How to Take Advantage of Backlinks to Rank Well in Search Engines

In digital marketing, it is now generally agreed that backlinks are important ranking factors in SEO. If these backlinks have high-quality, they are so much better for SEO ranking purposes. There is no doubt at all that quality backlinks can and do have substantial impact on search engine rankings. So, if you manage to get backlinks to your website and such links are from high quality websites, they are quality backlinks. You can take advantage of such backlinks to rank high too in the SERPs of search engines since backlinks are some of the vital ranking factors in the ranking process. Here are some proven techniques you can use to rank well through backlinks.

Increase in Page Authority

Linked domain authority (LDA) is a major component of Page Authority you can take advantage of to increase Page Authority. LDA essentially quantifies the power that a page wields on linking websites. LDA is a direct measure of how powerful an individual page is. This power is measured by how much weight it has on other websites. So, the higher the DA, the more important the content is. Search engines like Google tend to treat websites having high DA with higher respect than other sites. They rank them higher as well. LDA combined with link quantity and quality helps this ranking a great deal.

Linking to Other High Quality Domains

In practical SEO ranking terms, backlinks are a factor in the process but there are other factors as well. It is great to build backlinks but where those backlinks come from is hugely important as well. High quality domains are a great source you cannot afford to ignore if you want to get quality backlinks. So, if you want to have high quality backlinks, you can deliberately embark on quality link building by reaching out to other domains by way of guest posts, article marketing and other forms of content marketing. This is about the best way to attract quality backlinks to your own domain that can help your SEO ranking.

Increase the Number of Links from Other Domains

There is a debate as to whether it is the quantity or quality of backlinks that really matters more for SEO ranking purposes. What is not in doubt however is that Google uses backlinks from other websites to assess how valuable your own website is. That information affects the ranking of your website. To be on the safe side, it is best to go for both quality and quantity when building backlinks. When search engines track link points back to your website, they are able to estimate how many quality backlinks you have based on the popularity of the sites that are linked to you. Google takes this into account when ranking your site higher. Why the quantity of links matters as well as the quality is that the more the number of backlinks you have, the better the chances of Google finding more quality backlinks from the lot, and that affects your ranking.

Keep an Eye on Google Algorithm Updates

It is true that Google updates its algorithms periodically. If you keep an eye on these updates, you’ll always know what Google wants with backlinks for its ranking purposes. If you know what Google wants, you can in compliance with that requirement build some high-quality backlinks to enhance your organic backlink growth. That helps your ranking as well if you are doing what Google expects you to do. Therefore, you must be ready and patient to know what Google wants with backlinks at any in point in time then research well before embarking on your link outreach to ensure you get quality links that Google algorithms will so identify.

Explore Domain Age and Trust Flow Measures

For SEO purposes, Domain Age and Trust Flow are both ranked as moderately important ranking factors. Aside site authority which DA confers, trust also matters in SEO ranking. Domain Age and Trust Flow measures significantly help to improve your website’s trustworthiness. This is one main reason backlink building that enhances trustworthiness of your website is still very valuable in your SEO campaigns. If you use proven link building techniques like targeting long-tail keywords or writing quality guest blog posts on topics related to your niche, you can build trust over time.

Shop for Links Based on their Strength

Usually, powerful backlinks are helpful for your website ranking. You can only get such backlinks from higher domain trust networks like Universities, Research centers and powerful traditional news media like the New York Times and Washington Post. The links from these sites have more strength and authority over and above links from ordinary blogs or ordinary websites. It may not be very easy for everyone to get links from such powerful and authoritative domains but you can get links from them if you work hard at it. If you are able to create high-quality content that attracts these powerful and authoritative sites organically, you can get links from them. Because links are also weighted by how recently they were published, you therefore get more valuable links from such authoritative websites that publish high-quality content consistently, regularly and in high volumes. That usually creates more new content to link to. In the eyes of Google, your website gets more value for a new link than an old one and that helps its ranking.

Effective Affiliate Marketing Tips for New Bloggers

Blogging has become a hugely effective tool for affiliate marketers to drive purchase-intent traffic to their website and affiliate offerings. The reason most affiliate marketers and actively involved in blogging. Even if you are new to blogging, what you do to get results must be similar to what experienced bloggers do. Even though affiliate marketers are expected to effectively promote different products and get a commission without having to deal with any physical products or even customers, many usually have great difficulties getting purchase-intent traffic to their affiliate offerings. One practical way around that difficulty is blogging. A good blog can help improve traffic and even sales/revenue for most affiliate marketing efforts.

New bloggers are best advised therefore to concentrate on using their blog to attract good traffic. This they can do by improving their domain authority, performing keyword research on purchase-intent keywords, writing reviews on products/services and joining new affiliate programs. Doing these things consistently will enable them to use their blog to effectively increase their chances of making more affiliate sales and increased commissions.
 
Even though experienced marketers usually volunteer many blogging tips for affiliate marketing, these here tips are particularly suitable for new bloggers who want to maximize their affiliate marketing efforts using their blogs.

Don’t Target Highly Competitive Keywords

If you do so, you’ll be beaten black and blue by more experienced bloggers who are already fully into such keywords. It is an avoidable mistake for new bloggers doing affiliate marketing to target highly competitive keywords early on. Once a keyword is lucrative, chances are always very high that many other bloggers, some very experienced bloggers at that, are already writing blog posts about the keyword. It is usually very difficult if not impossible for new bloggers to make any impact with such keywords. If you start with such competitive keywords immediately, you risk poor ranking. When that happens, it can be quite demoralizing and could even stunt your blogging efforts in totality.

What then is best to do? Just target low difficulty and less competitive keywords! By using such keywords, chances are very high that your blog posts can age and increase rankings over time. As you garner more blogging experience with even some initial traffic, you can then muster more confidence to target more competitive keywords going forward. It is best to aim for higher volume and lower difficulty affiliate keywords. Such keywords give you the best chance of driving more traffic to your website and making more affiliate sales as a consequence. To locate such words, you can do keywords research on online tools like Ahrefs.

 

Target Recurring Affiliate Sales

Recurring affiliate sales are a dream income stream for many affiliate marketers. New bloggers who have attained some level of domain authority and keyword research can rank competitively for many affiliate keywords. That is when it is best for them to target recurring affiliate sales. For new bloggers, having passive affiliate sales is OK but having recurring monthly affiliate revenue is much better.

Even though the commonest affiliate marketing model with most bloggers is to promote an affiliate product/service and getting a commission after a sale, that income can be passive. But, the recurring traffic you get by ranking well usually ensures you get more sales month in month out going forward. Now, that is great for affiliate income! Recurring affiliate sales are like the icing on the cake and they tend to improve greatly on the passive income model. With recurring affiliate sales, you are paid commissions indefinitely for each new customer you refer. That by all calculations is much better than getting a one-time commission for each sale. Your commissions come in steadily each month a customer you referred pays for a product indefinitely. Targeting affiliate programs like these instead of one-time commissions can skyrocket the affiliate revenue from your blog.

Increase your Domain Authority

Domain authority refers to the authority your blog commands in cyber space. Digital marketers measure domain authority by way of rating on a scale from 0 to 100. It indicates the quality and number of sites that link back to your website. The nearer your rating is to 100, the better your website is ranked in Google SERPs. This is important because backlinks are a ranking factor that Google uses to rank sites. The higher your domain rating therefore, the easier it is for Google to rank it for affiliate keywords. If you are a new blogger, you can improve your domain rating by doing guest posts and getting backlinks to your website among other blogging activities to help your ranking. Technically, this appears to be the most efficient way to increase your domain rating because it helps you get initial backlinks to your website and this can attract more natural backlinks to the site.

When your domain rating is high enough, you can start ranking for some important keywords. This helps to increase the traffic to your website significantly. Thus, if your website has a clean backlink profile and high domain authority, its commercial valuation as a valuable web property increases. This is so because domain authority is one of the main factors that buyers take into consideration in pricing a web property. The higher it is, the more valuable the web property is.

6 Ways to Improve Domain Authority for your Website

Domain authority is a technical marketing metric digital marketers use to rate their websites. It appears to have first been developed by Moz but it is now widely used by many SEO tools. The rating helps website administrators predict where their website will appear on SERPs. The higher the rating, the better the chances that a website will be rated highly on SERPs because the Domain Authority (DA) of a website is based on a range of factors which search engines rely on to determine search rankings. Marketers can by deliberate efforts therefore improve the domain authority of their websites through these factors.

Here are 6 simple ways to improve the DA of a business website.

1. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Some Google reports now attribute up to 60% of web traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s some huge chunk of traffic no serious marketer can afford to lose out on. What to do? Just make your website mobile-friendly enough to give the site a very good chance to benefit from some of that valuable traffic. By doing so, you will not only make the user experience on your website better, you will also improve its domain authority. You can improve the mobile-friendliness of your website through its design and layout which many experienced webmasters are not likely to ignore in this age and time if you are unable to do it yourself.

2. Increase Social Engagement

Most website owners know that social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at these days doing one thing or another 24/7. Exploring ways to increase social engagement of your website therefore becomes highly imperative. If for instance any web page of your website has been liked, shared, and commented on several times on social media, that page is more likely to get organic links to your website as well as more branded searches. That helps its ranking a great deal. If you use social media to interact fully with users interested in your content, it will improve your DA. An improved DA helps to drive more traffic and improves your search ranking.
 
3. Improve Page Speed

Page speed is one of the vital factors contributing to the use-friendliness of your website. Page speed impacts where your content ranks in search results, which in turn impacts your DA and Bounce Rate. You can do some in-house tests on your website to determine its loading speed. If for instance your web pages consistently take more than two or three seconds to load, it is a pointer that you have a problem. You can by deliberate action improve loading speed of your website pages by taking a look at the following factors:

Check the website design and hosting provider.
Ensure there are not too many widgets and plugins.
Optimize your Theme or Content Management System.
Make sure the Images and Video files are not unduly too large.

If widgets, ads, or large images and video files are responsible for slowing down your website speed, you may choose to remove them altogether if you cannot reduce their sizes enough to improve the loading speed of the site.

4. Write Linkable Quality Content

Writing linkable content is one of the best ways to get backlinks. If you can create high quality content on your website that other websites will want to link to, that’s linkable content. Such content if SEO optimized can organically generate links on its own. You attract backlinks to your website by regularly providing original, useful, and relevant content in your niche/industry. That is the type of content that most likely generates good backlinks, improve your search ranking, and boost your DA score. Some of the best linkable content most popular with marketers are, Product reviews, Video content, Long-form blog posts,  How-to guides and informative web pages,  Original images, visuals, and infographics among others.

5. Encourage Guest Posting

If you encourage guest posting, you can determine where you want your backlinks to be. If your content is good enough and linkable, it helps to improve your DA since DA calculators do take into account the quantity and quality of backlinks. That makes it imperative that you must encourage only backlinks from legitimate, authoritative, and reputable websites. If you guest post on such websites and leave a link back to your website, it helps your DA score. Inevitably, consistently writing quality guest posts generates good backlinks. Such posts further help you to build highly beneficial relationships with other authoritative websites. Your relevant content out there on such websites shows users that you’re some kind of expert/authority in your industry/niche. That on its own helps to improve your website search ranking and it is good for business.

6. Improve Internal Linking and Backlinks

Internal links are links on your website that link to other pages on the site. They help search engines and other users to navigate the site. Backlinks are links to your website from other sites. Both types of links have marketing and search advantages the reason they are both vital to your DA and search ranking. However, backlinks are not that easy to get since it is not your website that’s providing them. What you do on your website helps to get them from other sites. So, if you consistently write high quality linkable content and guest posts, you can be rest assured that you’ll get high-quality backlinks as a consequence.

Last Line

The above steps will not only help to boost the DA score for your website, they’ll also make your website more user-friendly and enhance your search ranking. Irrespective of whether your aim is to improve your search ranking, optimize your website for users, or compare yourself to your competitors, improving your domain authority, DA is one useful metric you cannot afford to ignore on your website. However, DA only predicts success but does not guarantee it. But, it offers a useful signpost to measure your website with. Website success depends on some other factors among which DA is only an important one. 

Why Domain Authority is Important for your Business Website

If you are a digital marketer, you are no doubt aware that your website is your business window in the deep digital space of the Internet. If your website does not command a respectable domain authority, it is seriously handicapped as a business outlet on the Internet. A good domain authority enables the site to appear high on search engine results pages (SERPs). If your website manages to make a top spot on SERPs, it becomes easier for users to find the site and more likely to click on it and do business out of it. That is why most digital marketers really crave a high search ranking for their business websites and a good DA helps that process.

So, if you really want to easily beat out your competitors and rise through search rankings, you must do something about your domain authority. One of the most important factors that impact the search ranking of your website is its domain authority (DA). This you can always work on by deliberate efforts to improve upon.

But first, you must fully understand exactly what Domain Authority is. Domain authority is a scientific marketing metric first developed by Moz but is now widely used by many SEO tools. The results come in form of numbers as ratings. Why exactly is this rating important to website owners? Well, it appears to be a great tool that helps website owners/administrators to predict where their website will appear on SERPs. DA is based on a range of factors that help determine how high a site is likely to appear in the search rankings. When a website ranks high on SERPs, it benefits from higher web traffic. That web traffic is organic traffic which is about the best quality traffic a website can benefit from. DA helps too to drive higher click-through rates (CTRs), more leads, higher conversions and even more sales.

Thus, digital marketers deftly use DA to improve the overall performance of their websites in comparison with competitors even though it may not on its own stand as an absolute metric for the search engine performance of their websites. What really works in favour of DA however is that as website owners through SEO start to tick the boxes of factors required by Google to give their websites top spot on Google SERPs, it also helps the DAs of their websites. The most important of these factors include:

1. Search Engine Optimization, SEO: A special preparation/arrangement of content across your domain and how well optimized it is for search engines.

2. Backlinks: Both the quantity and quality of backlinks are very important here. These are links to your website from other websites. The quality of backlinks is determined by the authority of the domains they are linked to.

3. Social Signals: This is the buzz of your website on social media. It depends on how much the content/pages in your domain are being shared and interacted with on social media platforms.

4. Technical Ranking Factors: These are factors dependent on your website design and layout. They relate to its page loading speed, aesthetics, user-friendliness, internal linking structure, and mobile-friendliness.

Last Line

Professional marketers use DA calculators to collect DA metrics then compare and use the results to rank and compare domains within the same niche/industry. These metrics usually apportion a score out of 100. The nearer a score is to 100, the higher the DA of the website. Smart marketers always keep an eye on that score to ensure it is higher than their competition. The reason is rather obvious. Deliberately working on your website to improve its DA therefore becomes a very good digital marketing technique.

5 Simple Ways to Enhance Your Domain Authority

No good internet marketer can afford to ignore the Domain Authority, DA, of their websites. Even though Domain Authority may not have direct effect on the SERP ranking of any website, it somehow helps to provide some insights which help to improve SEO efforts that directly impact on the ranking. There are web tools you can use to measure the DA of your website. Your website DA could be high or low depending on the efforts you are putting in to enhance its performance. What you should immediately suspect when your site has a low DA score is that it has serious issues like spam backlinks and keyword stuffing which are harmful to the site. Next is to take conscious and deliberate simple steps all aimed at restoring the site DA which will in turn impact your site SERP ranking. By knowing all the factors that influence the ranking metrics of your website, you can take steps to have any problems fixed immediately by way of preventive measures to prevent the DA score from further dipping. Here are 5 simple things you can do.


 
#1. Choose the Right Domain Name

This is a given if you want to make any impact at all in internet marketing. If you don’t have a domain name yet, it’s time to get one. A great domain name is good for branding and SEO, the reason it must be carefully chosen to help promote your brand. It contributes immensely to enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of your website. These in turn help to make possible higher Click Through Rates, CTR, and consequently the conversion rates of the site. They impact positively on your SERP ranking and Domain Authority. Because you need a good domain for easy identity of your brand and easily recognizable, it is best to settle for a domain name that is short, catchy and relevant to your site niche and business identity. Marketing experts advise that the name should be devoid of symbols and uncommon spellings and syllables as these do harm a domain’s readability and memorability.

#2. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Right now, the whole world is on the move. People are doing business and marketing products on the go. Thanks to hand-held smart devices which have become extremely very popular worldwide. With over 4 billion unique users accessing the web through mobile devices, it is one huge market any serious marketer cannot afford to do without. You can easily get left out of that huge market if you are unable to optimize your website to make it mobile friendly. If you are a marketer and you cannot optimize your website for mobile users, you hugely risk losing about half of your web traffic. That no doubt will negatively affect your DA score. A responsive web design with the appropriate apps can help make your website mobile friendly.

#3. Always Optimize Your Content

The way content is treated on your website is one of the most important factors that affect the DA score of your website. Apart from helping your brand to build a solid and formidable audience base, quality content is also a delight for Search Engines. Quality content best appeals to Search Engines’ algorithms that prioritize websites with valuable information. That makes it imperative for you to continually optimize your content for better results. Web masters can help you do this for a small fee. If however you have the knowhow yourself, you can routinely incorporate niche-based keywords, customized meta descriptions while adding internal linking in your content. Doing so helps to increase the Click Through Rates, CTR, on the site while greatly decreasing the bounce rates.

#4. Produce only High Quality Content
 
For online marketing, content is king. Your content must be designed for persons and not search engines. That is why you must make sure to always produce unique and informative quality content on your website which attracts visitors and keeps them long enough on your site to notice the brand you are marketing. Creating a linkable high-quality content can also help you to gain high-authority links pointing to your site. High-authority links with characteristic high DA scores and SERP rankings means such websites already have well established authority and trust with search engines. By associating your site with such high authority websites, search engines are likely to deem yours just as reputable and trustworthy as well. By adding external links from high authority sites, it encourages such linked sites to visit yours mostly out of curiosity. Your website gains immensely when such sites link back to you if they like your content. That way, you can eventually build a great and beneficial network within your niche. That helps to enhance your website DA and your brand.

#5. Regularly Edit and Remove Bad and Spammy Links

Most Search Engines particularly Google are highly intolerant of spammy links. Regular algorithms deployed by Google easily detect spammy links and links stuffing and they punish such websites very severely. That is why expert marketers always advise that it is best to avoid linking your website to low-authority and shady websites. With the use of reliable Web spam score tools, you can regularly review and edit your content to remove bad and spammy links. That helps to improve the good health of your website, its DA score, Spam score and the overall reputation of your website.