Every good backlink profile begins with a single backlink. Simply defined, a backlink is an embedded link to your website that appears somewhere on another website. Conversely, if a link to another website appears on yours, you have provided a backlink for someone else.

Backlinking does far more than just offer easy access to offsite information for website visitors. Ahrefs have identified referral traffic, greater search engine discovery, and higher search engine rankings as the three biggest benefits of backlinks.

Driving traffic to your website is an essential component of online marketing outreach. When people click a link to your website to get more information, you immediately gain a new website visitor who shares a common interest!

The other two major benefits of building a portfolio of backlinks have to do with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO efforts are centered around improving connections with motivated consumers through popular online search engines such as Google. A significant number of key backlinks can both help search engines discover a new website and cause them to place a familiar website higher in results rankings.

Although it may seem quite simple to boost SEO through backlinking, there is an intricate art and science to the process. It may be easy to randomly place large numbers of anchor texts on arbitrary websites in an attempt to increase the number of backlinks to your own website. However, quality is far more important than quantity when it comes to building your backlink profile.

What Is a Backlink Profile?

Your backlink profile is more than just an internet-wide list of all the anchor links to your website. It also involves an assessment of your backlinks’ ability to drive referral traffic and improve search engine results. Because a backlink from an irrefutable, untrustworthy, or unknown website can actually hurt your referral and SEO efforts, it is crucial to approach the entire backlinking process with careful thought and strategic planning.

Building a Strong Backlink Profile

Due to its innate complexity, the link building process is best conducted by an experienced digital marketing professional. However, all quality backlink profiles share a few essential qualities in common.

Backlinks

As previously mentioned, all effective backlink profiles begin with a single high-quality backlink. You have to start somewhere, and even the longest of journeys starts with a single step!

Link Attributes

Digital marketing experts divide website anchor links into two general categories (Dofollow and Nofollow) that are determined by how the ranking algorithms of Google and other leading search engines treat each link.

In short, a Dofollow link passes page ranking signals to search engines, while a Nofollow link doesn’t. As we will discuss in the “Find Balance” section below, search engines keep tabs on both types of links, making them equally essential for good SEO.

Referring Domains

Referring domains are the various websites that contain backlinks to your website. As we discussed before, the quality of your referring domains reflects directly upon the quality of your website in the estimation of search engines and consumers alike.

Anchor Text Distribution

Each anchor text that backlinks to your website sends identifying information about that link to search engines. This means that search engines can keep track of anchor text categories to see if a particular backlink profile is designed to artificially boost rankings through “spammy” practices.

For example, search engines look for relatively even anchor text distribution across a broad range of categories. If the vast majority of a website’s links have a precisely matching anchor text, it will raise a red flag that may negatively impact SEO.

H3: Relevancy

We have already discussed the benefits of backlinking to websites that are respected authorities in their respective fields of influence. But all the respect and authority in the world make little difference if their fields of influence differ from yours.

This is the underlying idea behind relevancy. Backlinks to your website must fall within its primary area of focus. For example, a real estate website would gain little from a backlink on a blog that is dedicated to reviewing new soft drinks.

Spam Score and Trust Flow

A lack of relevancy is just one of many issues that can turn a healthy backlink into a toxic one. Although neither spam score nor trust flow is an official backlink metric of top search engines such as Google, they are proven criteria when it comes to assessing the overall quality of a specific website.

Determined by calculating the percentage of websites with features that are similar to the website under scrutiny, the spam score estimates the likelihood that a particular backlink comes from a low-value spam website. Low spam scores come in at  30 percent or less, while high spam scores are generally over 60 percent.

Trust flow measured the overall credibility of a website based on the credibility of its backlinks. This key SEO and referral metric is determined by tabulating the number of clicks that a specific page receives from an established set of trusted and relevant sites.

Find Balance

We have discussed the fact that search engines look for an even divide among relevant categories when it comes to anchor text distribution. This principle of balance also applies to many of the issues that govern effective backlink profile building.

“For example,” says the industry authority Backlinked, “if all your backlinks come from one site, you have also convinced only one webmaster of your site. Therefore, regardless of their absolute number, these backlinks are not worth much.”

A similar balance should exist between Dofollow and Nofollow links. If Dofollow links dramatically outnumber Nofollow links for a given site, this serves as a signal of unnatural and inorganic backlink practices and will negatively affect search engine rankings.

Let Marketing Done Right Help You!

Marketing Done Right offers multidisciplinary digital outreach services that include all aspects of backlinking and general SEO. Our team of experts is adept at using the latest in industry advancements to achieve goals that are specific to your company.

In Conclusion

A leading digital marketing agency can assist you with all facets of backlink profile building. To learn more about the power of the backlink and link building best practices, contact a skilled and knowledgeable representative of Cleveland, Ohio’s Marketing Done Right today.