used to form the keyword to the link. It will look unnatural having a lot of “incoming links” using the same exact anchor link text.
Best you use different variations.
Now if your trying to rank your site for let us say ‘Tax Advice.”
Different variations would be ‘advice on taxes’, ‘professional tax advice’ and ‘tax guidance’.
Distributing your backlink’s anchor text recklessly can hurt in a couple of ways. The first is wrong anchor text distribution. This can inhibit your site from ranking.
The second most important is aggressive anchor texts can land you a penalty. Remember to keep your exact match anchor text well below 1%. The majority of your anchor text should have a brand or “Naked Link Anchors”.
A naked link is a hyperlink for which, anchor text is the URL itself. Branded link; a link to your company’s name Optimized link; link around the target keyword or key phrase Naked link; “Link around http://format”
Check out our guide on Anchor Text Optimization in 2022 for more in-depth details on Anchor Text.
5. In-Content
Producing content is an important piece of the SEO puzzle so to speak.
If you don’t think content is important, well you would be wrong.
Your content strategy will make or break your SEO campaign.
It doesn’t matter how many backlinks you may own, or get, or optimize your site for.
Your campaign will fail you if don’t take content seriously.
The “In-Content Backlinks” are sometimes likely to be editorial links, which are what search engines value most. If a link is included early on in parts of the content. Then its natural to assume the author of this content has considered it to be an important link.
A backlink in the main content area of a page and towards the top area of content is of more high quality than a link lower down the page, or in the sidebar.
6. Page Rank
The “Page Rank”, is a basic and obvious measure in assessing the worth, as the quality of backlinks. The higher the Page Rank, the higher the quality of a link. The Page Rank can be misleading metric though. All web pages start off with a Page Rank of 0, or N/A.
The Page Rank of a page can rise and fall over a time period. The rank value that Google displays for a page is only updated for the general public’s viewing every 3 months or more. Within the algorithm, its updated constantly. The Page Rank value you see is only an estimate, and could well be a point, or 2 off of the true Page Rank.
Note: You can use Mozbar to determine Page Rank as shown in Trusted Sources above.
7. Authority Websites
Stronger the site, the more results you’ll get. Since Google doesn’t update Page Ranks like they use to. You have to rely on third-party metrics.
I Recommend you analyze opportunities using all available options open to you.
The best “link analysis” tools are:
- Ahrefs; planets strongest AIO SEO tool on the market,
- Majestic; the planet’s largest Link Index database on the web
- Moz Link Explorer; a tool to developing a high-quality inbound link profile.
Note: A backlink to your personal website or business’s website is included on a page that connects to a high-quality site.
These are in the same niche as your site.
This indicates to the search engines that if this site trusts them, I should too, let’s give them a boost!
8. Existing Backlinks
Between higher rankings for a website, and the number of existing backlinks linking to that site has strong correlations. All others being equal, its preferable to have 10 links from 10 different websites than 100 links from 3 different websites.
For a new linking domain to be considered high quality, and it should be from a website which hasn’t already linked to you.
9. Not Reciprocal
When it comes to link exchanges it’s widely abused in the past in which resulted in the value of reciprocal links being reduced. Reciprocal links do still have value, and there’s a certain no risk of getting a penalty being applied as a consequence of them.
However, if your searching for a backlink of the highest possible quality. It should come from a website that you’re not also linking to from your site to limit confusion.
10. Backlinks on the Page
Trust and authority flowing through a page, with a backlink to your site on it get divided up between all the links on that page. The fewer links there are, the higher the quality of links on that page, as the trust, and authenticity passes on is less diluted.
11. Not Acquired Easily
Easier you can get a backlink the less value it may actually have. Chances are that you can get to it in a couple of minutes or a couple of clicks. Its a safe bet others have done the same. This includes your competitors if they take the time to review your site’s backlink profile.
12. Free, or No Charge
Paid Links can often improve your rankings. But it can also be classed as high-quality backlinks because of that there is a risk in doing that. Search Engines say that the buying backlinks for the purpose in improving the rank of your website “contravenes”, meaning violate the prohibition or order of (a law, treaty, or code of conduct).
These guidelines are upheld and any website not following this maybe penalized. A payment in question doesn’t need to be made to the website directly that is directly linked to you personally. This payment can be made by a 3rd party linking the scheme, or transaction. For example, using a blog network.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to increase your backlinks, ranking, and overall Domain Authority. Follow these guidelines and I am sure you will start to see a great improvement. If this sounds like to much work, MainStreet Design also offers Blogger Outreach Services to streamline this process for you and get you back in the game!
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