There are many factors that will contribute to the overall search engine optimisation of a website, such as the quality of the content, what the content is actually about and the length of it too. Another element that will impact SEO is the backlinks that point to your website. This is the term for when other websites link to your website as a ‘doFollow’ link. With this in mind, the general rule of thumb is that by having more backlinks pointing to your website, your SEO generally improves (since Google views more backlinks means that the content on the site is of better quality and valuable, as deemed by other website). For this reason, here are some ways you can try to increase the number of backlinks your website gets.

#1 Create High Quality Content

The best way to gain backlinks is to give other website owners and bloggers genuine reasons to link to your website. After all, the alogrythms that Google use are becoming so complex that, sooner or later, they will be able to tell when a website’s link to another website is genuine or not.

For this reason, every time you make content, make sure it is to the best of your ability and of the highest quality. I know this sounds all a little cliché and easier said than done. However, how else do you suppose the majority of backlinks out there are created?

#2 ‘Referenceable’ Material Induces Backlinks

For all those that have created a report, essay or something else some time or another, you will know about references and a bibliography, which is used to cite what sources you have quoted and used in your report or essay.

Although this seems restricted to offline documents, there is a norm, it seems, that many websites are starting to reference articles that they have used, possibly in fear that Google may dock their SEO if they do not reference websites they have used (Google could reduce their organic health status due to plagiarism). For this reason, try and make content that:

1. Contains facts that are nowhere else on the internet (so that if other websites use your facts, they should reference you)
2. Contains opinions for which can be referenced too

A great example of this, incidently, is with my website PoemAnalysis.com. What I found is that a lot of the content on the website is referenced by those creating essays on analysing poetry, which has helped the SEO and number of backlinks to the website ten-fold.

#3 Guest Blog

This tip comes with caution, since it seems that Google frown upon guest blogging up to a few years ago. However, if done right, guest blogging can increase the number of backlinks to your website.

The problem was that many guest posts consisted of all the links at the bottom of the article, usually in the author bio section for whoever wrote the guest post. However, this is frowned upon which means, if you do guest blog, you should have the links embedded into the content, linking contextually.