SEO Backlinking Process

Backlinking is a great way to boost the rankings of a well-optimized website. Backlinking alone will not typically help with your rankings, so Third Marble's process is designed to first optimize your website pages, then use backlinks to boost those pages.

What is a Backlink?

Backlinks are simply a link from any website to your website. For example, this is a backlink to a website called ReDoSites. When you click on that link, it will take you to the ReDoSites website.

Important Parts of a Backlink:

The html code for the above backlink looks like this:

<a href="https://www.redosites.com/">this is a backlink</a>

The red text is the URL. It's the website page that you will be redirected to when you click on the link. Ideally, you want to get your URL in this code on other quality websites.

The green text is the Anchor Text. It's the text that appears in the link. The anchor text is important for SEO because it gives Google some information about what the URL is about. In this case, the backlink to ReDoSites is telling Google that ReDoSites is about "this is a backlink" (which is not ideal for that particular website). A better Anchor Text might be something like "fast page loading websites".

What is Domain Authority and Page Authority?

Domain Authority isn't a Google term, but a term created by the SEO industry to estimate a website's "ability to rank well on Google". Google doesn't specifically use any such metric per se, but all the elements of Domain Authority are part of their ranking algorithm. The SEO industry uses it as an aggregated estimate of the benefit a website has from backlinks.

Having a high Domain Authority does not mean that your website will rank well, it's more an indicator that your website has the "capacity" to rank well. Specifically, it looks at several factors related to the quality and quantity of the backlinks to your site, plus the overall SEO health of your website. It does not factor in the relevancy of your website's focus keywords.

For example, if you had a plumbing website with a high Domain Authority, it does not mean you will rank well for the phrase "water heater repair" if your website is not properly optimized for the keyword "water heater repair".

Page Authority is similar to Domain Authority. Domain Authority is for your entire website, Page Authority is for an individual page on your website. Usually, your home page has the highest Page Authority, which is why you often see you home page on Page One of Google. Other pages typically have fewer backlinks, so they don't often index as well.

Like everything in SEO, your Domain Authority changes constantly due to changes in the Domain Authority of the websites that are linking to your website. If a spammy website links to you website, then you could see a decrease in your Domain Authority. It's not something that is easily controlled.

How Does Domain / Page Authority Work?

Let's say there's a webpage that's linked to your website. That page has a Page Authority of 35 out of 100 (abbreviated "PA 35"). A fraction of that 35 is passed to your web page and added to your Page Authority score. For your page to get a Page Authority score of 35, you may need dozens of PA 35+ pages linking to your page - each one passing a fraction of their Page Authority to your page. Domain Authority works the same way.

It's important to note that your website pages also pass Page Authority within your website, so it's important to have "contextual links" from one page of your website to another. A Contextual Link is simply a link within the main content of a page, like the paragraphs or a bullet list; not in the navigation bar or a link in the footer.

Domain Authority usually expressed on a scale of 1 to 100. However, it's not linear.

A DA 20 website has 10 times the ranking power of a DA 10 website.
A DA 30 website has 100 times the ranking power of a DA 10 website.
A DA 40 website has 1000 times the ranking power of a DA 10 website.
A DA 50 website has 10,000 times the ranking power of a DA 10 website.
etc...

Said another way, getting 1 backlink from a "DA 20" website has roughly the same impact as getting 10 backlinks from 10 different "DA 10" websites.

What's the difference between Outbound Links and Backlinks?

An Outbound Link is a link on your website that points to someone else's website.

A Backlink is a link on someone else's website that points to your website. These are also commonly called "Inbound Links".

So the backlink in the first paragraph of this page is an "Outbound Link" from the Third Marble Marketing website, AND it's a "Backlink" to the ReDoSite website.

Google uses the Domain Authority (and other factors) of the connected websites as "votes" for both sites. If your website has Outbound Links to high-quality content, then Google will assume that your content must also be of some quality since you are referencing high-quality content. This can help improve your Domain Authority.

If a high-quality, well respected website backlinks to your website, then that website passes some of that "quality" to your website. This increases your Domain Authority.

By contrast, if your website has outbound links to spammy content, or if spammy content backlinks to your website, Google may decrease their opinion of your website and decrease your Domain Autority.

What's Third Marble Marketing's Backlink Strategy?

Third Marble incorporates a strategy that is designed to funnel dozens of backlinks from medium to high Domain Authority websites to one particular "Primary Target Page".

We start with creating New Pages on the internet (not your website) that contains content related to your products and services. These pages receive backlinks from multiple medium to high Domain Authority websites to boost the Domain Authority of the New Pages.

These New Pages are then linked, using keywords in the Anchor Text to point to several "Target Pages" of your website.

The Target Pages then contain internal links, with keywords in the Anchor Text, to the "Primary Target Page".

The Target Pages and the Primary Target Page also have Outbound Links to high-quality, non-competitive content with good Domain Authority.

The concept is simple - pass a fraction of the Domain Authority from dozens of good DA websites all the way down to a single target page that is optimized for one of your top keywords. (The execution is not so simple - see below).

This is the reason we sell our SEO services in blocks of 10 pages. It allows us to focus on creating funnels of backlinks to high-valued pages of your website.

We hope this helps!