Business

A SEO Newbie’s Guide to Backlink Profiles

Search engine optimization may sound like the hottest marketing tool around, but it’s still underrated. Believe it or not, less than half of businesses currently invest in their SEO strategies.

Well, that’s good news for you, as it gives you more time to get ahead. However, there’s one big challenge in any SEO strategy, and it takes place off of your website.

Let’s talk about how to build a backlink profile in 2022 to boost your SEO strategy!

What is a Backlink Profile?

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, backlinks are the links from other sites to yours, and they are the primary off-page ranking factor for search engines like Google.

The reason for this is simple; Google needs to understand your website’s authority on a given topic, and their algorithms rely on other websites for that.

For example, every time the New York Times runs a major story (which is every day), other news outlets from across the country and around the world will share the information and link back to their original story.

For that reason, if the NYT runs a mediocre story about a topic you’re an expert in, they’ll still have an easier time ranking at the top of a relevant search because of their backlink profile.

If you haven’t guessed, a backlink profile is the overall collection of links on the web directing users to your site.

Conduct a Backlink Profile Audit

If you want to know how to check your backlink profile, most SEO tools will tell you how many links go to specific pages on your website. This includes Moz, Google Search Console AHRefs, or whichever your favorite tool is.

All you will have to do is insert your website’s URL along with any competitor site to see your current backlink profile.

Once you know where your links are coming from, you can compare them to your competition, try to clean out the ones that are harming your strategy, and try to build upon your existing profile.

How to Build a Good Backlink Profile

Without a doubt, the best way to build a quality backlink profile in the eyes of Google is to produce quality content on a responsive website.

Over time, other websites will recognize this great content and promote it to their users, which develops a quality, organic backlink profile over time. However, that takes time and consistency.

In the meantime, you’ll need to get the ball rolling. Guest posts are another great way, where you ask an affiliate to link to your site organically in a post.

However, understanding anchor text and backlinks is important, as the two go hand-in-hand for SEO value, as the anchor text provides search engines with context for an outbound link.