A Beginners Guide to SEO in 2018
We are an Ottawa-based Web Agency and we know SEO can be a daunting task for even the most experienced digital marketer, let alone a complete novice. The ranking of your website and increasing it is dependant on hundreds of factors but there is one factor that has a big impact of your ranking – backlinks.
Backlinks are links from other websites across the internet back to your own. Before you rush own and get your links posted everywhere, keep in mind that the quality of your backlinks plays a major role in their effectiveness. The more relevant and reputable sources you have linking back to your website, the better your own reputation becomes.
Firstly, let’s discuss what a high-quality website is and what factors affect how Google decides to rank them.
Domain Age: websites with long-standing, consistent ownership is seen to be trustworthy by Google, giving links from it more weight.
Link Authority: many factors affect the authority of links from a website including age, keyword relevance and density all add weight to your links.
Natural Link Patterns: Google’s algorithm is excellent at looking at your natural linking patterns and it punishes those who have dozens of links from low-quality websites.
Exact Match Anchor Text: The text that hyperlinks to your website plays a key role in the quality of the links and relevant keywords add more validity to links.
Now that’s out of the way, we can look at our five tips for fostering high-quality backlinks.
Review the Inbound Links to Your Website
Create a folder or a spreadsheet of the current links to go back to your website. Analyse this data by asking how many you have and where they come from. Take some time to determine the quality of these websites, including their rank and authority. You can then decide what content is attracting these links and work out which keywords you can capitalise on.
List Your Top Posts, Pages and Keywords
Analyse your website and create a list of your most-read content and the keywords that attract the highest levels of traffic to your website. This will help you work out what drives people to your website and why other websites would link back to you. Content is the backbone of your inbound linking activities, so it needs to be relevant, engaging, authoritative and unique.
Write Long-Form Content for Your Website
Content that is over 1,000 words is long-form and attracts backlinks from other websites. You don’t even need to create need content, you can search your website to find good content that you can expand upon and write longer pieces or guides. Take a look at RenoQuotes.com who do a fantastic job if this.
Compile a List of the Websites You’re Interested in Writing For
Many websites allow people to write guest posts, which let you add natural links back to your website. They get more content and you get more backlinks, it’s win-win. You can pitch ideas for topics you’d like to cover, or the website owner may ask for something specific within your field of expertise.
Foster Backlinks to Your Best Content
Another effective strategy is to pitch the content that gets you a lot of traffic to other websites and pitch it as something they can link back to in their own articles. If the content you send is relevant to their target audience and high-quality, they may consider your request and feature your content as a source.
That’s the end of our brief beginner’s guide to SEO. Good luck with your ranking and if you need any more information, please feel free to contact us directly for one-to-one advice on improving your SEO.
