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The importance of high quality backlinks have increased over the years. As clearly seen from the effectiveness of the EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) framework and the initial release of the Google Penguin update in 2012 and continuous updates since.
Press Backlinks
Press links are typically sourced from websites with high domain authority and as a result you don’t necessarily need to acquire many in order to see the benefits of owning a high quality backlink profile. However, it is important to consider the fact that press links are notoriously much more difficult to obtain; and may sometimes include the ‘no-follow’ tag which could lessen the benefit from acquiring the link.
There are a number of different methods towards obtaining press links for your website. For example, reaching out to local outlets can be a great start to building a strong authoritative link profile and will typically be easier than connecting with a national/international outlet. Links from reputable local outlets can then be leveraged to earn higher quality national/international links as you increase your domain authority.
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a great tool for acquiring high authority backlinks. It is a tool used by journalists seeking sources with expertise to link within their content. Successfully acquiring backlinks using this tool can ensure that all aspects of the EAT concept are massively improved ensuring to have a positive impact on your SERP ranking and overall SEO health of your website.
Comment or Forum Backlinks
Comment/Forum backlinks are perhaps some of the easiest links to earn. All it involves is visiting another blog or site and posting a comment that includes a link back to your site. This approach towards link building is however often abused by spammers and may negatively impact your site’s link profile, if you consistently post links on unauthoritative irrelevant pages or websites.
You may be able to utilize industry tools such as Ahrefs or Moz pro, to identify similar authoritative relevant websites where you may be able to find opportunities to build high quality links. These tools can also help you identify links that you have lost; whether that is due to the site owner changing the link or due to a page being deleted, these links may prove easier to obtain as the webmaster is already familiar with your site.
Internal Link Building
Often neglected, internal link building can be a great method of enhancing page/site performance. Internal links can positively increase user experience as it can make it easier for both users and search engines to better navigate your website thus keeping users on your website longer as they investigate new pages.
Internal links can provide search engines like Google additional information about your website. And improve SERP ranking and site relevancy through the creation of topic clusters. There are several different ways to incorporate internal links on your site:
Anchor text
One way of effectively incorporating internal links on your website is to ensure that all internal links include anchor texts that contain relevant keywords or phrases. This helps tell Google and other search engine crawlers what the content of the page is about and what relevant keywords it should rank for on the search engine result page.
Having multiple internal links to the same page on one page won’t result in a penalty. However, typically Google will only consider the first link (and anchor text) as a ranking factor so unless the additional links helps the user navigate the site or find relevant information, don’t include them.
Blog articles
Creating blog content can be a great means of developing your site’s internal link strategy. Blog posts can be used to produce relevant links to support new and/or updated pages on your site to create a boost in SERP ranking.
Cross-linking
Cross-linking is great for increasing the amount of time users spend on your site. This is due to the fact that it involves linking relevant keywords to related content through its anchor text. For example, an ecommerce website selling clothes may recommend and link to similar or complementary products to users at the bottom of the page as a means of increasing conversions. These links are still relevant, as you’re telling users that they may also like a similar and/or complementary product available on your site.
Internal cross links can also be used as a means of allowing pages to inherit the backlink authority of the pages that links to them. This can be leveraged to positively impact a site’s SEO by using tools such as Google Search Console to identify content-heavy pages with a strong link profile but little to no internal links that may be able to distribute it ‘link juice’ to other pages on your site without sacrificing user experience.
Homepage internal links
Internal links from the homepage should target the most crucial pages, these include top-level pages such as an ‘About us’, ‘Contact’ and or category pages. Considering that a homepage is typically the most important and viewed page on a site it is important that the correct links are included as a means of ensuring that the site is easily navigatable to users and web crawlers.
Blogger Outreach
Blogger outreach is a popular means of attaining backlinks. This often involves partnering with relevant bloggers and site owners to exchange content for a feature with a link back to your site.
Blogger outreach can also include promoted or sponsored posts. For example an ecommerce brand may send a blogger a product to review and link to the relevant page on their site as a means of driving qualified traffic to their site. The blogger is, however, required to inform its readers that the post is sponsored.
There are several things to consider before choosing a blogger to work with that extends past the style and type of content they may post.
- Number of brand mentions in post – the cost of blogger outreach is expected to vary quite significantly depending on how frequently your brand is mentioned in a post; whether it is mentioned once in a long article or given multiple dedicated social media mentions and blog posts the ROI will vary.
- Domain authority – the higher the domain authority the more authoritative Google deems the site to be and therefore the greater the value of earning the link. A low domain authority could suggest that it is a new site, it has no backlink profile or that the content isn’t up to par.
- Post frequency – how regular do they post content?
- Site and social media engagement – are followers engaging with their content, whether that through the comment section on a blog or sharing and discussing on social media? What is the ratio between the number of social media followers and post engagement?
It is important that your backlinks are diverse and not reliant on a handful of websites regardless of their domain authority as it is possible that some pages or websites may be deleted over time.
Creating a sustainable link building strategy requires you to invest heavily within content and outreach; as building high quality backlinks takes time regardless of which method you choose,