Diversifying Your Link Profile

Links

Backlinks are a crucial part of your Off-page SEO campaign, and one of the four most important ranking factors according to Search Engine Journal. A good SEO should know that your backlink profile should be diverse enough in order to bring the most value to your website. Backlink quantity shouldn’t necessarily be prioritized over backlink quality.

What Qualifies as a Diverse Backlink Profile

For a successful campaign, you want to make sure that your backlinks have a little bit of everything pointing back to your site, for example:

  • Top-level domains like .com, .edu and .org
  • Image links
  • Follow
  • Nofollow
  • Niche directories
  • Guest posts
  • Local directories
  • Internal links

You can also link practice area pages to each other, location pages, and other pages within your own site, which can often provide benefits as well.

Social media platforms can be a great way to get backlinks as well. Sharing blog articles or other industry news on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be a great way for your website to get backlinks from some high-authority sites, and get clicks on your content.

Quality Over Quantity

A lot of people think that the goal of building backlinks is to get as many links as possible pointing back to your website to boost rankings. That’s only partly true.

The quality of your backlinks plays an important part in how much authority your site will gain. If search engines find that you have tons of backlinks pointing to your site, but they are all from low-quality spam sites, then your site might be deemed as spam and penalized, putting you many pages back in the search results, or gone altogether.

Varying Your Anchor Text

Anchor text is the actual word, phrase, or sentence that is tied to the link. Typically, your anchor text is a phrase that you imagine prospective clients will use to search for when looking for your services. Because the anchor text of a link sends a strong signal to the search engines, pages can begin to rank only due to the anchor text. This doesn’t mean that every single backlink should have an anchor text containing a strong search such as: “CITY NAME car accident lawyer.” That kind of over-optimization and lack of diversity can cause suspicion and work against you.

Maximize Your Referring Domains

Backlinks are often confused with referring domains, but in fact, they’re quite different. A referring domain is the actual domain that the backlink comes from, not the link itself. You may have several backlinks from one single referring domain. Just like with the quality of your backlinks, the number of referring domains you have pointing back to your site can give you a huge boost. The search engines don’t want to see a site that has 1,000 backlinks from five different referring domains. That can signify spammy tactics. The more high-authority referring domains you have, the more domain authority your site will gain, and the higher your rankings will climb.

In addition, if your SEO is increasing the backlinks to your site, they also need to increase the referring domains pointing to your site.

Final Thoughts

Different demographics look for information utilizing various sources, therefore search engines look for different types of sources that show strong domain authority and site legitimacy. Link spamming for quick results is a thing of the past and ends up hurting you in the long run. Some penalties may never get you found again. Build your authority through healthy links, strong referring domains, and diverse anchor texts for the best, long-lasting results. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

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