 Want to know how to get backlinks to your small business website? We're talking about it here on The Journey. Equalings are one of the most important ranking factors of search engines like Google. The more highly relevant backlinks you get for your website, the more likely you are to show up when someone searches for something relevant to your business. And the good news is, you don't need to know a ton of fancy tricks or have a ton of in-depth knowledge on how the internet works. Of course, that would help. You just need to have a basic understanding of search engine optimization, SEO for short, including how to get backlinks. All of that will go a long way toward improving your website's position on search engine results pages. And like the name sound, a backlink is simply a hyperlink on another website that links back to yours. A backlink is like an endorsement in the eyes of Google, kind of like an upvote and other search engines. Think of it like if you were to share an article link on your Facebook page to your friends, you are among other things recommending anyone who cares about you to click that link. When a website shares a link to another website, they're basically doing the same. And before you can start actively building backlinks, it's important to understand why you must build them ethically. Well, Google wants to protect its rankings and it will actually punish pages that try to game the system. And look, Google can easily discover if a website is cheating because it knows what a natural backlink profile looks like compared to any, you know, a natural one. And they have your website's backlink profile because they crawl and catalog the pages constantly. I'm talking all the time. So for example, if you gain 10,000 links this Tuesday and only two or three over the next few weeks, then all of a sudden you gain another 2000 a month later, there's a good chance you are cheating. So how do you actually build backlinks then? So you don't have to be an SEO specialist to build backlinks for your website. Here's simple five step process that you can build into your marketing strategy to grow your rankings, traffic and backlink count, starting with analyze. So come up with a list of keywords that reflect what people are searching for to get to your website or your competitors in your industry. If you want to take a competitive stance in your SEO field, analyze the keywords of your competitors as well. Next up, create high quality, engaging content that targets those search terms, also known as keywords. Now once you have your list of keywords, keep it in a safe place, and then it's time to assign the content to each term. Now you can create infographics, recommend that you can also do videos, ebooks, blog posts to name a few. And as a small business owner, you just need to weigh your time and cost of production. Now the fastest way to produce content in an economical manner is by blogging. And while content can be used for search engine optimization, it should also be created to provide value. We stress that all the time on the journey and keep in mind that your goal isn't just to rank for outdoor wedding, it's to turn those visitors into paying customers. Exactly. And converting those visitors into customers is exactly why you have a website. But after you do that, you're going to want to publish those keywords. So post those keyword targeted content on your website and then optimize the page based on the terms that you've chosen. And if you really want to rank for one keyword in particular, consider developing cornerstone content. So cornerstone content is the highest value, most foundational piece of content for increasing traffic and brand awareness. And now many brands will invest in high quality content like a long form blog post to target a specific keyword. This is the cornerstone piece of content. And then they're going to create a bunch of hand, really just supporting blog posts that just link back to the main piece and direct readers to the valuable deep information. And now it's time to promote, let the world know that you publish the content. And remember, the more people who see your post will link to it, growing your backlink count with the help of your social promotions and posting links to your content on social media. What that's going to do, it's going to help to generate traffic to your website. And then hopefully prompt others to link back to your content, which does affect your SEO heavily. Naturally, these higher rankings will help you to build on your success and drive even more backlinks to your site. And as we always say, don't just set it and forget it, you're going to want to monitor, track and analyze the activity, organic traffic, and backlink profile. As you start to regularly publish content and share it on social media, set up a process to track your user engagement and backlinks among other data points. Google Analytics is free for website users, and there are easy to digest tutorials that you can follow to learn more about the tool. You can also check your analytics weekly, but once a month is just fine. With Google Analytics, you can review a host of different metrics that can provide value to your brand and content strategy. Now it's important to know developing backlinks and improving your SEO. It's not an overnight project. It's going to take some time. In fact, most brands do not see the results that they want for at least 12 months, full year. And even if you are ranking well, hey, you don't want to stop letting your content grow stale is a great way to just fall in the ranking. And you don't want all of your hard work to be for nothing. Creating the best content you can will never get punished by search engines like Google. The search engines will appreciate you, your audience will engage with you, and your business will grow. All right, that's a wrap, but the journey does not need to stop. Here we have over 200 videos for you to check out. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for watching. This is The Journey.