What Makes a Good Backlink?

Backlinks are now one of the most important ranking factors for search engines, and have been for quite some time.

A backlink is a link from one domain to another – the higher the domain authority of the backlink is, the better your chances are at improving your own rankings. All of this and more will be discussed in our latest guide in making sure you have the best backlinks for your website.

Link Relevancy

If you have a website that specialises in dog walking, are you going to want a backlink from a reptile specialist website?

Backlinks between websites should be relevant to the site’s business or the general purpose of the website. If it’s a blog based around fishing sites in the UK for instance, the site owner should be looking for backlinks from angling websites so that readers can click through and still find relevance to your site.

Search engines will be looking for these associations when crawling your website; the better the relevancy your backlinks are to your website’s purpose, the better the link quality. In turn this means improved rankings.

Domain Authority

This term, usually referred to as DA, was made by SEO company Moz who use it as a gauge to see which sites are more trustworthy than others. In essence, the higher a website’s DA the better it is for your website if you have a backlink from them.

Examples of sites with the highest DA, of around 95+/100, include the BBC, CNN and other popular news sites, NHS and its supported sites and Wikipedia.

A low DA site will be anything below 25, with 40 – 60 being an average for most trustworthy sites. Using the DA as a metric will give you a rough estimate of how good a backlink is, though it shouldn’t be used on its own to decide if a backlink is trustworthy or not.

Brand Awareness

A portion of a site’s trustworthiness is found by the site’s overall brand presence. A well-known makeup brand for example will be more likely to be received than a lesser known brand that will have less backlinks.

Increasing trust goes beyond optimising your website and having a number of great backlinks, it also includes SEO-focused content, social media presence and on-page SEO optimisations.

Getting backlinks can be difficult at first, but there are many ways you can look to gain relevant links. For instance, guest blogging is a great way to include your own content on another person’s website in exchange for a backlink. Sponsored content is another way backlinks can be achieved, where a business will showcase your business in dedicated posts.

One thing to keep in mind when looking for backlinks is that you should research your market, perform continued outreach and be consistent with your process so that you have the best chance of gaining relevant and high quality backlinks.

Innermedia offers a range of services that can help with your backlink profile, as well as other SEO services to make your website shine.