So a backlink is where a third-party website has a link to your website. That’s the backlink, and Google realizes that if a high-domain ranking website has a link to your website, your website must be real, authentic, valuable, etc.
So how do we get them?
Some ways are just organic, and other ways our active public relations is a huge one for news media outlets and doing those PRs, especially considering hopefully it’s a follow link.
Public Relations
I won’t go down that rabbit hole and explain what those are—if it’s a follow link from a quality news site to yours, that’s a good indication to Google that you’re actually authentic. And it’s a great backlink. So public relations is one of them; the other is guest posting.
Guest Posting
So that’s where you reach out and offer to do two things. You can actually:
write an article for a third party,
you can just ask them to link to it.
And if you go on Fiverr, you can find these people all over the place. People who offer guest posting offer slush interlinking—not really interlinking, but link dropping—which, 90% of the time, is on low-domain ranking websites that you’re getting them from. So they don’t have as much of an influence as, say, a news media outlet.
Directories and Citations
And we do this as part of our onboarding, which is getting your primary directories and citations and your name, address, and phone number consistent across the web because that helps lift the ship. And that’s usually a one-time thing, although we do monitor them to see if there are any changes or if anything drops, especially if you change your name, address, or phone number, then we have to go back and update all those citations.
Signal Genesys
And then the last one that we use is Signal Genesys. Now, Signal Genesys is essentially working out the same thing as public relations and the news media. They’re third-party software that we have found great success with. And we write articles, submit them, and then they get published across usually around 30 different media outlets on the web. And those media outlets can have a variety of domain reputations, say from 20 to 50. And that has been what we have found to really give the biggest boost because guest posting does work, but trying to find the right website partnership to submit a guest post on is a lot of manual work, and Signal Genesys eliminate some of that manual work.
So that’s what we do. Backlinks for the most part other than citations are manual, it is feet on the ground, and it is time consuming and requires human resources. But when done correctly, you can make or break the difference between you and your competition in terms of where you show up in the rankings. So that’s how we get it done. Hopefully, that was a little bit of education without getting too complicated for you.