You can dramatically increase your search engine rank by getting others to link to your website. The number of such backlinks, is the primary ranking factor according to top industry experts (source).

At LiteBreeze we link to our web application development clients and encourage them to link back to us. This is win-win. It’s not about driving direct traffic, but building trust and website authority. This in turn drives traffic through improved ranking.

Chances are that your company requires only a few more backlinks to rank on the first page. At least if you’re in an industry that is fairly low-competition in terms of SEO, such as a niched local consultancy firm.

How many backlinks do I need?

How many backlinks do you have, and how many does your top ranking competitor have? You can use a free backlink checker tool such as this one.

Here’s an example for a 100’000-person town in the UK:

This particular website ranks #1 with only two linking root domains / referring root domains. I’ve excluded no-follow links:

Does Google allow link exchanges with clients?

Yes! Historically black-hat SEOs did excessive unnatural link exchanging by placing say 1000 outgoing links from their website in return for a backlink from those 1000 websites.

Google obviously will identify and punish such tactics. But natural quality backlinks are positive: “As long as these reciprocal links are on topic and ‘make sense from a user standpoint’, link exchange is not something bad.” (source)

Build links with closest partners

Getting unknown third parties to link to your website can be difficult. But exchanging links with clients, suppliers and partners can be much easier. Start with this low-hanging fruit before proceeding with demanding content-based link-building campaigns.

You’re not asking for much; a subpage link is fine

Locate and suggest a suitable page from where your partner can link to you. And stress that you will provide a quality backlink in return.

Take your link-building further with a CMS tool

We recommend our clients to set up a blog using a platform such as WordPress (we offer WordPress development services). This way your company can easily start publishing quality content and build links with your clients, suppliers and other stakeholders.

When you prepare day-to-day content such as information to clients, you can easily convert such “free content” into an article. Win-win. Content is a long-term investment. You will also benefit from being transparent with your stakeholders.

If you have a multilingual website learn how to structure your multilingual content and domains.