Link building is a core part of any SEO strategy. Whether you’re trying to improve your organic search rankings or build up your website’s authority and trust, getting links from other sites can be an essential part of the process. However, link building doesn’t have to be difficult—if you follow these guidelines, you’ll be well on your way toward link building success:
Read the content.
Link building is a process that requires you to make intelligent decisions about where you link and why. The last thing you want to do is waste your time or money on bad links.
To ensure that the links you generate are high quality, read the content of each site on which your link appears. Make sure that it’s relevant to your own website, and read it carefully so nothing pops out at you as being off-topic or poorly written (if this happens, don’t use them).
Check the quality of the site.
The quality of the content on a site is one of the most important factors when determining whether or not it’s worth building links to. You want to build links to sites with high-quality content, but you also want your site’s link profile to be high-quality as well!
The first thing that you should check is the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of a site. The higher these numbers are, the more likely they’ll be able to pass link juice through their backlinks.
If you’re looking at an existing website and don’t have access to Ahrefs or Moz Open Site Explorer, you can use SEMrush’s Domain vs Domain tool: https://www.semrush.com/info_features/dvdd/#overview
Another way that I like to evaluate whether or not I should start building links from a domain is by looking at how many backlinks point towards it in total—this gives me an idea about how much reach there currently is for my potential target audience online versus just being able to see what kind of content gets shared around most frequently on social media channels like Facebook (which isn’t always related).So here’s where things get interesting! We need some way for people visiting our blog post about link building success tips right now 🙂
Consider internal link weight.
Link weight is a measure of how much value a website’s links contribute to its ranking in search engines. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of outbound links on a page by the PageRank (PR) of the linking page. Link equity, or link juice, is another name for this concept but they are essentially synonymous.
In order to understand how it works, let’s look at an example:
A page with 3 external links has 1 PR and each link contributes 0.5 PR to that page’s score. The total PR from these outbound links is 1 + (3 x 0.5) = 2 as we add all three together then multiply them by their individual values (1/2).
Check for mixed signals.
- Check for mixed signals. If you see two or more signals pointing to the same domain, IP address, hostname, user agent or browser — it’s likely that those signals were generated by bots.
- Consider the frequency of your links from a particular source. If you’re getting many links from a source (like a blog) and your website has been around for awhile — then this may be an indication that the links are legitimate. If you’ve only had one link from them and they are not as authoritative as other sites in their niche—then it’s probably worth investigating further before taking action on those links.
Diversify your links.
_Diversifying your links can help you get the most out of each link you earn. To do this, you need to diversify the types of sites that are linking to you—not just in general but also on a per-site level.
For example, if we have 100 different links from 100 different sites (for example), then 50% of our links may be from SEO blogs and forums—but 50% isn’t enough! In fact, it’s probably too much because these types of sites aren’t necessarily going to drive traffic or conversions due to their nature (more on this later). You want some blog comments here and there as well as some brand mentions and guest posts with high domain authority (DA).
Likewise, if we look at each individual site within our list above: these might include blogs and forum communities such as Quora or Reddit; ecommerce stores like Etsy or eBay; social media accounts such as Facebook Pages; review platforms like TripAdvisor; etc.—and while they all bring something uniqueto your link portfolio(ie: direct traffic), they also have varying levels of authority depending on their niche audience size combined with how trustworthy people perceive them to be(ie., will someone trust what someone says about themselves?).
Look at broken links, too.
Broken links are a sign of a website that is not being managed properly. You don’t want to be associated with a site that looks poorly maintained and unmaintained, so you should look at broken links as a good thing.
Do a competitive analysis.
The first step in any link building campaign is to do a competitor analysis. This is an exercise that will help you determine how to properly approach your competitors in order to build links from their sites, and also understand how you stack up against them. There are several tools available for conducting this type of analysis, but two favorites are SEMrush and Ahrefs. Once you have set up an account with one of these platforms (or both), it’s time to start digging into the data!
The first thing you need to do is figure out which links are coming from your competitors’ sites so that you can begin identifying opportunities for gaining backlinks in return—or at least keeping up with them. If there isn’t enough information available through searching engines or social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn, then reach out directly via email asking if they would be willing share some insight into their strategy around link building efforts on their website(s).
Focus on quality, not quantity.
One of the most important factors to consider when building links is the quality of your backlinks. While quantity is certainly important, focusing on building a small group of high-quality links will have much better results than trying to get as many backlinks as possible. In fact, Google’s algorithm has become so sophisticated that it can easily tell if a website is spamming its link profile and will penalize it accordingly.
In addition to being more effective in general, quality backlinks also have several other benefits:
- They are very likely to be followed by search engines, which means they can help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- They are more likely to be followed by humans—and thus spread word about your site via social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
- If a site has been around for a while and has built up an audience on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook then that site might pass along any new content from one of those platforms without even realizing it!
Monitor your link building efforts.
Link building is a long-term strategy that requires careful monitoring. You need to stay on top of your link building efforts and make sure you’re getting the most out of it as possible. Link building is an ongoing process and you need to know whether something is working or not, so you can adjust accordingly.
Monitoring your links will help you be more effective with your time and resources, so it’s important to keep track of what links are being built and how they’re being earned (e.g., guest blog post, sponsored posts).
Keep an eye out for negative SEO and Penguin updates.
Negative SEO is when your competitors try to get your website penalised by search engines. This can happen when a competitor links to your website with low quality, spammy or unrelated content in an attempt to reduce the rank of your website.
If you suspect that someone has been negative seo’ing you, there are a few things you can do:
- Check for suspicious activity on Google Analytics and SEMrush – If there’s an increase in traffic from one particular source, see if it correlates with other suspicious activity (e.g. lots of negative reviews, sudden drop in rankings)
- Check Google Search Console – Are there any new backlinks pointing to your site? If not then check MozCast – Is there an increase in “linkless” sites linking to yours?
Don’t go overboard with anchor text.
Don’t go overboard with anchor text.
While it’s important to build links, you need to make sure that the anchor text used is relevant to your content and doesn’t feel overly optimized for search engines. Make sure that you’re not stuffing keywords into your anchor text just for the sake of getting a link from a site in a particular niche or vertical, as this can lead to bad practices down the road when you don’t have control over what they do with those links.
Instead of going straight after SEO optimization, focus on writing quality blog posts that will help drive traffic back to your website and earn links naturally over time through reader engagement with great content. The best way to ensure this happens is by making sure that every post has an attractive headline (with either an eye-catching image or some kind of shocking claim), followed by engaging subheads throughout the body copy, then ending each paragraph with a call-to-action like “Learn more” or “Check out our store.” This way readers will know exactly what they need from reading each piece before moving onto another one—and if they enjoy reading them enough times then there may even come along someone willing enough give credit where credit is due via linkbacks!
Use rel=nofollow properly.
While you may be tempted to use nofollow on every link in your site, it is important to first consider the relevance of that link. For example, if you have a blog post about fishing and someone links to your site from their fishing website, it makes sense for them to use nofollow so that they do not pass along any juice. In this case, there is little value in having an outbound link from your content back toward theirs (and vice versa).
However, if someone has linked back to your content from their homepage or another subpage of theirs (as opposed to a specific article), then leaving the link open will still provide you with some amount of value from those links. This is because when readers click on these “soft” anchors—or internal links within sites—they tend not only get more engaged but also stay longer than users who simply visit external pages within the same domain or website as where they began reading content online.
Good link building strategy is essential to building traffic to your website through search engines
Link building is a process of creating new links to your website. It’s an important part of search engine optimization, because the more links you have, the more authority you have. The higher your website ranks in search results, the more traffic it will receive from people who are searching for whatever products or services you offer.
What does this mean? The better your link building strategy is, the more traffic and business you’ll get!
Conclusion
The bottom line is that link building is an important part of SEO, and it can be difficult to do well. But if you follow these 12 guidelines for effective link building, you’ll be on your way to success in no time.
