How to Get Backlinks
Seeing as backlinks play such an important role in your website's performance in search results, building a strong backlink portfolio is key. But getting backlinks can be a time consuming and tedious process. Luckily, there are countless ways to get backlinks, each of which can be beneficial for your website’s backlink portfolio.
Online and Local Directory Submission
Listing your website in local or online directories will give you a strong backlink, although, it may be a no-follow backlink. Regardless, directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Four Square make it easier for potential customers to find your website, read reviews, and determine if you are the right provider for them.
Additionally, Google’s My Business pages allow you to list your business and website on Google Maps, making it easy for customers to find you. Be sure to use the correct name, address, and phone number consistently across all online directory listings to avoid potential confusion.
Blog Comments with Tags and Chats
Another way to garner backlinks for your website is to visit authoritative websites, read their blogs, and comment on them expressing your appreciation for their quality content or asking a thoughtful question. Of course, in commenting on the post, you’d leave a link to your website. These are likely going to be no-follow backlinks, however, they can still help you build a relationship with other authoritative websites and businesses in your industry. Regardless, ensure you’re only commenting on appropriate and relevant posts for your industry. Otherwise, linking in your comment may come off as spam and the site will simply remove your comment. Get your backlinks on comments in Tags and Chats Entertainment News.
Guest Blogging
One of the best strategies to gain high-quality follow backlinks is to guest blog for other websites in your industry. This is far more time-consuming than the other options we have mentioned, but this is the best way to build high-quality backlinks. To perform guest blogging, you will need to research quality sites in your industry and find out which ones accept guest blogs.
You will then need to ensure you are writing content that fits their guidelines and submit it to them for approval. Be sure to include a link back to your website somewhere in the copy, as this is the entire purpose of guest blogging. While you’ll find that many sites won’t be interested in a guest blog, plenty of others will oblige considering the free content they’ll receive for a backlink. With Tags and Chats, you can post any article for backlinks as a guest blogger within a wide variety of categories (celebrity gossip and celebrity news from the Royals, Kardashians, Bollywood, and Hollywood. News and articles in sport, fashion, gaming, movies, TV, health, wellbeing, gym, fitness, food, drinks, and more.) that fancy your style of writing with to-follow links. All you need is to open your profile that's free and then you set to start blogging.
The Importance of Backlinks
Search engine optimization involves a number of different tasks and moving pieces, each of which are equally important to the health and strength of your website. Backlinks are an essential aspect of SEO because they help to build your website's domain and page authorities, which directly contribute to search result rankings. However, the importance of backlinks extends further than this alone.
With StatCounter, you are able to track where your traffic comes from and how those users interact on your site. This can help you develop a sound SEO strategy, which should surely include a strong backlinking strategy, as a thorough and quality backlink portfolio is important for a multitude of reasons to be covered below. As you consider SEO for your website and begin to familiarize yourself with the strategies therein, let us fill you in on the importance of backlinks and the best practices for building your backlink portfolio.
Essential Elements Of A Successful Blog Post
Magnetic headline
Deliver enough information so that the investors will want to hear more.
It’s the same with a blog headline. It has to
Give some indication of what your article is about.
Make the prospect want to at least check out your first paragraph.
In other words, it needs to be magnetic, it needs to pull people in.
Sometimes adding emotional words to the headline will give it the added magnetism required. In other cases, the information you’re offering will, on its own, be enough of a draw. However, even when you’re presenting great content, spice up your headline with a word or two that will grab readers and make it stand out. People are moved to act by their emotions.
Compelling lead
I want to be very clear about how I’m using the word “compelling” here. In news reporting, a lead should pull together the important points of the news story. But that’s not necessarily true in a blog. The first sentence or short paragraph of your blog must compel visitors to read your second paragraph—you want to draw your readers in. Don’t take forever to get to the point, and make sure there's sufficient build up so that readers will want to know more about the information you’re presenting and appreciate it once they understand your ideas.
Useful subheads
Subheads serve three purposes:
They break up the type to make the page more visually appealing
They help your reader navigate to important sections.
They boost search engine optimization (SEO).
Disclaimer: Regarding my third point, it used to be we insisted on using keywords in one or more subheads, but this doesn’t seem as important anymore. I will explain this more in the next section when I touch on keywords; however, using descriptive phrases that capture your key “ideas” in subheads will probably help your SEO.
The first two points are always important. A long page of continuous type turns away a lot of potential readers. We’ll come back to this in the section on graphics. Also, once readers finish your article, they may want to jump back and go over a point; subheads should help this.
Informative and engaging body
The body is the “meat and potatoes” of your blog post. It can be about anything from new, incisive observations that will revolutionize the life or business of your reader to a funny story about what happened to you on the way to work yesterday. If you’re establishing your authority, you’ll want to author one kind of post; if you’re trying to develop a personal relationship with your prospects, you’ll want to author a different kind of post. The question is, “What’s your goal today?”
As I mentioned earlier, the old rule said you needed to include a sufficient number of keywords into the body of your article; however, recent experience and research has shown that keyword usage and density is far less important to Google today. Google’s algorithm is smart enough now to understand what you are writing about and index your articles properly for searches. Therefore, if you’re doing a good job explaining your topic, Google will understand; you don’t have to riddle it with robotic keywords.
Appealing graphics
It’s a great idea to include graphics in your blog posts to illustrate points and break up text within the body of articles to make your pages more visually pleasing. Google measures the time spent on your pages, so your graphics, typography, and color scheme should work together to encourage visitors to stick around. Also, when you promote your content on social media, you should include a visually interesting graphic.
Powerful call-to-action
Almost every blog article should have some kind of call-to-action, which can take a variety of forms and be achieved through different tactics. Your first step is to decide what action you want your visitors to take. It might be to make a comment. It could be to read another blog on your site or to check out a product or service you offer. You also could get a prospect’s contact information by offering exclusive content in exchange for an email address.
Relevant internal link
Do you like free advertising? We all do, right? This is one reason you should include links to other articles on your site in every new article you write. Would a real estate salesperson just show one room of a house to a prospect? Of course not, and remember, one of your main goals is to get people to stick around your website.
Further, internal links have always been considered good for SEO. I think they benefit your SEO because they increase the number of pages per visit and time visitors are on your site. I don’t think that the mere fact you include a link is very important; what’s important is visitors see the link as relevant to their visit, click on the link, and spend time on the resulting page.
Start guest blogging with Tags and Chats today.
Nofollow vs. Dofollow Links: What Are They?
Links are how search engine bots see relationships between websites. They travel from one website to another via dofollow links, passing over nofollow links. But nofollow links can also add value to your website. Understanding how other websites link to you is an important first step in building a healthy backlink profile for your website.
Why should you care? Consider this: More high-quality external links pointing to your website brings in more traffic — not just from the people who click on those links but also via search engines. When we look at the top 100 websites by Alexa Rank, over 90% have more than 2,000 backlinks. For some of the most used websites, backlinks number in the millions. Alexa site-comparison tools can show you competitor link data. Learn more about checking backlinks with Alexa. The Value of a Backlink Search engines, especially Google, consider the quality and quantity of inbound links a measure of the value of your website. Google has been using a weighted point system — PageRank — since 2005 to determine how valuable a page is, and thus determine where to show it in search results. This system takes into account the value of links pointing to a page or website. High-value links can make your site move up the list in search results.
So, what should you do to make sure you’re getting the right types of backlinks? How can you be sure you’re using dofollow and nofollow links properly on your website? It all starts with understanding the difference and how can you make both types of links work in your site’s favor.
What Is a Dofollow Link? Strictly speaking, a dofollow link isn’t a thing. Dofollow is simply the default state for a link. Said another way, any link without the nofollow attribute is a dofollow link. When another website links to yours with a standard (aka dofollow) link, it can directly affect search engine rankings. Here’s an example of a normal dofollow link in our article about guest blogging: Here’s what the code looks like behind the scenes: How do dofollow links affect site rankings? Search engine bots crawl the web through dofollow links, registering who is linking to who. These relationships pass a type of authority that SEO pros call “link juice” from one site to another.
For example, let’s say a reputable site with high PageRank links to you. Search engines then see your site as more reputable and may increase your PageRank. This can improve your ranking in the search engine results. (Learn about PageRank and more in How Search Engines Work.)
How do you make a link dofollow? When you create a new link on your website, such as in a new blog post, it will usually be dofollow by default. Have you spotted a nofollow link pointing to your website that you wish were dofollow? You can’t change a nofollow link to dofollow when it’s on someone else’s site. You’re better off understanding what types of links are typically nofollow links before reaching out to the site owner to ask if they can follow the link (remove the nofollow tag on the link) to your website. Keep in mind that there are some instances where nofollow links are common — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
What Is a Nofollow Link? To the average website user, dofollow and nofollow links look exactly the same. However, nofollow links include a small piece of code, called an attribute, that lets search engine bots know not to follow the link. It looks like this: rel=“nofollow”. According to Google, nofollow links don’t pass any PageRank to the website being linked. This means that nofollow links pointing at your website do not directly affect your site’s position in search engine results pages. This dates way back to 2005, when well-known Googlers Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen introduced the nofollow option to tackle comment spam. Nofollow links prevent black hat SEO practitioners from profiting off of links planted in the comments sections of high-authority sites.
Links from the following types of content are usually nofollow links:
Blog comments
Social media
Forums
Press releases
Sponsored content
Widgets
So, if you are looking to increase your website’s authority with link building, don’t invest the bulk of your time in leaving comments on blogs or submitting free press releases, for example. That said, even though nofollow links will not increase your PageRank directly, don’t be too quick to dismiss them.
Do nofollow links hold any value? Although nofollow links may not directly increase your website’s PageRank, they can still contribute value in several ways.
1. Nofollow links are necessary for a natural backlink profile. It’s natural for a website to have a mix of nofollow and dofollow links pointing to it. In fact, Google’s Penguin update recognized that it was suspicious for a website to have all dofollow links. (Especially if those links all had the same anchor text!) Consider cultivating a backlink profile that appears natural; you don’t need to contact every site that links to you with a nofollow link asking for a dofollow one. We’ll talk more about this below.
2. Nofollow links can bring traffic and increase brand exposure. Links from many high-traffic websites are set to nofollow. While they may not contribute to your website’s PageRank directly, they can be a great source of traffic when people click through to visit your site. (The visitors who arrive at your site via a link from a different website are called Referrals in Google Analytics.) Think of news websites and social media channels: If your website is linked in a New York Times article, for example, the reference can be great exposure for your brand. Also, consider the benefit of viral exposure across social media or upvotes of a Reddit answer linking to your resource. A link from Facebook or Reddit will not directly increase your PageRank, but you could end up with a great source of traffic and brand exposure. Marketer Neil Patel saw almost 10,000 referral visits from Quora in one month, for example.
How that traffic then engages with your site can have an impact on your rankings, even if you don’t get any “link juice.” Search engines consider more than just a website’s backlink profile when assessing its value. People spending time on your site, clicking through, and sharing pages can all make a difference.
3. Nofollow links can help grow your dofollow links. The exposure you gain from links on popular sites can bring greater awareness. As more people hear of you, the chances you’ll gain dofollow links organically increase. Neil Patel’s traffic from Quora that we mentioned above has likely resulted in more fans and followers of his blog, which may, in turn, lead to more links to his content.
When to Use Nofollow vs. Dofollow Links on Your Own Site Until now, we’ve discussed nofollow and dofollow links in terms of someone else linking to your site. But sometimes you might want to leverage the nofollow attribute when you link out to third-party sites. For example, advertising, sponsored blog posts, text link ads, and other links that result from paid relationships should use the nofollow attribute. That helps make it clear to Google that you’re not trying to game the system with a link scheme. Additionally, any content that potentially could be considered “untrusted” should also use the nofollow attribute for links. This should include comments if you allow them on your site.
How to Make a Link Nofollow Let’s say you’ve accepted a sponsored post on your blog. To add the nofollow attribute to links within the article, you need to modify the code:
In your blog editor, switch to the HTML view so you can edit code directly.
Find the link you want to make nofollow.
Add the nofollow attribute so it looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Example anchor text</a>
How to Tell Whether a Link Is Nofollow or Dofollow Nofollow and dofollow links are indistinguishable for web users. However, there are a couple of ways you can tell the difference: You can check manually, or you can use a Chrome extension that highlights nofollow links. To check a page manually, view the page source. In the Chrome browser, for example, click the View menu and then mouse over the Developer. Next, choose View Source. In the new window that opens, you’ll see the source code for the page you’re on. Search on the page for nofollow. (Type Ctrl F to open a search bar, then enter “nofollow.” If that word is used on the page, it will be highlighted for you. To check all links, you can instead search “a href” and look over the links to see which ones contain that nofollow tag) Use a plugin if you’re going to be checking a lot of pages for nofollow links. The NoFollow Chrome Extension will show all nofollow links in red.
What’s the Best Ratio of Nofollow to Dofollow Links? There’s no “best” nofollow to dofollow backlink ratio for links pointing to your site. Some folks think 50/50 is a good mix, some say 40/60, and still others target 30/70 nofollow/dofollow links. Looking at top websites by Alexa Rank in the United States, the mix may be closer to 25/75, which signals that the most successful websites have a greater number of dofollow links. The best mix for your site will naturally include a variety of link types. To get an idea of what might be natural for your industry, examine a sample of websites in a similar space or industry. Follow the lead of sites that already rank high.
Start guest blogging with Tags and Chats today and build your backlinks.
