Backlinks and Domain Authority

Jan 11

If you want your website to be visible when someone types a search into Google it’s important you have an effective SEO strategy in place. Several measures exist to calculate the "strength" of your site, the most relevant being the domain authority and the number of backlinks. But what do these mean and how can you improve on these?

If you google the definition of backlinks you would get a list of companies offering to check the qualities of your backlinks. They want to sell you a list of a couple of hundred links saying they would improve the authority of your website for a small amount of money. But here’s a spoiler: that’s a scam! This will only lead to you having loads of bad backlinks, and Google is likely to penalise you for that.

So what can you do to create a reliable group of backlinks?

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links that come from one domain but lead to another. These hyperlinks allow users to browse the internet and access new websites via other websites. They are the online version of word-of-mouth. Another website from your industry talks about you on their website.

For search engines such as Google, backlinks show the relevance of a website and its content to the user, meaning the more backlinks your website has the more popular/ relevant your website is likely to be. This means Google will put your website forward giving you a better ranking in search results.

Backlinks can be textual and they can also be photos and graphics - in this case, the user will just need to click on the photo to be linked to your website.

Why is it important to have good backlinks?

Google looks at the relevance of your backlinks according to your website, so if your backlinks have nothing to do with the content of your website, then your website won’t rank as high. For example, if you have a restaurant website with backlinks from a tourism site, Google will rank it higher than if you had the same website with backlinks from a hairdresser website.

The quality of your backlinks creates reliability, meaning another company from your same industry has approved your website/services. If your backlinks are unrelated, then Google will just assume that you paid for your backlinks and might even penalise your website by trying to discredit your website's results.

How to get quality links?

Getting backlinks requires a lot more work today than it used to. That's why a lot of companies hire PR & marketing agencies such as… us ;)

As a business owner you should think about how a customer might hear from you outside of the internet, then you should try and apply this online. First, the website linking to your website always has to be relevant to your content. So if you are a babysitter, where would a potential customer hear about your services? A school, a park, a mothers club...etc. You can now approach a school in your area and ask them if they would be interested in linking their services to yours, by providing some information about your services on their website and you doing the same on your webpage.

Any parent who is now looking at this school’s page will now know the school approves of your services, and any parent looking at your website will know that this school is approved by a professional babysitting service in their area.

Not only a physical place can give you backlinks but in some industries blogs, forums and even review sites can give you great backlinks.

Getting good backlinks will lead to having more traffic on your website, which will improve your SEO and increase the number of visitors to your website.

What is ‘domain authority '?

The domain authority score was created by Moz. It is a score from 0 to 100 rating the credibility of your website and services in the eyes of Google. To give you a perspective, websites such as Facebook or Youtube have a score of 100. A strong domain authority starts at 50. One thing that is important to know is that it is way easier to jump 10 points from 20 to 30. The more popularity your website gains, the harder it will be to jump 10 points from 70 to 80 points.

What is taken into account in Moz?

Moz takes around 40 different variables into account to calculate your domain authority. To get a high score yourself, you will need to meet criterias such as the amount of quality external and internal links your websites have. Getting a quality backlink pointing to your website from a website such as The Guardian who themselves have a good domain authority will make your website seem reliable. Google already trusts this link therefore google trusts their opinions. The quantity of your backlinks also matters but quality over quantity! Having loads of bad quality links won’t get you anywhere.

How to improve your domain authority?

You have to work on your website as a whole. If your website is pleasing the customers then you will get a better score. Do you have valuable content that makes users stay on your website?

Providing well presented and original content on a regular basis will increase your chance of getting links from other websites. A good way to do this is by adding blogs to your website, as it gives a chance for users to stay longer on your website, and helps place yourself as an expert in what you do, catching the attention of other websites in the industry.

But bear in mind that quality content is the key! Having a good domain authority is only one way to get your website on the first page of Google! ;)

Email us if you want to have a chat about backlinks. We’re here to help!

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