The process of building links is an essential part of SEO, but it can be confusing and difficult to understand.
We know what it’s like to constantly be on the lookout for new backlink opportunities. It’s a tedious, time-consuming task that often feels like it’s never going to end. We feel your pain when it comes to backlinks. We know the search can be tedious and time-consuming, often feeling like it will never end.
Google search rankings have been affected by links since the very beginning, and they still have a huge impact today.
Search engines treat links to your website as votes. The more votes you have, the more important your website is considered by the search engine.
The higher you appear in search rankings, the more people will perceive your website to be important.
In other words, if you want to outrank your competitors, you need to have more high-quality links pointing to your website.
Google uses links to help determine what your web pages are about, which can in turn help improve your search rankings.
This guide will show you the anatomy of a quality link and how to judge whether a link is good or not.
There are several reasons why spammy, toxic links can be easily identified. For example, the linking site may be:
- Irrelevant to your site.
- Clearly lacking audience.
- Devoid of human value (i.e., solely designed for web crawlers).
- Linking to notoriously spammy niches (online gambling, pornography, pharmaceuticals, payday loans and so on).
- Missing central relevance (i.e., links point to sites in every vertical imaginable).
- Overtly selling links.
If you find links that seem to come from spam websites, you should get rid of them or at least disavow them.
Even though toxic links can still pass link equity, you have to be cautious when getting rid of them so you don’t lose your rankings.
In addition, you should replace lost equity with new, real links.
Evaluating Link Quality
The quality of links you create and maintain is critical, as is the effectiveness of your link strategy. The number and quality of links are both important indicators of success in online marketing. A strong link strategy is necessary to create and maintain effective links.
Links should not be the end goal of your online marketing strategy, but they should be a key performance indicator (KPI), similar to the more generally accepted KPI of social shares. The end goal should be the focus of your strategy, with links being a means to achieve that goal.
1. Relevance
When assessing the quality of a link, the most important thing to consider is its relevancy.
Don’t bother with links that aren’t relevant, because they probably won’t be helpful and could be seen as manipulative.
Please explain to me why this site would link to us.
If it is difficult to provide a compelling explanation, it’s likely that the link prospect isn’t worth pursuing.
Generally speaking, a link can be relevant in four different ways:
- Domain to domain
- Domain to page
- Page to page
- Link to page
This article is about the different types of relevance and how to use them.
To determine if a link is relevant, trust your intuition. If you can’t explain why the link would make sense on another site, it is likely not relevant.
2. Human Value
Links that are worthwhile offer real value to humans.
When thinking about the human value of a given link, consider if it would make sense on the page where it’s located. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Would someone be happy they clicked your link?
- Would the link take them where they expected to go?
- Would the page provide what they’re looking for?
- Would the link take them to something useful and helpful?
A link should be beneficial for the site linking, the site being linked, and the person who clicked the link.
The site owner is only interested in linking if it offers value to their audience. If not, it’s a red flag and you probably don’t want a link on that site.
When considering the human value of a linking site, you need to examine the site’s audience. If there are no actual humans reading the site, there is no human value in a link there.
If the wrong audience is on your site, the link will not make sense for them and will not add value to the web.
You can check how engaged your audience is by looking at the comments and questions they submit on your blog or forum.
After you have checked to see if people are engaging with your content, you can use a tool like SEMrush to find out how many people are visiting your site and how large your audience is.
Links that are valuable to human readers are the best links you can get, and Google wants to count them.
3. Authority and Trust
It is important to examine criteria such as measurements of authority and trust.
The Google search algorithm is designed to find the most reliable and trustworthy results for a given search.
Google usually determines trust and authority by looking at links, so it’s a good idea to try to get links from websites that are reliable and have a lot of authority. In other words, links from important websites will make your site seem more important.
At this point, only Google engineers understand how their search algorithm measures authority (PageRank) and determines search results.
But there are some tools that relatively accurately offer authority metrics.
Here are some potential options:
- Moz – Domain Authority and Page Authority
- Majestic – Trust Flow and Citation Flow
- Check Google rankings for related terms – Ranking within Google is its own signal of authority (You can use a tool like AuthorityLabs).
The following metrics shouldn’t be the only things you measure, and you need context to understand them. For example, a new page on a site that’s already a leader in its industry will have low Page Authority at first, just because it’s new.
A new website that is becoming popular and is getting a lot of positive engagement from users will still have a low score on most, if not all, of these authority tests.
It is useful to examine these tools to gain a general understanding of authority and trustworthiness.
You should also check the site’s links to see if they are from a spammy site. You can use a backlink tool like Majestic or Open Site Explorer to check a site’s backlinks.
Do some research on the site’s industry reputation. Do a quick Google search on the site’s brand or domain name and see what turns up.
To find out what people are saying about prospective sites, you can either check relevant communities or use a mention tool to find brand mentions across the web.
You can learn about a website’s reputation by doing a small amount of research, which can help you decide if you want to link to that site.
It is important to take into account signals of authority and trust when you are assessing potential link partners, as links are effectively endorsements online. You should therefore only want to be linked to websites that are reputable.
4. Placement
When placing a link on a website, it is important to consider where the link will be placed. If the link is placed too close to other links or to a source of heat, it may be less likely to be clicked on by visitors to the site.
The placement of your link on the page is important. Links in the content area are more valuable than links in the footer.
It is important to remember to make your links relevant to the paragraph they are in. If the link does not fit or make sense in the paragraph it is in, it will not be effective. This is why relevance is the most important thing to consider when adding links.
5. Anchor Text
The text that is visible when a link is clicked on is called anchor text. This text is usually a different color than the rest of the text on the page to make it stand out.
If you label your link in a way that is incorrect, Google may become angry with you.
Google has relied on anchors in order to decipher what a page is about. This has made anchor text the most important component of a link.
People began to use the anchor text function to their advantage, so Google had to make some changes to their algorithm. Anchor text now has less of an impact on a site’s SEO, but it is still a important factor.
Choosing the right anchors for your links can be tricky, and you may harm your ranking if you do it incorrectly. You may over-optimize and harm your ranking if you use too many anchors that match exactly.
We use the anchor type that looks natural and try to use a variety when building multiple links at once.
How to See Top-Linked Pages
It is now time to take a look at how we have gotten the backlinks that we have now so that we can use that information to plan our backlink strategy going forward.
Looking at the “best by links” section on Ahrefs’ site explorer can show us which pages on our website have gotten the most links.
The “referring domains” column on this page lets you see how many domains have linked to each page.
The homepage is the most popular page on the website, which is typical for most websites. However, some of the other pages have also received a fair amount of links.
Here’s a quick sampling of our top-linked pages:
Each of these pages serves a different purpose, but they all have one thing in common: they receive links.
This is tip number one: we can use what has worked for us in the past to decide what might work for us in the future.
You can use this tool to find out what your competitors are doing. Repeat the process, but instead of your own site, use a competitor’s.
Identify and Create Link Worthy Assets
Even though this article is about “link building,” you won’t be able to get links from high-authority websites unless you have some content that other people want to share.
When we looked at our previous example, we found which pieces of content gathered the most links. These are perfect places to start because they have already shown themselves to be “link-worthy” assets.
This means that you should continue to create fresh content that provides value to your readers.
We suggest that you be creative with your content in order to make it stand out from that of your competitors. This could involve creating a large guide or conducting an industry survey to produce unexpected results.
If you want to earn backlinks, put more thought into your content.
You will need to create pages on your website that you can use as targets for your link-building campaign.
Perform Outreach
Now that you have looked at your current links and found some goals, it is time to get some new links.
Although this step may be tedious, it is important to take your time to avoid discouragement.
There are hundreds of ways to build links, but most of them involve reaching out to promote your content.
It’s not practical to hope that someone finds your website without you promoting it. You’ll need to get your website in front of people’s eyes.
Let’s break this step down into actionable tasks:
- Create a list of websites that might be willing to link to you;
- Find contact information for each website;
- Reach out to those contacts and pitch them your content.
Being efficient is the challenge when doing this and is key to the success of your campaign.
You can’t always tell which sites will be willing to link to you.
This stage can be very difficult, especially if you are using the wrong strategy.
It is very important to build links. This is because while there are many things that can affect how well your website does in terms of search engine optimization, having high-quality links is still one of the most important things.
We hope you have found this guide helpful in understanding the process of link building. Though it may seem complicated, our philosophy is straightforward: there is no shortcuts when creating links that will last over time.
If you are too busy to handle your SEO, consider finding a partner who can help you.
Conclusion
In order to be successful in acquiring and monitoring links as a marketing channel, it is essential to evaluate link quality.
Google is improving their ability to distinguish between genuine links and link spam.
You will only earn worthwhile links that will have a positive impact on your site and brand if you constantly evaluate the quality of those links.
0 comments