Acc, the Senior Digital Developer at Today’s Business, is in charge of having his clients show up in top search engine results. While he was working on a client’s SEO, he saw some success with keywords. However, the site rankings were still relatively low. He was not seeing much traffic. Naturally, Acc looked at other successful sites in his client’s industry to see what they were doing to gain top ranks. He noticed that most of these top ranked sites had more relevant incoming links compared to his client’s website. When he reached out to these sites and asked about linking back to his site, the results were not great. But after doing a little more research, Acc came up with a few tips and guidelines to follow when reaching out about links. The following will highlight his findings.
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When beginning any link building, three main components are crucial to achieve success: Optimized content and structure, link popularity (or how many links you currently have to your website) and link reputation (or what the links are saying about you within the anchor text).
Bonus Component: “Social signals” and mentions are becoming more and more important in 2016. Building a strong link strategy with the above support will ensure a balanced and highly relevant structure to acquiring links. The most important thing to remember moving forward is quality always beats quantity. This is the reason site pages outrank others with a high link count. Page rank is not the deciding factor anymore. Instead, getting links from authoritative websites carries the most weight. The big thing to remember is not all search engines are created equal, and they usually handle links differently. Bing and Yahoo prioritize content more compared to Google. One client had many links pointing to their website, and ranked very well on Google, but until content was added, it was trailing on the other search engines. That being said, Google is still the king of search, and the plan should be to show up there first.
Link Advice From A Man Named Acc
In order to achieve high search rankings, you need to provide quality links to related and well written content pages. The best route to take when link building is to use the competition to plan what links are quality, but also where they are linking to and from. Keeping an eye on what your competition is doing will enable you to rank higher and at a faster rate. The worst thing you can do is blindly link to other sites without first looking at the page structure and content. When you link, it is important to link out and also work on getting links in. Some clients and website owners feel that linking out to someone else is not necessary, but that is simply not the case. Swapping links with related websites is a great practice. However, make sure not to go after automated link programs. They are not highly valued and can result in spammy activities, which Google is not particularly fond of.
Acc Pro Tip: One great tool I stumbled upon, while writing this blog, is the Solo SEO Link Search Tool (yes that’s the name) to help you find link opportunities. All you do is enter your targeted keyword to find potential link building opportunities. After the tool has run, click on queries of interest to open them in the search engine selected. This can be done manually by using search parameters, speeding up the process.
Keys to Success
This blog only scratches the surface of linking and the best practices that should be used when starting. I will leave you with the following keys to link building success.
- Get links from relevant websites that complement what your website is about. In other words, link where it makes sense.
- Do not worry about page rank when it comes to linking.
- Links should always have targeted keywords as the hyperlink text.
- Links ideally should always be followed by a brief description of the targeted website containing keywords and phrases.
- Avoid building all the links at one time. Space them out and let them build out gradually. Building them out too fast can raise red flags and penalties by the search engine.
- Links should not be iFramed or used through Java or other spammy scripts.
Do you have any tips of your own? Let us know!