Links are often seen to be one of Google’s most important ranking factors, so they’re pretty important when it comes to helping your website rank. High authority backlinks can be a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google & an indication that your website is valuable & worth linking to.

Studies have shown that Google gives more credit to websites that have a higher volume of relevant, trustworth backlinks – but it’s about quality, not quantity when it comes to website links. Securing a good selection of high quality links from trusted websites that showcase your expertise & are relevant to your brand can add great value to your SEO offering & your website’s performance. This in turn allows you to showcase E-A-T which is a key ingredient to a successful SEO campaign.

When we talk about trust, links play a key role in the full mix, so using a Digital PR based approach is a great way to ensure that you have both on and offsite trust. 

No – absolutely not, but they do play a key role in both growing referral traffic to your website & visibility, in addition to adding that all important SEO value. Digital PR is about showcasing your brand, product or service online, in front of a targeted, engaged audience who wants to know more about what you have to offer – it’s growing your presence in a similar way to traditional PR but in an online space.

From a backlinks perspective, Digital PR is one of the best ways to build high quality links to your website which do of course add huge SEO value & many people when considering how to optimise their SEO campaigns see improving the quality of their inbound link profile as a key way to do this. While this is completely right & should be seen as so, there’s no reason why Digital PR can’t drive great SEO value & visibility at the same time – after all relevance is key for SEO so putting your product/service in front of the right audience will add value in more ways than just links!

You may have often heard the terms “do-follow” & “no-follow” links thrown around when it comes to Digital PR & it’s true, there is a difference between them. “do-Follow” links are links which pass authority through to your website whereas “no-Follow” links don’t – however it’s often stated that both no-follow links & just citations have implied link value so they are definitely still valuable to build & it’s great to have diversity across your link profile.

Remember – effective link building and Digital PR does so much more for your website than just creating a link, such as raising brand awareness, generating traffic and giving your brand massive exposure on top tier publications. So, the value shouldn’t be solely placed on whether the link has a tag or not. (‘followed’ links pass link equity to your website, whereas links tagged with a code don’t pass link value in the eyes of Google. But they’re still valuable!)

Link building and Digital PR is about creating interesting, insightful and engaging content, as well as building strong connections with journalists and relevant media. So, to get more links to your website, start building great content and contacts. Reach out to industry publications, small business websites or magazines that your consumer reads. Offer to write articles, share company updates, offer product reviews or share your market insight. Create genuine connections, offer genuine, relevant and useful information, and you’ll soon start reaping the SEO rewards. 

Alternately – work with a company that does this for a living! A good Digital PR agency will have all of these basics downpat, along with some great journalistic relationships – this is a key ingredient to success.

Defining links as good or bad isn’t always the best way to approach it – you would be better to consider whether a link is relevant & adds value to your website, or if it doesn’t. It’s also worth considering whether that link is actually drawing good referral traffic through to your website – as referral sales are another great product of well-targeted Digital PR & are definitely something you should be aiming for if you have an ecommerce business!

Good links are fairly self-explanatory – they are genuine links from trustworthy sources which are relevant to your website. They are acquired naturally through Digital PR & generally offer some level of value to the user, this can be through your expertise or research, which helps to showcase the expertise of your brand – another great trust signal for Google!

By contrast, poor quality backlinks can potentially harm your website – Google penalises link profiles which are heavy in poor quality links – mainly as these tend to be the result of poor SEO practices or dodgy over-optimisation! Regular link auditing will help to ensure that you are keeping your link profile in check & free from any potential penalties.

“Bought links” are a bit of a dirty word in the SEO industry – and for good reason – in 2022 your link acquisition strategy should not be built around buying links. In the past, marketers used to pay websites to post their client’s content & link back to their client’s website, often on mass scale & with content that was poorly written & didn’t have any relevance or connection with the website it was posted on. Google saw this as manipulation tactics & penalised websites who did this.

However, paid for links do essentially still exist & they aren’t all bad – you just need to label them correctly. If you take out an advertorial in a newspaper, for example, you’ll likely get a paid-for link, but this isn’t bad, you just need to make sure you attribute any sponsored links with the “no-follow” & “sponsored” tag to let Google know that you’ve paid for that link through an advert.