You probably know that creating backlinks for your website is really difficult, boring and time consuming. And yet SEO backlink strategy is the most important task you can do when growing organic traffic with search optimization.
It’s almost impossible (remember I said “almost”) to rank well in Google without a decent volume of backlinks to any given web page. (You can rank without backlinks on low volume keywords however.)
But any search keywords that have any kind of real traffic volume are likely to be competitive. So, you’ll need to build backlinks to rank well against your competitors.
MORE BACKLINKS = BETTER RANKING
That is because a backlink is a vote of confidence as far as Google goes. A webpage with a lot of backlinks gets a lot of votes, and so it gets driven up the search results.
If you analyze any of your website’s competition in the search results you will notice that in most cases, a site ranks higher than yours because it has more backlinks.
In rare cases, it could have fewer and that is only because the backlinks are going from websites that have more Domain Authority or Page Authority.
You can calculate a page’s DA or PA by using either Moz.com or our favorite here at Cyberwalker Digital a site called Ahrefs.com.
WHY DOMAIN AUTHORITY IS IMPORTANT IN SEO BACKLINK STRATEGY
The DA and PA values at Ahrefs.com are a score from 0 to 100 that tell you how trusted the site and page are. This correlates to how much traffic they get and how trusted – or “authoritative” – they are.
So Amazon.com has a DA of 87
While the Los Angeles used bookstore Samjohnsons.com has a DA of 41.
If one linked to your website and the other linked to your competitor who would benefit most?
The Amazon.com link. Why? Because the backlink is from a site and webpage that has more authority.
There are two more things you need to know about backlinks when you go hunting for them.
There are two more things you need to know about building backlinks when you go hunting for them.
A BACKLINKS VALUE MATTERS
1) A backlink’s value is amplified if it originates on a site and page that has similar topical content to its target site.
2) The page authority (PA) is as important if not more important than the domain authority (DA).
The first point is pretty self explanatory. A link from a industrial car parts manufacturing page to a knitting blog is going to be suspect as far as credibility goes. However, a link from northhouse.com (a knitting supplies manufacturer) with a DA of 53 to a knitting blog is going to be really credible and will boost the knitting blog’s authority.
When you pursue backlinks ensure that the page content and site category you get the backlink from is relatively consistent with the page you are optimizing for better ranking. A B2B site should be used for a B2B site. A fashion site or at least consumer trends site should be used to enhance a clothing store. You get the idea.
To the second point, you will want to test the page authority as well as domain authority of the page you are backlinking from. Use a tool like Open Site Explorer from Moz.com or our preference the Page Explorer tool at Ahrefs.com.
Pick one then there use it to evaluate the site and specific page you are trying to rank and also the site and page you are trying to get a backlink on.
As an aside the homepage of any site has both a PA and DA.
Here is an example using our two pages on our agency site using ahrefs.com:
https://cyberwalker.com (homepage) – DA: 35 PA: 37
https://cyberwalker.com/backlink-authority/ – DA: 35 – PA 8
Notice that a backlink from our Cyberwalker.com homepage would impart much more authority than a backlink from the page (ironically) about backlink authority. That is because many more sites link to Cyberwalker.com’s homepage so its page authority is killer high.
