Backlinks play a key role in improving your search engine ranking. Backlinks are links from outside websites that link back to your pages. Search engines use backlinks as a way to determine your authority and if you have a lot of irrelevant backlinks, Google sees that as a red flag and it will hurt your ranking. What should you look for in a relevant backlink? A relevant backlink should have the following:
- Link is from a trusted source – Is the link from a site that people trust, such as a local or national publication or organization? Backlinks from trusted organizations are much hard to receive, so search engines see the link as more valuable.
- Link was not paid for – Search engines state that using paid backlinks will penalize your site. Even if it sounds enticing to get several backlinks quickly, do not pay for backlinks.
- Link is not reciprocal – In the early days of SEO, online organizations would make deals to post backlinks to one site if they got one in return. The search engines wised up to this practice, so if they see that most of your backlinks also feature your website, that can affect your ranking.
(Source: https://www.seomark.co.uk/high-quality-backlinks/)
While creating a content and backlink strategy are key to improving your ranking long term, here are some items you can complete today that will help your ranking:
Update your page tags
Search engine crawlers user your page tags to see what is on your page and what your website is about so it can evaluate its relevance to search terms and results in additional to other criteria like backlinks and content. The other benefit of having relevant page tags is that some of your tags are automatically added to the listing on Google and can provide some additional information for visitors before they click through on your page.
Set up social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for your company
If you don’t already have social media pages set up for your business, take the time to at least setup Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for your company. Depending on your industry, you may want to add other social media accounts, but these 3 will give you a solid foundation on social media. The benefit is also that it gives you some additional backlinks as long as you include the link to your website in your profiles!
Register your business with Google My Business
When you search for a company on Google, often times you will see a box in the right side of the page with more information on the company you were searching for. This box pulls from a Google My Business profile and since it takes up more real estate on the search result page, there is a higher likelihood that someone will click on the result. Another bonus? New backlink!
To set up your new Google My Business profile or make updates to your existing one, click here!