To wrap up the month of February (and hopefully winter) here is our recap of our favorite Wednesday activity, SEMrushChat! This week’s discussion focused on the importance of trustworthy links in your SEO strategy.

First, let’s define what this means. Search engines’ ranking algorithms focus on a variety of different metrics to determine authoritativeness, relevancy, and trustworthiness of a website. One of these metrics is backlinking.

Linking to an external, third-party website acts somewhat like a ‘vote’ for it. Each vote is equivalent to an ‘endorsement’ of the page that the link points to. In return, search engines use these endorsements to help determine how to rank those webpages.

Thinking about your own webpages’ endorsements, a ‘backlink’ is created when an external website links to yours. As described above, these links influence how search engines rank your pages. As a result, backlinking is a huge part of your SEO strategy.

Let’s dive into our key takeaways from SEMrushChat:

When deciding which webpages to backlink from, remember to consider: website credibility, domain authority, relevancy to your clients’ and customers’ industries, quality of content, frequency of updates, traffic, audience reach and engagement rate.

website credibility, domain authority, relevancy to your clients’ and customers’ industries, quality of content, frequency of updates, traffic, audience reach and engagement rate.

When establishing your expertise, personal authorship in blog posts and other website articles is important and always relevant. Website visitors are people and in general people follow people and therefore want to hear from people. Brands benefit when they add a human voice to their brand by personally naming the author.

In B2B we try to include Thought Leadership content in most campaigns. These pieces increase the website and brand’s credibility for both actual people and search engine crawlers. We establish expertise and authority by including each author’s credentials following their name. This is especially true in the financial and medical industries.

Ranking higher in search engines means showing up higher on SERPs (search engine results pages). As stated above, this is the end goal of backlinking. Search engine rankings are mainly determined by an algorithm. Unfortunately, sometimes that algorithm may be updated which in turn may negatively hurt your webpages’ rankings. When this happens, what should you do? All that work just to be thrown back down in the ranks without a single clue why! Don’t panic, there are a few things you can do:

• Research the new algorithm and look into possible reasons for why you were affected
• Do a full review/audit of your website and make any necessary changes/fixes
• Look at your competition and other similar websites to see how they are faring against the update

Sometimes an algorithm update can actually be a blessing in disguise. It may force you to rethink your strategy and improve upon it. Despite requiring an extensive amount of time and dedication it will be well worth it when complete.

Sales and website traffic are key metrics to look to when determining if your website has a good score or not. There are many tools that can help measure your linking strategy. Some examples are SEMrush, Majestic, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console.