Links are the primary method for Google to determine your website’s reputation. It’s a crucial reputation by association. If many other trustworthy, authoritative websites are linking to your website, then Google has confidence that your website is trustworthy as well hence authoritative.

Naturally , if many spammy websites are linking to your website, then Google will determine that your website is spammy as well, so it’s important to be cautious about that.

Be Careful Building Links

With Google’s algorithm constantly changing, what are the rules one needs to follow regarding link building?

The first rule is no paid backlinks. If the other websites only create links for a payment of $1000, then Google doesn’t count paid links in their algorithm. That’s rule #1.

Rule #2 was alluded to above - Do not get links from low-quality, spammy, and/or irrelevant websites. This is “Reputation by Association” so don’t taint your website’s reputation by associating it with such websites.

Finally, rule #3 is to concentrate on the most natural links as possible. The more organic the link, the more Google will factor it into their algorithm in favor.

How to backlink to your website?

No. 1. Create Something Awesome

Create content on your website that other businesses in your industry would want to link to. Things like complete, step-by-step guides, useful calculators, and even a browser plugin or tool that help automate a tedious task - help generate links the most.

If you manage to create something truly awesome, then you’ll organically get links. This is exactly what Google is looking for and these are the most valuable links for your SEO.

Once you think of something unique and helpful, and create and publish it on your website, you will then need to promote it so other websites know it exists.

In other words, even after all that hard work, there is no guarantee you’ll get links to it. Still, if you do succeed, rest assured that these will be the most valuable for your SEO.

No. 2. Do Something Awesome to Get Public Relations

Try to generate some awesome publicity to garner the attention of your local or even national media.

But remember that this takes real work and creativity and there is no guarantee that you will eventually get the links links. Nevertheless, if you do get online press mentions, then such links will give you a big competitive advantage.

No. 3. Write for a Column

People are always looking for original content so if you can secure a steady column for some online publication, you will be able to consistently publish articles with links that direct back to your website.

Since Google understands the competitiveness of the editorial process for online publications, these types of links have higher value in terms of SEO than a standard guest blog article.

#4. Publish Guest Blog Articles

Once again, original content is something websites are looking for, so do your research and find other websites in your industry and see whether they accept any guest articles. If they do, that is an opportunity for you to write and post a guest blog article that includes a link back to your website.

Guest blogs are not as valuable as natural links, press mentions, or columns, but they are still worth the effort, especially if it is an accredited website. In addition to helping your SEO, guest blog articles may drive traffic, leads and sales to your website so it is something to invest in.

#5. Submit to Directories

Lastly, you can send your website’s address to relevant directories. While this is the easiest tactic, these links have the least value for your SEO. But it’s still worth doing.

It is still recommended to get listed in relevant national, industry-specific and local directories – primarily for citations, which are crucial for Local SEO.

A citation is simply a mention of your name, address, and phone number (aka NAP). Each listing in such directory counts as a citation and they help boost your rankings once Google shows the map on the first page of the results.

The Key: Diversification

As shown in this post, there are many different ways to effectively and safely get links to your website. Like any investment, you would want to diversify your “link portfolio.” invest your budget across all the tactics mentioned above and continuously build links from a diverse source of websites.

A good indicator of a diverse, healthy link profile is that the number of linking domains (the number of separate websites pointing to your website) is organically increasing over time. You may measure such metric through Google’s Search Console or via using a tool like Ahrefs. Remember that once you focus on all 5 of these types of links, then you will likely see a steady upward trend in the growth of your linking domains and a result of your SEO score.