As many of you know, backlinking, and having a backlinking strategy, is crucial for obtaining high rankings on search engines and having great search engine optimization. In this article I’ll dive into why that is, how you can get backlinks, how to properly place a backlink and various other backlinking strategies.
A backlink is simply a link from another website to your website. Having backlinks makes your website seem more popular, and the more popular your site is the more likely you’ll rank for your desired keywords (provided that the keywords you’re trying to rank for are relevant to the content on your site). This popularity concept makes sense because if people are referring links to you then you must be credible, right? Well, not always. You need to make sure that you are getting backlinks from popular websites.
So how do you judge the popularity of a website? Well, Google gives every site a page rank (from 1-10, 10 being the highest), and this is one solid barometer for knowing how popular a website is in Google’s eyes. Also, a website’s Alexa ranking is another solid way of knowing how popular a site is; however, I prefer Google page rank because it would seem that the search engine algorithm that Google uses is probably more heavily weighted in favor of Google page rank than Alexa ranking. That being said, don’t get too hung up on page rank, since it’s an arbitrary value assigned by Google.
So where do you go to get backlinks, and how do you get them? This is a very good question and one where you have many options, especially for doctors, including:
- Comments on other industry blogs
- Directory listings
- A profile on medical sites such as Real Self
- A link exchange between you & a peer’s website (you both agree to link to each other’s site)
- A press release
- Social media sites
Now, it’s not about simply having a link to your website; there’s a technique to placing a backlink. The key is having the right anchor text, which is the phrase or keyword that is highlighted by the hyper link. Before you even consider the anchor text you want to use you need to have done your keyword research (check out this article for more details on basic keyword research). This will help you determine which keywords people are searching for and which keywords you want to target. So let’s say, for example, that I want this website to rank for “medical social media.” I will place my backlink as medical social media. This way Google is associating the keyword phrase in the anchor text with my website, thus helping me improve my search engine rankings for this keyword.
Keep in mind that you won’t always want to link to your home page. In fact, if you utilize a blog, which I highly recommend, then you’ll also want to backlink to other inside pages and articles. Before deciding which page or article on your site to link to you need to assess where you currently stand with your search engine rankings. For example, if you want to rank for say, “Miami breast augmentation,” and you do a search and find that your Breast Augmentation page is on page 6, but your home page is on page 10, then you clearly want to target your inside, Breast Augmentation page, because it’s more likely to move up quickly since Google already views it as more relevant.
Also consider backlinking to your Youtube videos & channel, your local business listing and your social networks. This will also help to get the rankings up for these sites as well. Remember though, a backlink can go to waste if you don’t have your website or blog articles optimized for the right keywords.
Make sure that once you decide on a keyword that you want a certain page to rank for that you:
1) Make sure that page utilizes that keyword several times within the content, preferably within a heading (h1) tag
2) Make sure you optimize the title tag and meta description for this exact keyword phrase
3) Make sure the backlink you place uses this exact keyword phrase in the anchor text
If you follow these steps you’ll be well on your way to getting better search engine rankings through backlinking. If you have any questions about backlinking or search engine optimization in general then contact TRBO ADvance today, or give us a call at 877-673-7096 x2.
