How does Google determine which website to rank number one, two or three? It comes down to SEO, right? Well, it’s more in depth than that. Google has over 200 factors; and the number one factor that affects rankings is backlinks. Today, I’m going to teach you what backlinks are and how they work.

Moz, a reknown SEO company interviewed tons of marketing experts, and they asked them what factors affect Google’s rankings the most? They all said backlinks. So, with backlinks, that’s one website linking to another website. Google’s looking at it as votes. The more links that your website has, the higher you’re going to rank.

In addition to that, they’re looking at quality. So, if the Washington Post links to you, that’s way more effective than if Ms. Tiggy Wingkle the vet linked to you. And Google knows that it’s way harder to get a link from the Washington Post than it is to get a link from Ms. Tiggy Wingkle the vet.

Now, another thing that they’re using within their algorithm is how related is that link? So, if the Washington Post links to your vet website, that’s actually not as effective compared to Ms. Tiggy Winkle the vet linking to you. But, on the flip side, if Pets R Us linked to you, because it’s very relevant and they’re within your space, that’s way more effective than if Ms. Tiggy Winkle the vet linked to you.

Google is looking at how many backlinks you’re getting; how many you’re getting over time because it has to be natural. They don’t want you to just go pay people to link to your website because they don’t like that. You shouldn’t pay for links. They’re looking at how related those websites are and they’re looking at something called domain authority, which is how authoritative that website is.

So, assume you’re getting tons of backlinks, you’re getting them from related websites and they have high domain authority. A domain authority is from a scale of 0 to 100, 100 being like a Google.com, a Youtube, a Facebook and it works like on a Richter scale. A logarithmic scale, in which it’s way easier to go from 1 to 10, than it is to go from 10 to 20. So, if you can get a lot of backlinks, you can get them from relevant sites, and you can get them from authoritative sites that have high domain authority, your rankings are going to climb.

If you’re wondering what domain authority is, like what number a certain site has, you can go to ahrefs.com, put in a URL and they’ll spit out the domain authority. It’s a paid tool. A free version of this is Open Site Explorer. If you Google ‘Open Site Explorer’, it’ll take you to moz.com, and you can put in a URL and it’ll tell you that site’s domain authority.

Now that you know how links work in the eyes of Google, if you want to get links the quickest way is to do round up posts. So, go and email every single expert within your space. You email these people, include them in their round up posts; and since you’re asking them one question and you’re asking that same question to every expert within the space, it’s a great opportunity for them to get free press, which is why they’re going to participate.

Once they all participate and give you their response, write an amazing looking blog post showcasing all the responses, include their name, link to their website, link to their Twitter or Facebook profile. From there, email each of those experts, once you’ve published the post, and ask them to share it on their favourite social network.

By doing this, your blog, your website, is going to get more traffic. The more eyeballs that see your sight, the higher probability that someone’s going to link back to your site. As you get more backlinks, your rankings will also climb.

Do you have any suggestions on improving backlinks? Would love to hear from you in the comments section below.