Best Backlinks for Your Translation Website Help your customers find you online




Greater than 5 minutes, my friend!

SEO is a funny little creature. Honestly, I have really been enjoying my sabbatical, I sleep better, though I have less time for my video game addiction. My wife and I take long walks with the dog every day and I’ve actually lost about 10lbs. Which is good, I needed it. One of the biggest parts of any kind of search engine optimization, especially for translators where there is so much competition, is having quality backlinks to your site.

To keep everything simple, SEO is made up of four basic parts:
– On-page optimization
– Off-page optimization (what this post is about)
– Social Media Profiles, and
– User metrics (bounce rates, session times, etc…)

I specifically want to talk about off-page optimization and how it works. Google is pretty clever. They have one job and they work really hard to do it well. That job is to answer your questions. When you search for something, you’re asking it a question. That’s usually something like, what does this word mean in this other language, at least in our case, but it can also be a question about where to buy a pizza or where to find translation work. In the case of our clients, the question is, where can I find a professional translator that can do this job for me. Google then has to decide, out of all the websites in the entire internet, which site will offer the best answer to the user’s question. Search Engine Optimization is the combination of tools and techniques that we use to help Google understand what our site is about, what questions we answer. One of the ways that Google determines if our answer is better than any of the others is by looking at the number, and quality, of other websites that have placed links to your site – especially if they’re in the same industry or niche.

Not all links are the same, though. There are two basic types of links:
– Dofollow (or just Follow) are links that are read and “followed” by Google’s robots and are beneficial to your site
– NoFollow links are seen by the robots, but they don’t follow them to your page. They don’t hurt you, but they don’t really help you, either. These are the links that you see in Facebook or Twitter.

So, you’re probably thinking, wow, Triston knows his stuff. But, where am I going to get links like that?

I have three places where you can get links like that!!

  1. You Proz.com profile. It’s super easy. Just add your link to your profile page (I suggest adding it to the “About” section). If you want to get really fancy, you can add some sort of anchor text (the text of the link, like this). You need a little piece of HTML code to do this, but it’s super easy. Just copy and paste this <a href=”www.opl10nt9n.com”>The Sexiest Translator Alive</a>

    Replace my link with your own URL and the text “The Sexiest Translator Alive” with your own. Now, don’t just use any ol’ text here. This is an incredibly important indicator to Google of what your site is about. For that piece of text, use your primary keyword. There are some potential issues that can arise if you have a lot of links going back to your site all using the same anchor text (keyword), but that shouldn’t become an issue for you. The people that need to worry about that kind of stuff wouldn’t be reading this post 🙂

    If you like, you can leave the code exactly as it is and link back to this page so that I rank better ^_^

  2. Translator Directory. All things considered, I don’t really like this site. I get tons of spam and other garbage from it, but they do have DoFollow links and decent metrics. Just add your website as you normally would here.
  3. Pop Expert. This is pretty much the same thing as Translator Directory, no real work from the site itself, but it does give a powerful backlink.  Remember, we’re not signing up here to find work, we’re using them to improve the rankings of our own websites.
  4. OPL10NT9N.COM. Now, I know what you’re thinking, it’s probably like, “Whaaaaaa?!!?” Well, out of all the sites listed here, mine has the poorest metrics (because I’m not spending thousands of dollars to promote my site and buy more backlinks, or pay someone to go out and do it manually for me), but it is diversified and I don’t mind adding a link to your site here. You will find other blogs and sites that will do the same thing, but they’ll charge you for it (because they understand the value that a link has). I’ve seen them run from anywhere between $5 to $500 or more. This is where things like guest posting in a blog is helpful. You can share links between each other and everyone can grow from it. I was even offered $100 to share a post from another agency at one point, because they wanted the backlink and because they love all of you and want your attention. This is the most time consuming and potentially expensive option, but it will also bring you a lot of backlinks.
  5. The Open Mic. Not only is Dmitry’s project really cool, it also serves as a backlink. His metrics are a little higher than mine, but you’ll get a lot of value out of his site in general. Especially since people post several articles per day there, and I only write like once a month. But again, it’s a link and it helps Google see that your content is good.

There are A LOT of other places out there for you to build up your backlink profile. Go check’em out! Just remember what I mentioned earlier about DoFollow and NoFollow links. If you’re on Chrome, you can download an app called the Moz Bar that will highlight different kinds of links and will help you determine if your site will benefit from the link or not. There is one other thing to keep in mind, and it’s something that the Moz Bar will again help you with. Some sites are bad. They’re considered spam by Google and their links could actually hurt you (just like you’re awesome by associating with awesome sites, you’re bad by associating with bad sites). The Moz Bar gives you a numerical indication of how “good” a site is. It’s scaled from 1 to 100. This isn’t a perfect way of judging a site, there are a lot of tools and professionals that are dedicated to just that, but it should help. The higher the number, the more you’ll benefit from the link. I think this blog is like a 14 or 20, depending on which system you use to measure a site. So, I’m only like 1/3 as powerful as Proz, but my site is VERY industry specific. It still helps.

But, that’s one of the biggest off-page SEO factors in a nut shell. Take this knowledge, improve your websites, rank higher, charge more, change your life. This is the core of what I did to find my own clients – technically they found me.

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Triston Goodwin

About Triston Goodwin

2 thoughts on “Best Backlinks for Your Translation Website Help your customers find you online

  1. Great post, Triston! And thanks for mentioning The Open Mic 🙂
    One thing I’d like to add is particularly useful for blogging translators: you can republish your articles on The Open Mic and use canonical URLs. This is something that is often doesn’t exist on other blogs/blogging platforms. I wrote an article about that a while ago: link to theopenmic.co

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  2. Thank you, Triston. I have been avoiding making a web page for my translation services, but reading your excellent suggestions made me realize it is absolutely necessary. The explanation about developing a backlink profile is very good, and for someone like me — I have no money to buy Google adwords or pay some blogger for a spot on their blogroll — it is worth its weight in gold (which is going up, I hear, since BREXIT). Thanks again.

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