BACKLINKS
I was chatting to a client about search engine optimisation and reminded him about the importance of backlinks. These are links to your website from another website, and are another way of verifying that you're genuine to the search engines. Like your website copy, backlinks need to be meaningful. It's no good having dozens from random sites, but as an example, links from a blog post about your product score very highly.
Writing in-depth articles on the subject of your business, can naturally result in other sites referencing and linking to your page. Building relationships with other site owners and bloggers, contributing content and listing your business with trade organisations in your industry or in other niche or regional directories all help to create backlinks.
BAD BACKLINKS
You don't want backlinks from an inappropriate site, so check what sites link to you. Review the sites to decide if you want to be associated with them and if not, ask the owner of the site to remove the link. If they ignore your request, or refuse, you can ask Google to ignore bad backlinks by using the Disavow Tool to dissociate your site from the link.
5 TIPS FOR CREATING BACKLINKS
1. Share Images
Backlinks can be in the form of an image as well as text. To add an image backlink, the link is created in the alt tag text of the image. It can be a URL, your name, your business’s name, or phrases that include your target keywords.
2. Build Relationships
Be prepared to work for high quality backlinks. Contacting people and building relationships with other site owners can result in trustworthy links from relevant sources. These score more highly with Google.
3. Be Selective
Having lots of low quality backlinks can have a negative effect on your website’s ranking. Good links are judged on multiple criteria, which include things like relevance and traffic, trustworthiness and how well they match your keywords.
4. Link Different Pages
Get links to as many different pages of your site as you can. The homepage will acquire the most, but links to internal pages are also valuable.
5. Try Different Things
There are many ways to get backlinks. Google rewards authentic, natural looking links, so do your research, use the tools out there and add as many different links as you can.
I'd like to hat tip Steve Napier of SEO Link who has some very helpful guides to SEO and backlinks, which you can find here: https://www.seomark.co.uk/high-quality-backlinks/