Basic Guide to Make your Backlinks Work in 2021.

By admin | October 16, 2021

A decade back, SEO was simple. Throw up a thousand word content, couple backlinks, and congrats; you just became a SEO Expert.

Well, those days are long gone by.

It’s 2021 already, and “links” aren’t so simple anymore. They’ve got a complete anatomy of their own, a biology, they’re like a living creature with their own strengths, weaknesses, likings and dislikes!

And if you’re on this page, you probably have already built quite  a few backlinks for your site, but they didn’t work out the way you expected them to, and your site still hasn’t seen the face of Google, I got that right? Didn’t I?

So in this short yet actionable guide I’ll just try to give you a better picture of what you’re doing wrong, and how to get those links to work.

What You’re Doing (But shouldn’t Do)

1. Building “Lots” of Backlinks.

So maybe you read a guide from NeilPatel, Darren Rowse or Brian Dean and decided to hit your site with as many links as you want. Well, all great guides they are, but you probably are late to the game as any guide which tells you to “build a lot of backlinks” is probably half a decade old.

“Quantity” doesn’t matter anymore. Google was quick to find out that humans can be really hardworking when it comes to making money, and hence “quantity” won’t be an issue for us, and that’s why, they took it out of the equation.

Bottomline, stop building lots of backlinks. They’ll have more of a negative effect, rather than positive cause hey what’s the motto Google lives by?

Yeah, see? And “natural” links don’t just pop up one after another. So a lot of backlinks may trigger a spam alert and then you’re gone for good.

2. Building Links From the Same Sites

Finding a site which seems good enough and building half a dozen links from that site doesn’t work anymore either. Every unique site is called a  “Referring domain”, and having more than 1-2 links from the same domain is again something you’ve got to avoid.

Rather, try to get as many “unique domains” to link to you as possible for maximum benefits.

3. Building (Not so) Quality Links

As I said earlier, quantity of links doesn’t matter anymore. So what does?

Quality!

And what does quality mean? Well, it’s a vague concept but let me make it easier for you, hit Moz OSE tool, and check the following details out:

• DA- Domain Authority
• PA- Page Authority
• Number of Backlinks
• Spam Score

And then hit the Whois tool, and check the site’s age out as well. You may optionally also check the site’s “traffic” out using Ahref.

Any site with DA 20+, good number of backlinks from quality sites and low (or Nill) spam score is a “quality site”. And it should preferably be atleast 6 months old. As for traffic, there’s no specific number and it doesn’t matter a “lot” but it’s good if it has some.

Note that it’s just “one possible method” of deciding the quality of a site, and isn’t absolute. But It’s just easier to explain it to you this way than listing out all the 200+ factors which actually count when deciding the quality of a site, right?

4. You’re Using the same Anchor Texts

Google says “links should be natural”, and if in some alternate universe it actually was possible to get enough “natural links” to rank for a keyword, they wouldn’t be using the “exact same anchor texts” right?

So till now, you probably are using the same “My keyword” “My keyword” & “My keyword” anchor text to link to your keywords, and well that doesn’t look very natural.

So what you can do is, DIVERSIFY-

• 30% Exact Match Keywords: “Best SEO Agency in London”
• 30% Secondary keyword anchor text- “SEO Consultant in London” / “Top SEO Consultant in London” etc.
• 30% Generic Keywords- “Click here” / “Read more”.
• 10% Sitename Keywords- “Clickdo”.

Now again, this is a rough calculation and can be interchanged or changed completely, bottomline? Diversify!

5. You’re only Focusing on External Links (And Ignoring Internal Linking)

Getting links from other sites is important, no doubt.

But, linking to your own content is equally important as well. Here’s how much attention Neil Patel gives to Internal Links:

So yeah, do link internally. If you find it a hard task to accomplish, you can use a plugin like Yoast Premium, or a free alternative such as this one.

These plugins automatically suggest you links to your older articles which can be linked to from the article you’re currently working on.

Wrapping it Up

These tips were pretty basic, I agree.

But hey, God is in the details, don’t you agree? You set these pillars right and your site would be the monument you always wanted it to be. Start off the wrong foot, and you won’t ever make it simple as that.

Would you mind taking couple seconds and leaving your opinion in the comments? I know it’s traditional to ask for them, but nope I do read them and they do matter to me.