Backlinks

Search engines are autoresponders.  They comb through billions of pieces of content and take thousands of different factors into account to determine which content has the best answer for your question. In addition, they monitor whether other people like the web as well. Just like in real life, we prefer things that we have heard from friends and family that have a good experience.  The same applies for the world of search engines.  The more trusted backlinks your site makes, the more Google trusts the web.

Some interesting facts:

Studies have shown that the number of referring domains is the biggest influence on search results.

Did you know that more than 66% of pages on the Internet have 0 backlinks?

Pages with longer content receive 77% more backlinks than pages with shorter content.

Ahrefs study found that 43.7% of Google’s high-ranking pages link to each other.

Companies that have a blog get 97% more backlinks.

Optimizing your page helps you deliver more understandable information for search engine robots. That way your content is properly indexed and displayed in search results.  Similarly, collecting external links that tell search engines that your web site is an expert on a certain topic will help (see building backlinks).

Is it necessary to hire a linking professional, consultant or agency?

Yes and no. Depending on your workload, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website, it may be easier to do SEO yourself. You may also find that you prefer expert help.  Both are good options.  SEO people have written so many guides that just by googling website optimization, SEO making, website SEO, you can get many decent guides.

If you happen to be looking for expert help, it is important to know that many agencies and consultants offer SEO services, but the quality of the services can vary.  Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, while the wrong SEO techniques can do more harm than good to your website.

You can certainly handle doing yourself, but it will take more time and effort as there is a lot to optimize.  Sometimes it can be much cheaper to hire an agency that knows what to do than to start learning and pecking in unfamiliar waters.

White hat and black hat SEO

White hat SEO refers to SEO techniques and strategies that follow the rules of a search engine and its main focus is to provide value to people.

Black hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies that try to fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts a website at high risk of getting penalized or even being removed from search results. Also, using this is arguably unethical.

Punished websites lead companies to bankruptcy, which is also another reason to choose your SEO expert or agency very carefully.

It’s worth being careful – luckily experienced SEO experts can already know their way around this.

Search engines share similar goals with SEO experts.

Search engines want you to do well. Google even offers tutorials for SEO beginners similar to this tutorial here. There are thousands of instructions. They also support the activities of the SEO community.  But at the same time, it must be remembered that there is a constant cat-and-mouse game between SEOs and search engines. It’s clear that webmasters just want to be first in the search results no matter what.

Although the guidelines for webmasters vary between search engines, the basic principles remain the same: don’t try to fool search engines – it’s really hard and expensive to fool around. Instead, offer a good web experience to your page visitors. Answer the questions your potential customers are looking for.  However, there are some guidelines that search engines will like and what only SEO experts know about.

When building links, it is also important that they come from reliable sources.  This means that the website that points to your website must also have a strong SEO background in Google’s eyes. Luckily, we have all the tools to check and compare your backlinks with your competitors to find opportunities to get a better backlinking profile.

We have some really good contacts and we also do all the work for you – we even let our copywriters write the article if you like.  We find relevant websites that let you publish content marketing stories or simply link to a page. We negotiate with them, find the best price deals and organize the publication.  All you have to do is wait for the monthly report on what links we got you.

Can you do this by yourself? 

If possible, you should always try to link back to your site when out press releases. 

In addition, pages other than the home page should be preferred as links, and a specific keyword should be used as the link.  For example, if you have an e-shop for natural cosmetics, you should use important words such as natural cosmetics, face cream, facial cleansing foam, etc. as the link text or link anchor.  This is a way to hint Google and tell the algorithm  that your site is actually talking about these things.

Why is SEO important with link building?

Do we really have to talk about it?! Joke. Even though advertising services, social media, and other web platforms can drive traffic to websites, most good quality web traffic comes from the search results.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more trusted to smarter searchers, and attract more clicks than ads. For example, only about 2.8% of all searches in the U.S. click on ad responses.

In short, SEO has about 20 times the potential to increase traffic than Pay Per Click, both on smart devices and desktops.

SEO is one of the only marketing channels on the web that consistently pays dividends over time if it is set up correctly. If you produce good content that deserves a place in the rankings for the right keywords, your web traffic will grow like a snowball over time.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help to make our websites understandable to them.