Every
ecommerce business owner knows that ranking higher in the search engines and driving as much traffic as possible to your site is one of the best ways to succeed in a competitive market. SEO comes in many forms, and one core aspect of the process is link building - getting other websites to provide a backlink to your business. Learn how to boost your backlinks in this quick guide.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are links from another website to your own site, and fall into two broad categories:
- Follow backlinks – an endorsement link that helps your SEO
- Non-follow backlinks – a non-endorsement link that may help raise awareness of your website, but doesn’t directly boost SEO
Whilst all links are useful from a profile-raising perspective, only follow links will help to boost your search engine rankings.
It’s also worth remembering that not all backlinks have the same value. For example, unique links from high profile, popular sites that are relevant to your industry are much more valuable than links from irrelevant, small sites.
Boost your backlinks
There are loads of different ways to get backlinks to your ecommerce business - here are a few tried and tested options to get you started.
- Quality content
Let your customers do your back-linking for you by creating high quality, unique content like blogs, white papers and videos that your target audience wants to share online.
- Get help from your suppliers
If you’re reselling products, then send an email to the manufacturers asking for a backlinks from their sites – it’s in their interest to add you to their directory of suppliers.
- Harness the power of PR
Getting the name of your company in the press, and on the websites of media outlets is one of the best ways to generate powerful links. Just make sure you ask them to put a link to your site in any online articles!
- Reach out to bloggers
Getting niche bloggers in your industry to write about your company or review your products is a great way to generate links and drive traffic to your site. Just make sure you do your research, and only approach appropriate blog owners – no one likes to be spammed.
-
Get blogging
Writing guest posts on popular blogs in your industry is another great way to generate high quality backlinks. When pitching article ideas to blog owners, make sure you’ve got a clear idea in mind that fits in with the rest of the content on their blog, and follow up with a sample of your work.
What not to do!
Never buy backlinks – bought links are not a good substitute for real backlinks, and some can actually damage your search engine rankings, so beware of any companies offering to sell you them.
AU
