While digital marketers are embracing a number of SEO tricks to stay ahead of the competition, tracking backlinks is one very strong element in the game. Backlinks or inbound links to your site from other websites play an important role in how search engines, especially Google, determine the relevance and usefulness of your website. Here is why monitoring & managing backlinks can prove effective in improving your site’s SEO rankings.
This post takes a look at the significance of backlink monitoring to search engine ranking, the best ways in which you can track it, the quality that you are looking for, and ensure it adds value to your SEO efforts. You will also discover how recent trends on SEO works, why keyword rank tracking is important, and how the two means together, will be an integrated approach for your website to rank high and be seen as an authority on a search engine.
The Role of Backlinks in SEO
Backlinks are one of the core factors in SEO, because they are indications of one site giving confidence to another. If respected sites link to your content, this lets search engines know it’s worthy and worthy of trust. It can even propel your site to higher positions in search rankings. If even a few quality backlinks come from established and authoritative sites, this can make a big difference to the reputation and discoverability of your site. The spammy kind of backlinks can have the opposite effect, pulling down your site, which is why it’s important to keep track of and manage them.
Maintaining a backlink profile means keeping track of who links to your site regularly, and populating the equivalents of spreadsheets for an assessment of every backlink you have. This allows you to discover good and useful backlinks that help you to rank better on search engine results pages (SERPs), as well as ones that may harm your SEO campaign. The latest technology and backlink monitors can help you stay on top of and see your backlinking performance in detail. Armed with this knowledge, you can disavow harmful links to Google and establish relationships with high-authority sites to earn future backlinks from.
Tools for Effective Backlink Monitoring
To be able to track backlinks effectively, you need special tools. These tools can provide you with information about your own backlinks, as well as that of your competitors. Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush are examples of tools you can use to do this type of backlink analysis. With these tools, you can track not just which new backlinks you have acquired, and which old ones you’ve lost, but also their quality. Furthermore, these tools provide backlink audit functionality, which is a way to detect spammy backlinks that could be hurting your Google rankings. Once these links are detected, they often inform the user about the need to disavow them, which is a way of telling Google not to consider them. You can also use these tools to analyse your competitors’ backlink profile, so as to see where they’ve acquired their own links from, and whether your site might also benefit from such links.
Keeping an eye on backlinks takes time and effort. Yes, you can dutifully check every website that published a mention of your brand, but, honestly, that’s not a productive use of your time. Backlink monitors tell you what you need to know, and they do it fast. You need to know when someone is linking to a page on your website – and that means knowing about every single domain that has ever linked to you. You should be able to see the number of crawls and when they happened. Most of all, you should get real numbers. The best services will provide equivalent domain authority to the links pointing to your site, giving you a good idea of how valuable those backlinks are. Is the page linking to you full of malware? Well, these tools will tell you this with a handy ‘spam score’. It’s incredibly useful to be able to analyse all of these things in one place, with periodic reports sent to your inbox (as and when you have untrustworthy link building or guests posting problems). By staying ahead of these problems, you’ll have a much healthier backlink profile, a stable foundation to rank with, for longer. Finally, once your backlink service has your data, you can leverage that information from your keyword rank tracker. Why not use it?
Importance of Keyword Rank Tracking
Any good SEO strategy should include some form of keyword rank tracking to help you understand how your website is performing for search terms. Knowing the performance of your keywords helps you to develop a data-led approach to your strategy. For example, looking at your keywords can tell you which terms are driving visitors to your site and give you insights into how to improve your search rankings. It also helps you to plan your content ahead of any upcoming seasonal trends and adjust your content and SEO strategy accordingly. In particular, keyword rank tracking can also help you understand macro trends and get an idea of how forthcoming updates to search engine algorithms are likely to impact your rankings.
When you integrate the keyword rank tracking with monitoring of backlinks, you have created an armour that works both ways, enabling you to create a comprehensive approach to SEO.
For instance, if you know which keywords are promising and you are ranking high, at this point, it wouldn’t be wrong if most of your backlinks have specific keywords that you are ranking for. For instance, if you are ranking high for the keyword ‘SEO service in New York’, then what could be the anchor text for the backlink? It could simply be the keyword itself. Thus, SEO services in New York or SEO service in New York. Therefore, whenever any website links to your website with that keyword as anchor text, you not only create a quality backlink but also reinforce your rankings for that specific keyword.
Combining both, that of monitoring keyword rankings and backlinks, ensures that everything is in order and working in sync that will eventually propel you to greater heights and create room for visibility in search engines.
Analyzing Backlink Quality
The value of backlinks is not uniform, and grasping the quality of your backlinks helps you optimise SEO. High-quality backlinks usually come from strong, authoritative sites that could add tangible value to your online presence – such backlinks will immensely contribute to boosting your search rankings. On the other hand, some links can harm; for instance, receiving backlinks from spammy or irrelevant sites can have a negative impact on the way search-engine algorithms evaluate your site. Analysing backlink quality is quite productive in terms of finding answers – you need to assess multiple quality parameters, looking at your linking site’s domain authority, establishing whether the content of the linking page connects to your site’s content, as well as scrutinising the anchor text that a website uses in a backlink to your site.
By using a backlink monitor, it is possible to evaluate the quality of your backlinks regularly, and to keep improving your backlink profile. If you discover that your backlink profile is not so high-quality, then reach out to Google by using their Disavow Tool, telling search engines to not count this link to your site; or if you see some low-quality backlinks, you can try to request high-quality sites’ webmasters for backlinks or guest posting easily. Over the long term, you can pursue more high-quality backlinks and filter out harmful ones, and then your site’s authority will see great improvements on search engines.
Staying Updated with SEO Trends
Trends change all the time as well as SEO best practices, and it is important to always keep up with them if you want to stay ahead of the game. At the moment, some of the most compelling SEO trends include websites’ user-experience design, the mobile-first principle, as well as the growing importance of spoken keywords in the form of voice search queries. On a more fundamental level, most search engines update their algorithms on a regular basis to better cope with user queries, deliver qualitative results and satisfy search intent.
Many of the backlink monitoring tools also come with elements that update you on SEO best practices. For example, they report on the kinds of content that are generating most of the backlinks, so you get an idea of what kind of content is in favour among users as well as search engines. Another kind of update you can expect is a report on changes in your backlink profile – a big spike or plummet in backlinks could be an indication of a trend or an algorithm update. Integrate these insights into your existing SEO strategy, and you’ll be able to ensure that your efforts remain effective in the face of changing best practices.
Best Practices for Backlink Acquisition
It’s not enough to know why backlinks are important. The way to get them is through a concerted action. Inbound links need a strategy. You have to produce great content that will naturally attract the links: whether they be blog posts, infographics, reports, whitepapers, case studies or your own research. One of the best ways is to pitch, guest-post and comment on industry influencers’ and high-authority sites and blogs.
Lastly, networking in your industry is also important for backlink acquisition. Establishing relationships with other site owners, bloggers and others in your niche can help build partnerships that can result in a mutual backlink exchange. As you promote your content on social media and the internet, remember that it can be picked up and linked to by other sites. But keep a close watch on those sites and monitor your backlinks regularly using a backlink monitor.
Conclusion
Getting backlinks is always an important part of a good SEO strategy and monitoring backlinks on a regular basis will ensure that your site does not have a weak and unhealthy backlink profile. Use backlink monitors or keyword rank trackers to measure how up-to-date your SEO strategy is working. And that’s how SEO works – use all of these different elements to create a perfect SEO machine. If your site becomes the top dog in Google’s search results, more and more organic traffic will come to your site, driving more revenue and accomplishing your digital marketing goals. The talking heads of the SEO world might make you think SEO is always changing and we keep making predictions about how new elements of SEO strategy will affect your rankings.
