Link building has been “a thing” within search engine optimisation (SEO) for such a long time, it might seem almost “retro” of our experts to suggest you need to pay close attention to your own website’s backlink profile.
The reality, though, is that Google’s algorithm continues to place a big emphasis on backlinks when determining which sites to rank highest.
So, if you wish to achieve strong visibility in the search engine rankings for your brand, you will need to continue caring about your backlink profile.
Backlinks are still crucial, and so is the diversity of those backlinks
The enduring importance of backlinks for brands aspiring to fare well in the search engine results pages (SERPs) shouldn’t really be in doubt. After all, Google itself states that the search engine “primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled. In many cases, these are other websites that are linking to your pages.”
Ultimately, however, for your site’s backlink profile to be healthy, it needs to be diverse.
This means you will need to make sure your backlinks consist of various types of links, such as anchor text links, image links, and/or redirect links.
It will also help if your backlinks vary appropriately in terms of the different anchor texts used. Some of your backlink anchor texts might include your brand name, for instance, while others may be naked URLs, such as www.website.com. Anchor text can also be generic, such as “click here” or “this website”.
The benefits of achieving – and maintaining – a diverse backlink profile
You might be wondering what is so important about diversifying your site’s backlink profile anyway. If so, here are three major advantages to keep in mind:
• It helps avoid over-optimisation
If there is a lack of diversity in your backlink profile – for example, there being one type of link that dominates – this could look suspiciously unnatural to search engines. As a result, your site could be at risk of being penalised in the search engine rankings.
• It helps diversify the sources of traffic to your site
If the traffic to your site isn’t coming from a range of sources – encompassing the likes of search, social, and email – your site could suffer badly if one of your traffic sources suddenly declines. Building a diverse backlink profile, then, can help your site develop a variety of sources of traffic, instead of being dangerously reliant on just one or two main traffic sources.
• It helps your site find new audiences
It might seem a “safe” course of action to focus on acquiring links from sites that cater to the existing audience of your brand. However, in doing this, you might end up with backlinks from a relatively narrow range of sites and platforms. This may leave you having to do further work to boost awareness of your website and expand your audience – which a more diverse backlink profile can help you achieve.
Are you ready to work alongside Jumping Spider Media’s dedicated link-building team to devise the strategies that will help deliver the perfectly optimised backlink profile for your brand? If so, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly via phone or email today.