As a property manager, you understand the importance of driving traffic to your website. A high volume of website traffic means more prospective tenants and owners, which ultimately leads to revenue growth.
In the digital age, achieving a high-ranking, high-traffic website requires more than just creating a website; you must consider search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). One component of search engine optimization is backlinks.
Are backlinks still valuable? The short answer is, yes.
As with all aspects of SEO, the exact details for successful link building strategies have changed overtime, but it’s still important to curate a number of high quality links back to your website.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of backlinks in SEO and how they impact your online presence.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are external links that point back to your website. In other words, if another website links to your website, this is considered a backlink. The number of backlinks that a website has can affect its search engine ranking. The logic behind this is, if more websites link to your website, then it must have valuable content, and therefore, it should rank higher.
Basically, backlinks impact the credibility of your website. If a website links to your website, it may indicate to their audience that your website has valuable information. This in turn may lead to more website traffic, potential leads, and a boost on search engines. This flow of authority and value is often referred to as link equity.
The quality of the backlinks matter more than quantity. Search engines, such as Google, consider the relevance and authority of the website linking to you. For instance, if a high authority website, like Forbes, links to your website, this will be considered a high-quality backlink. However, if a low authority website that is irrelevant to your field links to your website, this will be considered a low-quality backlink. It’s important to prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to obtaining backlinks.
Common Link Building Strategies
There are many different components that you can add to your link building campaign. Most involve reaching out to other websites to see if you can offer value to them, and then including a link to your site. Common link building strategies for backlinks include guest blogging, broken link building, and content marketing.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a powerful way to build quality links to your site, promote your brand and generate targeted traffic. It involves crafting a relevant and high-quality blog post for other web pages in the same industry with a link pointing back to your website. By doing so, you establish yourself as an authority in your niche and increase your online presence.
When creating your guest blog post, it’s essential to focus on providing value to your target audience and ensuring that the content aligns with the website and its readers. Before pitching to a site owner, do some keyword research to determine what value you can bring their search traffic. With the right approach, guest blogging can bring immense benefits to your business and help you reach a new audience.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an effective link building strategy that will improve your website’s search engine rankings and driving more traffic to your site. We all know that creating valuable content such as blog posts or eBooks attracts potential customers and builds relationships with your target audience.
But did you know that these strategies can also help you build valuable backlinks from other relevant websites?
If you’re consistently creating high quality content, other websites in your industry may find it and link to your site organically.
However, to make the most of this link-building strategy, it’s important to conduct thorough keyword research and identify other sites where your content would be a good fit.
Once you’ve identified these sites, you can begin reaching out to their owners to let them know about your high-quality content and encourage them to link to it. With patience and persistence, this approach can yield significant results for your business.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building is another important strategy for building backlinks. This involves finding broken links on websites and then contacting the site owners to offer to replace the broken link with a link to your website. This technique can be very effective if you’re able to find relevant websites with broken links; it’s a win-win situation for both parties. The website owner gets a working link and your property management business gains a backlink from a relevant web page. This will help improve your website’s search engine ranking and traffic.
What About Social Media?
Backlinks are a key component of search engine optimization, but not all links are created equal. In particular, nofollow links are becoming increasingly common (especially on social media!) and can be a bit confusing for those unfamiliar with them.
Essentially, nofollow links are links that have a special HTML attribute added to them which tells search engines not to follow or pass any link equity to the linked page. This can be done for a variety of reasons, such as to prevent spam or to designate that a link is paid or sponsored.
While these incoming links won’t directly improve your search engine rankings, they still have value as a way to drive traffic and generate buzz on social media platforms. By getting your content shared on social media, you can increase brand awareness and promote your website to a wider audience.
Backlinking Schemes
It’s important to avoid backlinking schemes. Backlinking schemes used to be a common practice in the past, where websites would engage in black hat tactics to build links. These methods include purchasing links or participating in link exchanges. Search engines have become smarter at detecting these schemes and will slap penalties on websites that are caught engaging in such practices.
How Fourandhalf Can Help With Link Building Strategies
If the building links portion of your SEO strategy feels overwhelming, we don’t blame you. There’s a lot to keep track of when trying to generate high quality links for your website. All Fourandhalf websites come with foundational and on-page SEO services, but our new Advanced Homepage SEO add-on service takes link building to the next level.
This new service primarily focuses on off-page SEO, going after link building and citations from other relevant websites that already carry a lot of weight online. This will help give your website more authority and credibility for the keywords we are looking to rank for and will help you move up in the rankings quicker than the current strategy. This service focuses on monthly link acquisition, technical crawls, and reporting.
With anything SEO-related, you must keep in mind it does not happen overnight. You will receive updates on keyword movement so you can see how your ranking is improving for our target keywords so you know how effective the service is for you.
Final Thoughts
In summary, backlinks play a key role in SEO and can have a significant impact on your search rankings. Not only do they help drive traffic to your website, but they also lay the foundation for link equity which provide potential leads and revenue opportunities.
It’s important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to creating backlinks. Quality matters more than quantity and the more relevant, authoritative sites that link back to your website will increase its credibility. As a property manager, taking the time to consider backlinks and create an effective link building strategy can have long term benefits for driving organic traffic to your website.
If you have too much on your plate to run your own link building campaigns, we understand and are happy to help. Contact Fourandhalf today to see how we can help generate high quality backlinks for your website.
