How does backlink building work?

Links to your website ("backlinks") are one of the key ranking factors of search engines like Google. It is therefore important to get as many of these backlinks as possible. In this article we would like to introduce some ways to get links for your homepage. In this video we will also introduce you to link building in under a minute: Enjoy!

The homepage of your homepage is your figurehead and therefore responsible for the first impression your website leaves on your visitors. Therefore, you should think about how you want to position yourself and your company on your website.

However, your homepage does not only consist of a home page. We have created a separate guide for the successful design of your entire website.

As a rule, the attention span of Internet users is very short. An Internet search engine delivers a large number of results, they click quickly through various homepages and often decide in a few seconds whether they like a website or not. Therefore, your goal should be to arouse their interest with the help of a meaningful home page and thus give them a reason to stay on your homepage as long as possible.

Think of your home page as the front door. If it looks inviting to your visitors, they will pass through it, get to other pages of your homepage, possibly find exciting content there and even buy something in your webshop. If, on the other hand, the entrance door already scares him off, he will decide to turn around after a few seconds and look for alternatives.

The success of your homepage stands and falls with the homepage!

It doesn't matter how much added value your content has to offer: Your homepage visitor will not even get to see it if he leaves your page after five seconds.

So the design of your homepage brings a lot of responsibility with it. But don't worry, you're not on your own in this endeavor. To make it easier for you, we have put together some tips below that will definitely help you.

Does someone in your circle of acquaintances run a website? Then ask them to link to your website.

For almost every industry there are suitable associations, yellow pages or link directories that list which websites/companies there are from the respective industry. These websites usually have a form or a contact e-mail address that you can use to send in new link suggestions.

Find out which websites are at the top for "your" search term. There are various tools with which you can find out, among other things, which backlinks this competitor site has.

Display these backlinks and try to find out how the competition got a link on this website. Often a short friendly mail to the website owner is enough to build up the amount of your backlinks.

One of many tools that shows the backlinks of any domain is the tool from majesticseo.com. There you simply enter a domain name in the search box at the top and get a general overview of the website. Under "Backlinks" you will see some pages that have linked to the site. To display all backlinks, a free account at majesticseo.com is required.

Exchanging links has an effect on your position in Google, although not as great as if the link was not "exchanged" but only one-way.

If your page A links to a page B, the page B links back to A, this is from Google's point of view a little less of an objective recommendation for the linked website than if the link was only in one direction. This kind of link exchange (A to B, B to A) is called a reciprocal link exchange.

Many website owners get around this problem by running multiple websites and exchanging across the websites. For example, if you run websites A and B, you could offer the operator of websites C and D that you link from A to C, and he links from D to B in return. This kind of exchange is called a non-reciprocal link exchange.

But beware: Google is quite an intelligent search engine. Google can see through most non-reciprocal link exchanges using a variety of techniques. For example, website A and B of the website operator are often located at the same provider, which means that the IPs of the domains may look the same or at least similar. If these websites now have backlinks from domains whose IPs also look similar, this could look suspicious.

Also, Google might know who is running the website based on the website's imprint or the domain's Whois record. Thus, it is quite comprehensible that it was simply "exchanged" here.

Using the topic "press" for backlink building is not a suitable means for every website. For example, if you run your own homepage as an information page about your hamster Max, no magazine in the world will probably report on it, unless Max is a gifted piano player or magician.

However, for small businesses that have a real-life store, a friendly email to a local editor may be worthwhile. Links from news sites, even local ones, are often comparatively strong, as these websites often have many backlinks from other websites in their turn.

Many portals offer users to set links for a fee. However, one should be quite careful with this, as Google prohibits the purchase of links in its guidelines for webmasters.

However, the reality shows that many website operators fall back on this kind of link building and so far "got away" with it. Also, you should be careful, because especially in the field of SEO many black sheep are on the way, who want to sell you, for example, backlinks from pages that are qualitatively inferior or have no value. Good things have been heard recently from portals like rankseller.com or teliad.de.