Building Outside Links To Your Store

In the business of eCommerce, backlinks are some of the best tools at your disposal. When other companies link out to your website (I.e. “backlink”), you can get a lot more traffic.

Backlinks are great for improving search engine optimization (SEO), but getting others to link out to your site is not always an easy task. 

Continue reading to learn more about backlinks, and how you can get more of them for your business.

What Are Backlinks

Backlinks are links from another site back to your site. They serve many purposes, but mainly they grow the traffic on your site, build a larger audience and boost search engine rankings. Major search engines consider backlinks votes of confidence or “votes” for a specific page.  

This is great to expand your audience and appeal to people from all over, including new site visitors and bloggers. 

Why Are Backlinks Important 

Backlinks are especially valuable for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because they represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. These “votes” from other websites tell search engines that your content is valuable and useful. 

Backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others find your content valuable. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can deduce that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a search engines results page. The more votes you have, the higher your site will rank in major search engines.

How To Build Backlinks 

Create Content People Can’t Get Elsewhere 

You want to get backlinks by creating strong content that others want to share. If web designers find your content valuable and useful, they might be inclined to link this information to their own sites. When people visit their sites, they have the option to click the backlink to navigate to your site. This is a great way for your site to get more traffic and appeal to a larger audience. 

It’s a great idea to review products and services you offer and come up with unique blog topics for your business. This will make backlinking to your site appealing to others 

Write Guest Posts 

You can also get backlinks by writing guest blog posts on websites relevant to your industry. When you write a post on someone else’s site, you are allowed to list information about your own business. This presents you with the chance to target a specific demographic in your target audience. 

Your first task is to decide what your goal for guest blogging is. Knowing this goal ahead of time is key in determining the right kind of blogs to submit guest posts to. Typically, there are three main goals for guest blogging. 

1. Positioning yourself as an authority and well-known name in the industry. 
2. Getting exposure (traffic) back to your website. 
3. Building backlinks to your website (though this should never be the main focus, as Google frowns on this). 

With writing strong content on the top blogs, you can do all three of these things. 

Avoiding Spam  

Not all backlinks are created equal. At the back of SEO, there’s a thing called spam backlinks, which is basically a link to your page placed on an irrelevant website with some ill-fitted anchor text. 

While backlinks are effective for search engine optimization, you need to be careful with how you employ them. Some companies use tactics that can create many backlinks in a short period of time. This is a problem, because those links can appear on poorly optimized websites that have nothing to do with your business. These are known as spam backlinks. 

There are things you can do if your website has spammy backlinks by detecting all of the spam backlinks your website has, compiling and list of all toxic domains and reporting them to google or another major search engine.