WHAT ARE BACKLINKS?
Backlinks are instances where another site links to your own site.
WHY DO BACKLINKS MATTER?
Search engines interpret backlinks as a trust factor. If another site liked your content or overall website enough to link to it, you must be doing something right.
Done correctly and with care, effective backlinking can expand your reach and help search engines push you up in the ranking.
ARE ALL BACKLINKS THE SAME?
No. Major search engines (like Google, for instance) assign each website they encounter a score (like 1-10, 10 being highest) of trust.
DOES MY WEBSITE HAVE A GOOD SCORE?
Here are some of the things that boost your score:
- Being a real business with a real-world address
- Being listed on Google Maps, Yelp, and other local listings
- Having reviews from real customers
Chances are, your business has a good trust score. After all, you're the real deal!
THE MORE BACKLINKS, THE BETTER, RIGHT?
Not necessarily. Remember: that score matters.
Some SEO businesses try to sell you on a large number of backlinks. They'll scoff at the number your current company is providing you, and say, "Well, we can provide you with 1,000 backlinks for the same price."
And while they'll deliver on their promise, it's highly likely that they're simply "farming" backlinks to spammy sites that generate them.
These sites—we'll call them "backlink factories"—have very low search engine trust rankings (because they're not "real" websites where people are legitimately reading and writing about your business), and backlinks from sites with a 0 or 1 trust ranking are not good and can actually hurt your site's reputation with search engines.
GOOD BACKLINK STRATEGY TAKES TIME, BUT IT'S WORTH IT
Many companies go this route because getting your site backlinked on another, reputable site usually takes time, money, and patience.
One organic way to do this is to create great content that people then share and link to on their website, but that can be unreliable: even if you craft amazing content, there's no guarantee that someone is going to randomly pick it up and decide to link to your site.
DOES 5 FOLD CREATE BACKLINKS?
Yes. As part of your SEO strategy, we create backlinks, but not in the spammy sense mentioned above. The number of backlinks your site receives every month is dependent on your budget, your industry, your competitors, and other factors.
To learn more about this, chat with your 5 Fold sales representative.