One of the key ingredients to good SEO is having high-quality backlinks to your website. Backlinks are also known as “inbound links” because they are links on someone else’s website that directs traffic to your site. Generally, the more sites that backlink to yours, the more traffic you will receive and that means a higher site ranking from Google.

However, it is very important to remember that Google rewards quality much higher than it does quality. This means where the links are coming from are much more important than the number of backlinks connecting to your site. Backlinks from websites with a higher score than yours will help improve your score. Conversely, backlinks from sites with a lower rank than yours can hurt your score.

Backlinks play an extremely important role in boosting your search engine rankings because they are among the highest-ranking factors according to Google. This means that acquiring high quality backlinks to your site will strengthen your chances for a higher ranking. Here are a few simple strategies you can use to get high-quality websites to backlink to your site.

1. Find Backlink Opportunities on Your Own Website

The first step to improving your backlinks is take a look at your own website. Do you feature products from any vendors that may be willing to link back to your site? As long as you’re a good customer (and they have a strong website) then it never hurts to ask. Reciprocal linking is important to anyone paying attention to their SEO, so it isn’t an unusual or inappropriate request.

2. Check Your Analytics to Analyze Your Referral Sources

Next you can take a more in-depth look by checking your numbers on Bloometrix. The “top referral sources” will show you who is linking to your content and offering a backlink. Discovering the type of websites linking back to your site and the kind of content they desire may help you identify new opportunities to create similar content for more backlinks.

3. See What Your Competitors Are Up To

The best way to stay up to date on what is happening in the industry is to know what the others are doing. What type of content are they publishing and what are they doing to draw visitors to their site? Consider it “ethically spying” on your competitors in order to find their sources for backlinks and top-performing content, along with organic keywords and even what they’re doing on social media.

4. Pay Attention and Discover Opportunities

Your competitors’ backlink sources may provide you with some clever opportunities to earn a backlink for your site as well. For example, if they have a backlink from a forum or message board, you can create your own profile to earn a backlink. Signing up for their email newsletters and setting up Google Alerts will immediately notify you whenever they publish content or appear on another site.

5. Create High-Quality Content

One of the best ways to get backlinks is by creating unique, high-quality content that other bloggers, social media influencers, and industry experts find interesting or relevant enough to use and link back to your website. There are many different types of content you can produce including blogs, images for social media posts, and YouTube videos. In most cases you can do all that with your phone.

6. Get Involved and Participate Online

Writing testimonials on other websites and participating in online forums are also excellent ways to earn backlink to your site. Find websites relevant to your industry what have a high domain authority (DA) and submit a testimonial in exchange for a backlink. Actively participating in different forums will help you become an industry expert and will help drive traffic to your website.

These are just a few different things that everyone can do to improve search engine rankings by earning high-quality backlinks and increase the number of inbound links. If you would like to learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or how to view your analytics through the Bloometrix dashboard, Bloomerang Solutions is here to help. Drop us a line here or call us anytime at (913) 806-1911. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and like us on Facebook for marketing ideas, customer service tips, employee training videos and more!