One of the most important indicators of the SEO value of your site is your backlinks. As the name suggests, backlinks “link back” to your site from other sites. The more high-quality backlinks a site has, the more authority it has, which will make it rank higher. Increasing the number of links to your website improves your site SEO, making your website rank higher and bringing more users to your site. It’s a valuable investment, but how does it work?
How Search Engines Evaluate Your Backlinks
To understand link building’s impact on SEO, it’s helpful to understand how search engines use backlinks to evaluate your site.
While the algorithms that control search results are complex and ever-evolving, backlinks continue to be an important signal that a site is reputable and trustworthy. The more backlinks a site has, the more valuable a backlink from that site will be. That’s why a backlink from the New York times holds more weight than, say, a backlink from a small local business.
Now, there is absolutely a wrong way to do this. Backlinks that you haven’t earned are no good. If you have to buy them or do anything underhanded to get them, you absolutely will get banned from search results. Just don’t do it!
What Makes A Good Backlink?
Improving your backlinks means increasing the number of high-quality sites that are linking to your site.
This is what constitutes a high-quality site:
- High trust and authority – the number of high-quality backlinks a site has
- SEO and content optimization – the setup and optimization of the back end of the website
- Correct anchor text – this is the text that users click to get to the link, and having specific text you’re trying to rank for will help
Having more links is known as link popularity, and it’s one of the main factors used to judge your site’s backlinks. Having more links (and especially more high-quality links with the characteristics listed above) is the goal.
How Can Healthcare Sites Get Backlinks?
Healthcare providers have some unique opportunities to get backlinks due to the industry they operate in. Here are a few strategies we recommend:
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- Create content. Your patients are coming to you for a specific service. They likely have lots of questions about the service they’re interested in. Creating content to solve these needs helps bring new clients to your practice while also creating new opportunities for links and backlinks.
- Internal links. Linking between pages on your website is called interlinking. Utilizing these internal links to pages on your site can have a big impact on your website. Creating anchor links with terms you’re trying to rank for can help even more (just make sure they make sense, otherwise they’ll be detrimental instead of helpful).
- Claim your profiles. It’s easy to forget, but your practice’s social media profiles are websites. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and other social media platforms have considerable domain authority, and claiming your profiles and adding links to your website means you’re increasing your backlinks that much more.
Need help increasing your site’s backlinks? Not sure where to focus your SEO efforts? MyAdvice can help! Our SEO Power product can help you increase your health practice’s backlink profile and help your customers find you. Call our digital marketing specialists today.
