What are backlinks?
Backlinks are actually pretty simple to understand. Every time that another website on the internet links to your website, you’ve just received a backlink.
Google and the other search engines use these backlinks to determine how important, relevant, and valuable your website is to potential readers. This is a really big and important part of the way their search algorithm works, so building backlinks can be a very effective strategy to increasing traffic to your site and ultimate booking more camping spaces.
How do backlinks help my parks website?
As mentioned above, Google and the search engines will look at each backlink to your website and use it to either boost you / lower you in the search rankings for some specific terms. This is a VERY simplified explanation, but more or less that’s how it works.
Domain Relevance and Authority
The search engines will look at many things for each of your backlinks to determine how good and relevant your website is for readers. For instance, let’s say you have 100,000 backlinks, but they are all from websites about kitchen utensils. It doesn’t make a lick of sense why so many websites would be linking to an RV park / campground website that are centered around a topic that is completely different.
In this case, the search engines would likely not give much of a quality score boost even though the number (quantity) of backlinks is really high.
Just as much, if you had only 100 backlinks but they were all from other local parks in the area, RV bloggers, or RV dealerships, the search engines would likely give you a big score boost as it would seem a lot of people and businesses in your same industry/space have some good things to say about you.
Again, the thing to remember here is quality over quantity.
Referral Traffic
The other most notable benefit of backlinks is refferal traffic. Aside from getting a boost from the search engines, you are likely to see an increase in traffic simply from people clicking on the backlinks on other websites to explore your website. This is excellent traffic to receive, because these people are very likely to be in your target demographic/customer base, and will likely be searching for information and places to stay.
How do I get some of these fancy backlinks?!
This is the hard part. People and other websites will not link to you just because you post a nice piece of content or a new blog article.
#1: The content needs to be relevant to what their website is about, and it needs to fit in and make sense for their readers. Make sure that you’re content is well written and stays on topic, not jumping around from subject-to-subject just hunting for more keywords and search terms.
#2: Just posting an article doesn’t mean that it will be found by everyone who might be interested. You’ll need to make sure that each piece of your posted content is optimized to be found by the search engines. After this, we recommend the most effective strategy:
#3: Active backlink building.
Active backlink building is all about reaching out to other people and business in the RV/campground industry and forming partnerships to share and grown content and readership. This is the preferred method here at Parks and Rec, because it is what is called “White Hat SEO”. In other-words, it’s a positive, win-win based strategy that focuses on cooperation between business rather than competition. At the end of the day, we’re all campers and in the same community, so why not share readers and customers rather than compete?!
Publishing an article and linking to a complimentary business is the best way to build backlinks, as it brings the most value to your end user. The reader gets more relevant information, and you and your website gain credibility for providing this information, even-though it may be a referral to another business.
Takeways
Confused yet? No worries, we get it! It’s a lot to take in. Here are the quick and actionable takeaways for you when it comes to backlinks and your campground website:
- Focus on quality not quantity. Build links on websites of respectable businesses in your same industry.
- Reach out and share your content so it can be shared again by the world.
- Cooperate, work with others (even competitors) to bring more value to your customers
An investment up-front what will continue to pay dividends down the road for years to come.
Thanks for reading and Happy Back-linking!
