Contextual Back-Links For SEO
What are they and why are they important?
For a long time, back-links have been a key driver for website search engine optimisation and helping generate great ranking positions. Get your back-link profile right and you can be fairly sure that Google will reward you with improved search positions; hence why you will regularly see SEO practitioners referring to back-links and their use.
However, there are good links, bad links and pretty much everything in between; indeed bad back-links can actually damage a website rather than improve its rankings. So it’s important to understand what is involved when discussing back-links for search optimisation purposes.
Back in the early days of Google, pretty much any type of link would bring ranking benefits, but this is far from the case today. Google is now extremely adept at evaluating website pages, including the links embedded in the page content. So long gone are the days of seeking out any old link and firing it at a target site as part of a dental SEO project.
Now we need to be much more selective and only use links which will be of advantage to the target site. Get this wrong and your website can easily be penalised by Google; sometimes irrecoverably. Indeed where we are asked by dentists to help recover their search engine rankings, investigation often reveals that they have been subject to outdated SEO techniques which have penalised their website – and as mentioned above, recovery can be very time-consuming.
In our quest to help you understand SEO better, today we’ll take a look at contextual back-links and why this type of link is favoured for website optimisation purposes.
Defining contextual back-links
A contextual back-link is one where the link is embedded within a body of text which is contextually relevant to the target website. So for example a link in a blog post about dental implants pointing back to a website page about implants would be classed as contextual. The formation of the link itself is important and may (or may not) directly reference implants, but we’ll cover that elsewhere in a different blog.
Compare this to a link which is not embedded within contextually relevant text or perhaps is stuck on the end of piece of content or on a business directory. This is still a back-link but it is not contextual and typically less valuable.
There are cases where a non-contextual back-link on a very important, popular website can be more valuable than a contextual link on a lesser site, but these cases are quite rare.
Why are contextual links more valuable?
This is simply because Google wants to give benefit to websites which are most trustworthy and useful and one of the ways to establish this is by looking at the profile of the links pointing back to it. If the links are from related websites, there is a good chance of them being relevant rather than any old link from a random, unrelated website.
This is why you should try to secure contextual back-links from relevant dental websites where you can.
Do all your back-links have to be contextual?
No, absolutely not although that is the ideal and most powerful. There are many useful link sources which are not contextual, for example bona fide business directories and the like. The key with those types of links is to make sure that the site where they originate is not poor quality – a key indicator would be lots of links to hundreds of dentists which can be placed easily and without any moderation.
Also avoid dodgy blogs and other resources set up simply to provide back-link opportunities. You will often see “guest blogs” or similar advertised which offer “great” opportunities to place your links for a fee, but please note that this is dangerous ground and to be avoided. If you or your SEO team does this type of thing, rest assured that Google will catch up with you sooner or later.
Creating links in your own blog
One of the easiest ways to create useful contextual links is in your own dental practice blog. So for example you write an informative article about orthodontics and then include a well-crafted link to your Invisalign page or similar. Whilst this won’t be as powerful as a link from a relevant 3rd party website, it will still be useful to help build the rankings of the target page.
Summary
The use of back-links for SEO is well-known, but less well-understood is how the quality and hence usefulness of those links can vary hugely. Particularly powerful are contextual links from relevant, good quality websites and those are the ones which will really give your website a huge rankings boost. On the contrary, poor quality “free for all” links can have entirely the opposite effect!
If you would like to know more about SEO for your own dental practice website and how we can help you to gain prominence in Google, please get in touch with the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for impartial advice and guidance.