Your website’s ranking in Google is based on more than 200 factors. However, increasing the number of websites that link to yours (ie increasing the number of “backlinks“) is a very cost-effective SEO technique that will help your website get more visibility.
Link quality matters
Fortunately it’s not only the number of backlinks that matters – it’s also the relevance and quality of each link. The websites that link to your website have to be relevant to your business, product or service – in order to make that backlink count.
Participating in link building schemes and link exchanging will ruin your website SEO. Never ever pay anyone who is offering you a “1000 backlinks”: 10 powerful, free, quality links are much better than that. So, find out now how to legally boost your website’s natural backlinks!
1. Online Directories SEO
A Link directory or Online Directory or Web Directory is a directory on the internet that links to other websites. It usually lists websites by category – exactly as the paper Yellow Pages does for local businesses.
Submitting your website to online directories will help increase your ranking – but only if those directories are relevant to your business website. Don’t abuse this and don’t waste time and money on generic directories.
Register your website with the main global directories (Google Local, DMOZ, Qype, Tuugo, Yelp). It’s also recommended to register with local (Irish) directories and industry-specific web directories. Search in Google for “your_industry web directory” and see if it can give you a return on the investment.
2. Blogs and Forums SEO
Every time you submit a comment or reply to a forum topic, you add a backlink to your website. That backlink becomes relevant when the blog or forum you’re contributing to are relevant to your business website.
If you make sure your comment contributes to that discussion, it won’t be considered as spam, and your Google ranking may dramatically improve. So, research what blogs and forums are relevant to your niche, and get active.
Google has a nice “blog search” function that you can use to find the most appropriate blogs. If you are an Irish business, create a free account on Boards.ie forum and start contributing today – Boards.ie is a major source of backlinks.
3. Social Media SEO
Social Media links are not extremely powerful to your website – however people can potentially notice your content – and eventually create backlinks to your website.
Share your news, blog posts and website pages to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn if necessary. If relevant to your business, use Pinterest, Foursquare and other platforms – the more the better. Use an automatic social media sharing deck, so then sharing to multiple platforms can be easy and quick.
Finally, add sharing buttons to your website, and make it easy for your users to Like your content.