“Backlink” is a term that is becoming more and more common in the world of business. Thrown around by internet marketers and lauded as one of the best ways to raise your domain authority, the Backlink is becoming a staple of search engine optimization services.

 

So, what actually is a backlink? Simple. It’s a website that links back to your website, a referential link on another website that can increase your website’s value when it comes to ranking your website highly on search engines. Good backlinks can give you an advantage over competition and allow you to be found more easily by potential customers, so it’s worth putting in the time and effort required to obtain them.

 

Websites like Wikipedia using your site as referential material can be hugely beneficial because they are powerful domains that always rank highly themselves, and have a large amount of traffic going through them. As such, a link from a website like this will be more beneficial to your overall ability to rank than one from a small website that doesn’t have, or only has minimal traffic. One of the easiest ways to see if a site is a good website to get a Backlink from is to check its domain authority. This can be done fairly easily.

 

What Is Domain Authority?

 

Domain Authority is a statistic that was designed by a company called Moz. It is an easy way of roughly checking how well a website is going to rank on the pages of a search engine such as Google. Domain Authority (or DA) is a logarithmic scale which ranges between 1 and 100, which basically means that the higher you advance in score, the harder it becomes to increase your score to a higher level. Every site on the internet has a domain authority, and it increases based upon a number of varying factors.

 

There is an easy to obtain tool called MozBar which works as a plugin for Google Chrome that can be used to check the DA, or the domain authority of websites you visit! This enables you to see not only the authority of your own website, but also to see which websites are good to aim to get backlinks from. At DragonTech, we usually recommend any site with a Domain Authority over 20 which will help you increase your ranking. You can get Mozbar for free here!

 

Where Should I Get Backlinks From?

 

It can be complicated acquiring backlinks, however local directories in your area are an excellent start. Usually these have poor SEO, but the fact they are tied in locally helps due to the location services of search engines. You can usually expect a DA ranging between 15 and 30 for local directories. These can be found by typing your town or city name into your search engine, then the words “free directory.” It’s always worth putting your website down on these directories because the links to your site will help you, even if it’s only a little. It can if nothing else help you rank locally, which is really important for small businesses. 

 

You can easily get backlinks from other sources as well, the easiest of which is Facebook. Facebook gets a ludicrous amount of traffic, which means that a backlink from Facebook is very powerful. Their domain authority seldom drops below 90. You can add these backlinks easily enough by making a Facebook page and posting links to blogs on your website, or to your different services. Your page can also have a dedicated website, which will help due to the way Facebook sets up the page’s about data.

 

If you own a restaurant or hotel, you can definitely benefit from getting yourself onto TripAdvisor. It’s likely if your business is doing well that you will already have a claimable profile on TripAdvisor which is simple to acquire. You can claim and edit this profile easily with information about your business which will really help you as it is an incredibly powerful website. We also recommend getting yourself on Yelp, as this can also be a huge benefit to being discovered. Both of these sites will allow you to add information about your location which will help on search engines. It is also a good idea to not copy and paste information about your company, but to add similar information with different wording. Here are the links for both of them. 

 

https://www.tripadvisor.com

https://www.yelp.com

 

Both of these websites will grant you a decent amount of domain authority, and most businesses out there will not be using them to the best of their potential. As few companies take the time to attempt to increase the power of their websites, these backlinks will most likely be more than enough for you to beat a lot of your smaller competitors! It can take some time for your Domain Authority to rise properly so don’t feel disheartened if it takes time, just keep working on it!

 

Networking With Local Companies

 

It is quite likely that you are friends with someone who owns their own website. This can be a potential for mutually beneficial cooperation if you were to link to their website and they were to link back to you. You can also consider local companies and contact them.

 

Whilst it can be good to work together with people who have similar businesses, you do not ideally want to help anyone who is in direct competition with you, however if you owned a pub, and you teamed up with a local fish and chips shop and Indian takeaway, you could have the advantage over a business which isn’t networking in the same way. Businesses like this are similar to you but are not direct competition, which means you can comfortably add them.

 

It is possible to contact all of the businesses near you and offer to put a link from your website to their business website in exchange for one coming back to you. Not every business owner understands backlinks, so sharing this blog with them might help!

 

Non-Related Sites

 

In our previous example where we owned a pub, we worked with similar sites which worked with food and drink. These were beneficial because the websites deal with selling food and drink, just like yours, and are also local to you. A non related site will not be worth as much. You will still get some benefit from these following websites, but not as much.

 

https://www.newgrounds.com

https://hubpages.com

https://www.indiegogo.com

https://www.instructables.com

https://soundcloud.com

https://www.quora.com

https://www.colourlovers.com

 

We hope this blog has been useful to you. If you like it and want to network locally with other businesses by building up your Backlink profile, send it to people you would be interested in working with!