Site owners must focus on the quality of the backlinks rather than number of backlinks. Quality links mean links from a relevant site with a higher authority. Some websites have suspiciously large number of external links. These are probably the websites which buy links in bulk. These websites are in some ways, spammy websites. Linking to such sites can result in a penalty by Google. When building backlinks to your website, you have to make everything look as natural as possible. It’s normal that a website has most of its links to the homepage. URLs and links are building blocks of a website, therefore, ensure that they are consistent and are search engine friendly. Pages that have many outbound links are considered to hurt search engine ranking.

Review your website’s design

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination. The goal shouldn’t be to generate links, it should be to generate buzz or discussion; to share knowledge or data or other insights that we know our audiences (and prospecive customers) will find valauble. Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. Many users also prefer this over other approaches, especially on some devices that might not handle Flash or JavaScript. It will be hard to redirect your resources to mobile if your company has been completely entrenched in optimizing its desktop SEO. Like other internet marketing strategies, success won’t happen overnight. It takes persistent and consistent work over the long-term to see substantial results.

Check for broken links on your website

To understand SEO, you need to understand search engines. A search engine is a piece of software that crawls the internet and indexes its pages in order to provide the best website recommendations based on a user's search query. And they use complex, ever-changing algorithms to do that. Most people never click beyond the first page of results (which only shows 10 web pages), meaning there will be little/no traffic for those ranking in positions 11+. Therefore, simply being indexed won’t necessarily bring organic traffic. By sharing content that you post on social media as well as sharing your website content people are showing that your website is a valuable resource that they are happy to tell their friends about. Another effect of this is that people are more likely to link to your content and website if they have been introduced to it on social media. Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

Should I be buying backlinks to help improve my rankings?

For your pages to become searchable and indexable by the crawlers / search engine bots, they need some linking love first (bots follow links to find new content). Search engines find it harder to find and include pages in their results that aren’t linked to either internally (from other pages of the same website) or externally (from other websites). In addition to your user experience, there are also a number of other factors that affect the usability of your website such as website load speed, server uptime, broken links, cross-device compatibility, learnability and clarity. By making sure your website is easy to use you’ll be helping to ensure that it can perform well in the search engines and will also help to convert your visitors into customers. RankBrain and other machine learning systems examine user behavior to deliver the “best” search results possible. Unfortunately, what’s deemed best for one query might not be the best for another, which makes machine learning very difficult to optimize for. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "Google tends to prefer Featured Snippet content that begin logically as an answer would."

Set a bare minimum expectation for repurposed content

Which pages and posts are most important? These should have other pages and posts linking to them. Make sure to link to the most important content. It’s worth noting that there are SEOs who prefer using TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Citation Flow) from Majestic when checking their competitors authority and trust levels. Many marketers are so focused on building out site hierarchy, wireframing and design of the site that they lose site of content development. SEO is a huge part of content development, but when content becomes an afterthought during web redesign, and the focus is on getting the new site live ASAP, often times marketers will put the content together without deliberate thought to keyword inclusion and smart SEO content strategies. People make use of search engines for a wide variety of purposes, with some of the most popular being to research, locate, and buy products.