Any good SEO consultant will tell you that one of the biggest tools for making your website more visible in the search engine is to build links on reputable third-party websites (known as “backlinks”). The problem is that it’s easy to say ‘build good quality links’, but not so easy to do, unless you know how.

The emphasis is on ‘good quality’ links, because Google and other search engines have become smart enough to recognise manipulated or poor links. These are out of context links from websites that virtually only exist to send links out to other websites; it’s their business model. Also called ‘link spam’, these are poor quality links that don’t do your website any service, except get it in trouble with the search engines (particularly Google) resulting in a penalty for poor backlinks.

This is why you need to build solid backlinks from authoritative websites that have standing with the search engines. Most people however are too busy or don’t know how to build these links, so they leave it to a SEO professional. Brisbane business owners can be quite savvy, so while they may prefer to use someone else to build their links, many also like to know how to do it themselves, just in case!

So if you’re wondering how an SEO consultant builds backlinks for businesses, here are a few tips you might like to try yourself.

Links from local directories

While these won’t give your website a big boost in SEO, they do start the ball rolling. Citation directories were very popular a few years ago, but they ended up being considered to be poor links, particularly when a website had thousands of these and little else. Today, local citations should be a part of your link building strategy, but only if done correctly.

These links will get your NAP (name, address and phone number) peppered around the internet, boosting your rankings in Local Maps, which is great for local SEO. Since these links use your website as the anchor text, it makes Google very happy, because you are not manipulating these links. Try for 100 to 200 of these links, built over time.

Links from authority sites

These are the hardest links to get for your website, which is why most business owners hire an SEO consultant. The way to get these links is to create a piece of content on your website that the big authority websites want to link to (because it’s so good) and then watch it go viral on social media. Easier said than done!

Your content piece should generally be at least 2000 words in length (blog post or infographics are good examples) and you should aim to earn at least 100 to 200 shares on social media (the more the better). With this number of shares, it’s time to contact a few authority websites, show them your social shares and ask if your content would be of interest to their visitors. Your aim is to get 2 to 3 links from authority sites for each piece of content.

It’s also important to obtain backlinks from authority websites in your industry, as this helps to validate your website in the eyes of search engines. Guests blogs are another way to create backlinks to your website, and can be particularly successful if you can use your own keywords in the anchor text.

If all of this sounds awesome, but too complicated for you to do yourself, then why not contact a professional SEO consultant Brisbane and let them.