There are several on-page factors involved;
- The power, quality & relevance of other sites that link to you (backlinks) & how those backlinks are structured.
- The volume of social proof your company provides.
- Social media likes and shares - if real people like your product, Google will too.
Google is constantly adjusting the exact requirements required to rank first for a specific search, but and this is an important but.... backlinks from authority, relevant websites, are responsible for the trust and authority your site needs to earn to rank at the top. (at least for competitive searches).
While during the last few years, several different metrics such as an increasing influence of social media activity & testimonials have gained weight as metrics for measuring the company behind the website, backlinks still represent almost 50% of the total shove your site needs to be an authority site.
Google's ranking theory is that authority, relevant sites will link naturally to other relevant, authority sites.
To a certain extent this is true, but it does create a closed network of powerful sites leaving many smaller independents out in the cold.
If you have ever wondered why Google results are dominated by the same multinationals, this is the primary reason. For many product searches, you will see the same household brands ranking in the top ten. It is often worth paying more attention to the sites that you might expect to be there that are in fact missing.
How To Build Backlinks for Wordpress
Backlinks are power for a website. Ranking power. If high powered, well trusted websites link to you - recommend you by linking to you, then your authority rises.
Google works by using the premis that good websites will only 'recommend' other good websites (businesses).
If you base your linkbuilding around this strategy, you won't fall into the trap of gathering links from anyone offering you one.
The easiest places to create links offer the lowest quality backlinks. Directories, forums and blog comments are all virtually pointless for SEO so ignore them for the time being.
The biggest single challenge for anyone new to SEO and linkbuilding is to understand the difference between a good link and a bad link.
Bad backlinks will actively penalise your site rankings rather than helping them, so you should be very careful which sites you elect to create links on.
Good backlinks pass trust, authority and relevance to your page, so are worth their weight in gold for you.
Getting good links can be a time consuming challenge.
WP Off Page Link Building
A good backlink has the following characteristics:
- Is contextual
- Within relevant content
- On a Google friendly page
- Passes relevant link category
- Is DoFollow
Google wants people to accumulate their backlinks organically. This would mean, as a website owner, you would publish your site and then sit and wait in the hope that another website owner finds and likes a page of your site so much that they recommend you to their visitors via a link.
This sounds good in principle, but in reality, especially for smaller businesses, it doesn't work very well.
Imagine that you supply a Garden Centre with a range of Gardening Tools. Wouldn't it be great for your site if the garden Centre linked to you as the manufacturer? Yes, except why would they? Their customers might go direct to try to get a better deal from you. In reality, small businesses don't often link to their suppliers, clients, etc. but it is what Google think your should do.
This can work if for example you create killer content covering a specific topic and someone else considers your content so good that they link to your page as a reference site.
For the majority of businesses, creating content that is good enough to gain that much organic traction is a huge challenge.
For most businesses, they will be waiting a very long time for anyone, let alone backlinks in the numbers required to move the dial for SEO rankings.
The solution is to proactively create links yourself.
Until a page has a backlink it is referred to as an 'orphan' page. Orphan pages, unless they are on very powerful sites will struggle to rank.
Sites like the BBC or Newspapers like The Sun can easily rank orphan pages, but for the rest of us, you need to create a backlink to any page that you want to rank well in Google.
Orphan pages also pass no link juice to sites that they link to, so when you are looking for a page that might be good for a link to your content, bear in mind that if it is an orphan site, it won't have any benefit to your website at all.
The solution is to create backlinks to the orphan page, but then you are proactively assisting someone elses business in order to help your own. This strategy can soon get out of hand and requires very careful planning and implementation.
Building quality back-links is an artform, a highly detailed skill that can take years to perfect. There are steps you can take to fasttrack your learning process and increase the implementation of the links that you need...
Learn more about link building here
Backlinks Make Website Content Rank In Google. We Can Help - Our Specialist Backlink Team Can Create A Link Building Strategy Specifically For you Business - Click For Assistance
