When polled, 72% of SEO companies said that backlinks are significant when it comes to the ranking of a website.
Did you hear that? They’re significant.
This means that, in the age of digital marketing when SEO is pretty much king, it’s important to focus on backlinks. Keywords and high-quality content are still important, but it’s just as important not to forego quality backlink research.
How do you go about earning backlinks to your website? It takes time. Link building tips change so fast that it’s hard to keep track of what’s actually useful and what’s outdated.
This is why we’re here to provide you with insight into the top five Irish link building tips this year.
Before we dive into the top five Irish link building tips of 2019, it’s important to lay the foundation. What is backlinking?
A backlink, which someone might also refer to as an inbound link or incoming link, is a link from another website that links back to yours.
For example, if you write a blog and link back to the host.ie website, then we are receiving a backlink from your blog. We use backlinks to cite sources or provide examples of specific content that we can’t write out in an article.
While this might not seem important to you as the owner of a website, it’s a big deal when it comes to SEO and page ranking.
Because you’re linking back to another website, you’re signaling to Google and other search engines that it’s a credible website with authority.
In short, backlinks help establish relevance and domain authority, which are both parts of ranking algorithms. Websites that have high domain authority will rank higher on the first page of Google, which is what a business needs!
But again, how does this affect you as an Irish website owner? Well, you’ll want to engage in link building techniques that require you to earn or give backlinks. You can do this by:
To truly understand what to do when it comes to backlinking, you’ll need to do competitive backlink research. As part of that research, here are five of the hottest tips when it comes to link building for an Irish website.
Okay, there are really two points here: curating lists and building relationships. However, you can also curate lists that build relationships.
Because links are one of Google’s main ranking factors, it’s important to think about the kind of links you’re going to include on your website. You can do so by building relationships with other companies and individuals in your industry.
It’s important that these people aren’t competitors, but that they’re relevant to your content or your target audience. Yes, this means that you should be careful of both who you link to and who is linking to your website.
Building an effective link building strategy requires a little more research and a lot of patience.
If you can establish yourself as an expert in your industry by writing high-quality, informative content (which we’ll get to later), then it shouldn’t be hard to form relationships with other companies who want to link to your content.
What does “building relationships” look like in this context?
If you’re a veterinarian and your website features a lot of pet-related content, then you can build professional relationships with owners of websites that sell pet food and clothing.
Or, you can even contact owners of websites that promote any kind of service that has to do with animals.
Not only does this help cross-promote websites and ensure that you can both benefit from link building, but it also creates healthy business relationships in general.
Remember to focus on non-competing companies who don’t offer the same service or product that you do.
You can approach companies in this way by proposing that you write guests posts for each other first, or simply by proposing a link building strategy that benefits both parties.
As long as you’re both building links and getting backlinked, it’s a win-win for everybody involved.
This strategy goes hand in hand with the first one, as you’ll want to include high-quality links in your own website’s copy.
An easy way to do this? Curate lists!
Using the veterinarian example, some ideas of this include:
The list goes on and on, but you get the idea, right? Create content in the form of lists that will inherently require you to link back to other related websites.
This helps you form relationships, create authority within your own content, and rank higher. Yes, you’ll rank higher! Search engines love to rank pages that feature quality outbound links.
However, you don’t want to be including links in your content to other websites that don’t offer high-quality information to your readers.
If your links are consistently low-quality and take your readers to questionable, spammy websites then they’re going to catch on pretty quickly and stop taking you seriously.
One of the biggest problems companies seem to have with learning how to build Irish website links is that they don’t know how to get others to link back to them.
The easiest way is to write content that you know others will share and link back to. If you think about the kind of content that you share and link to, it’s usually industry-leading data and statistics, right?
Yes! So, when you’re trying to establish yourself as an expert, publish original data and research. Other people in your industry and probably outside of it will find the article and link back to it.
This is a (somewhat) quick and easy way to increase the number of times that your website is linked in various places around the web.
Each time a new study comes out in your industry, compile the data and statistics and write a blog post about it!
Or, create a list of statistics that are relevant to your target audience each month or quarter. Be smart about the title of these kinds of posts, and make it clear what you’re offering readers.
Then, make sure the page is SEO-optimized with the right keywords so that they can easily find your content.
Someone looking for the “top Irish online marketing statistics in 2019” should easily be able to find your blog about well, the top Irish online marketing statistics!
WordStream does this every year and notes that each time they do so it earns them hundreds of backlinks.
It’s going to be really hard to optimize your own content for link building if you don’t understand keywords.
It’s also going to be hard to convince other people to link back to your website content if it’s not relevant to what people are searching for.
The key to success with Irish link building is to act fast. Be the first to publish content about a hot new event, product, or story. This will help others look to you as an authority and link back to your original post.
How do you know what’s hot? You can do one of three things:
This is similar to the point about compiling statistics and data, but it’s more focused on news in your industry.
You can also publish content about hot topics using popular keywords. A simple search on Google Trends will yield hundreds of results that will give you somewhere to start.
You can head to the Recently Trending section to see what people are searching for.
Or, you can search for Interest by Subregion. If you serve a specific area of Ireland, then this might be a helpful tool to attract local Irish business as well.
The point is that to craft content that people will want to backlink to, it needs to be relevant. Doing your keyword research can help you ensure that you’re always writing SEO-optimized content that is up-to-date.
Building consistency with your brand is one of the best tips for Irish website building, whether you’re going to focus on backlinks or not.
Build a name for yourself and focus on establishing your company as an authority in your field.
If you’re constantly publishing high-quality content, then people will find their way to your website and link back to your posts.
One great tip in regards to link building and brand building is to establish yourself, as an individual, as an expert on the subject matter. This can mean:
The options are endless! Build your own personal brand and work to establish yourself as an expert on whatever topic that relates to your website.
This will help you cross-promote your brand on various different outlets and draw people back to your content in a way that encourages backlinking.
You are your greatest link building asset, as people are going to link back to your website and your brand. Make sure they have something quality to link back to!
This is a pretty standard SEO trick, but it can be useful when it comes to Irish link building as well.
What are people all over the country, or even the world, asking Google? As mentioned above, you can use Google Trends to figure this out. Then, answer these questions.
The key here, and the real trick is to answer questions that aren’t directly related to your product or service but that might interest your target audience.
We offer web hosting services in Ireland, which means that we know our target audience is going to be looking or at least interested in other website-related content.
Even though we don’t personally provide website design services, we still publish content about mobile-friendly WordPress tips.
Why? We know our readers will get value out of that, and that’s what we’re all about. Answering their questions allows us to rest assured that we are providing them with quality content that they can actually use.
We don’t do it to earn links necessarily. We just know that if you’re searching for Irish link building tips that you’ll probably benefit from other related content as well.
Now that you’re up to date on the top link building tips of 2019, you’re probably wondering how and where to implement them, right?
You’ll most certainly need a website first. And, you’ll need a space on that website to publish your blog.
Choosing the right web hosting provider can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to figure out what’s best in terms of SEO and other options that can affect your speed and ranking.
We at Host.ie can help you make sense of it all. We’re one of Ireland’s premier web hosting providers which means that we provide some of the best support.
Contact us to see how we can help you set your website up so you can begin developing a solid link building strategy today.
