Advertising Marketing & Promotion

Backlinks are an integral component of successful SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is a marketing strategy intended to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Backlinks are an effective tool because search engines see them as an endorsement by others for whatever it’s linking to. More than simply adding a link towards the end of your article, correctly using backlinks in articles is an art. It is an unobtrusive, subtle way of increasing your readerships. Interested users can simply use embedded backlinks to navigate to the sites and content you want to move them to. 

Location, location, location

Like real estate, the location of backlinks is important. To increase your page rank, place your backlinks near the top or beginning of the article. This gives search engines a point of reference, and lets them know that the data behind the backlink is important. The best location for backlinks is always near the top of your article, but be wary of placing too many URLs too close to each other within an article as this reduces readability and may drive off your users.

Use anchor text

Anchor text is the masking text used to cover a link. The actual URL of a link is usually not shown within articles online; instead, they are masked by anchor text. Using just a link by itself is usually ineffective from an SEO standpoint. Although your readers may understand the link because the information is processed in context with the rest of the article, search engines will not pick it up. To use backlinks correctly, you have to use keywords within your anchor text, such as “how to create a blog” instead of just “blog here”.

Variety is the spice of life

Instead of sticking to just one keyword or phrase to use as your anchor text, switch it around a little. Use other keywords to increase your site’s visibility to search engines, such as “beginner’s guide to blogging” or “starting a blog”. These related keywords can all be used as anchor text for the same URL or link, but if you have more than one site or content to promote, using a variety of backlinks within the same article can also help to increase your page rank. The power of multiple keywords and backlinks is an exponential increase in the relevance of your site, as judged by search engines. Just be sure to only link to quality content to ensure you retain readership.

Stay solo

It may be tempting to cross link your articles, backlinking all of them to each other, but this brings no additional SEO benefit and Google does not encourage this practice. While you can link different articles to each other, don’t link them back in return. Cross-linking is a black hat SEO practice that is often employed to unfairly jump ahead on search engine rankings, and search engines may remove your site from their results if you cross link.

Peggy Tee is a freelance writer and blogger she writes about everything and anything that catches her eye. You can read her blog at Taking to the Open Road.