Whether you’re entirely new to the world of digital marketing or an experienced website owner, backlinks are one of the hardest things to get a grip of when it comes to promoting your platform.
But actually, they’re quite simple when you break it down.
The reason links are shrouded in mystery and avoided so much is that the information out there is intimidating. Website owners are worried that one wrong move could result in a manual action penalty and there’s a lot of very strong opinions about ‘blackhat’ link building.
It’s important to bear in mind that a lot of the information available out there is outdated. Google Algorithms update, on average, every single day, with around 4 major changes a year. This means that the best practice for building links develops.
In fact, factoring links into their algorithm and how they determine ranks is what began to set Google apart from other search engines in the first place. So they definitely are going to continue to develop in this area.
To help you thrive online, the team at an expert Digital Marketing Agency in London have put together this bible for beginners starting to build backlinks.
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But First, Why Are Backlinks Important?
A backlink builds a connection between sites. It is one platform giving the thumbs up to Google or another search engine that your platform can be trusted, is useful and relevant. This is called authority.
The aim of the game is to make sure you have a high-quality website pointing to yours in order for your site to benefit. This is how you build up your authority. We talk more about how to identify a high-quality site further on.
Gradually improving your authority over time helps to move your website up in the search rankings, which has a whole ream of benefits, including increased sales and leads.
The process of building links requires you to outreach to publications, influential websites and peers in your industry. It can help you to establish relationships and encourages word of mouth for your business. We will look at some different kinds of links that help to establish your site as the authority in the industry which can encourage visitors to your business, too.
Link building softly targets traffic. Companies gaining placements in positive, well-written articles can expect to see user’s following that links to their website. This is called referral traffic. It boosts brand awareness and nurtures user’s into the conversion funnel.
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Before You Start
So now you understand the benefit of backlinks, should you start placing links all over the web? Not quite.
There are a few things to consider to make sure that you are gaining high-quality placements. These tips will make sure you get the most out of your efforts and climb in positions even quicker.
As with all marketing strategies, you need to know what you’re looking to achieve with backlinks. This ensures you can measure the success of your digital marketing, but also helps to focus your strategy. We’ll look at a couple of the ways you can tell if a link is going to help your site’s performance below. But first, here are the different kinds of link strategies you could employ:
Different Types Of Backlink
Guest Posts - When you are actively trying to improve your website’s rankings and build up a backlink profile, this is most likely the route you are going to take.
Guest posts, as the name suggests, means to feature an article on another website. Like a cameo. Within this article, there will be a link back to your website in there. Ideally, this link would be as close to the top of the content as possible.
To achieve placements on authoritative websites you will need to come up with a pitch to sell yourself. Give the webmaster or editor of the site a reason to feature you.
Some webmasters say that they respond to 1 in 267 requests for guest posts they get. This shows you how important it is to stand out.
Somethings to think about for your pitch message:
- Flexibility - Make sure you’re not too rigid with the idea/s for posts
- Referral - Some site owners want to know where the page will be linking to make sure it’s still relevant to their audience
- Relevancy - Highlight why your article is appropriate for their site and their audience
- Availability - Tell the webmaster you can be contacted to bounce ideas around - you never know, you might build relationships
- Email length - A lot of webmasters or blog owners are also running their businesses, try not to send essays.
When you’ve nailed your pitch, you can start writing your content. Make sure it’s high quality, well-researched and has an angle. Unique, interesting articles that give value to a reader are best. Finally, send it over to the webmaster for publication.
Naturally Occurring Links - To generate links, you can try a strategy that means they come to you rather than manually outreaching.
This seems like it’s too good to be true, right? It’s not, but there are a few things to consider.
Naturally occurring links means that people find your resources informative, useful and contextual to their audience enough that they are going to link back to it.
To maximise your potential for naturally occurring links, you should implement a robust content strategy on your site that goes beyond the simple 500-word blog posts. Start creating diverse content wherever the topic warrants it, for example, some of the best performing content-types for generating links include:
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Listicles
- Long-form guides that answer questions
- Research studies and white papers
Creating this content will help to establish a credible image for your website. And don’t forget to give users the tools to share your content by making sure your social icons and ‘share’ buttons are clearly visible and working.
One thing to bear in mind is that you cannot control the websites that are going to be linking to you.
If they are of low quality, this can impact your own ranking positions.
Referral Links - First, it’s important to bear in mind that referral links should not be the only authority-building aspect of your digital marketing strategy.
Referral links are when you feature your website in directories or on owned profiles on third-party platforms. For example, in your Google My Business page.
These to transfer link equity, but can look extremely spammy when done to excess or on irrelevant sites.
Investigate directories and resources used in your industry. Often, these are featured quite high up in SERPs so are rarely a struggle to find. Simply submit a request to feature in the list with a link back to your website.
This is useful for referring (see, not rocket science) quality traffic back to your page. Remember, make sure you actually provide the products or services that a user would be looking for on the directory. Failing to do so is likely to look unnatural and increase your bounce rate.
The Technical Parts Of Backlinks
Industry Of The Website - In order to benefit from the connection between two websites, the referring website must be relevant to yours.
Think about it in terms of a senior member of staff recommending you to a hiring manager for a better position at work. The recommendation will have a lot more weight behind it if that senior member of staff is also an authority and has experience in the department you are looking to move into.
This translates in exactly the same way as backlinks. A senior website that engages in the same industry or topics as yours will be most beneficial to boosting your position.
Gaining placements on relevant websites also ensures that your links appear natural to Google and that you are not engaging in any ‘blackhat’ SEO tactics. In turn, you’re also more likely to see qualified traffic coming through to your website via that referring link. This means they are more likely to be interested in what you are offering.
You don’t have to manually decide which sector a website fits into, especially if you are worried because they cover multiple topics. Use Majestic’s topical trust flow tool for an accurate measure of the influence a placement website has in your industry. Adding this extra step to your backlink strategy can make your efforts so much more lucrative.
Anchor Text - Anchor text is the words or phrase you imbed your link into. This carries relevance for your backlink as it is the phrase that crawlers (search engine bots that index the internet) associate with your destination page.
The most common tactic in linking strategies is to use a keyword as an anchor. However, it’s really important to shake things up and make sure you don’t overdo it:
For example, if your keyword is “cycling tours in Europe” you can use that as your anchor text, but use variants too, such as “Europe cycling tours” “Best cycling tours in Europe” and “How to book a cycling tour in Europe”.
Variations ensure that your link building does not look unnatural - and yes, again that word, spammy - to Google or other search engines.
Domain Authority - Domain Authority is a numerical score developed by SEO tools and resource centre, Moz. It is a metric for predicting how well a site will rank in SERPs based on its authority. A website will have a score from 1 - 100 with 100 being the most authoritative.
Moz’s Domain Authority will investigate the number of sites linking to yours and the subsequent domain authority of all of those, too.
Although this is not a ranking factor that Google’s own algorithm uses to determine positions, it is a very accurate prediction of the value you can expect to achieve from a backlink.
As previously mentioned, a connection between a high-quality website and yours passes through some of that authority. This is known as link equity. Or sometimes, link juice.
Domain Authority is also a great way to measure the success of your backlink strategy. If your domain authority is gradually increasing over time, then it indicates that the placements you have acquired are benefiting your performance.
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Trust Flow & Citation Flow - These metrics are a kind of breakdown of how domain authority is calculated.
The exact formula is undisclosed and DA was developed by Moz, whereas Trust and Citation Flow were developed by Majestic so you can expect there to be a few discrepancies.
However, these metrics are just another layer of analysis you can use to make sure your backlink profile is boosting your performance.
Trust flow measures the quality of the domains referring to a site.
Citation flow measures the quantity of the domains referring to a site.
Both are a score from 1 - 100.
These two metrics complement each other. If you have a really high citation flow, it means there are tons of websites linking to you, which can look spammy to search engine crawlers because they are not high quality (trust flow).
In turn, having a low trust flow could mean that there are not enough high-quality websites linking to you, which can look risky and irrelevant to search engine crawlers who ultimately decide you shouldn’t be shown in top positions on SERPs.
A basic rule of thumb for using the site analysis tool on Majestic is that your citation flow and trust flow should be relational, for example, within 15 points of each other. If a site you are looking to place an article on has poor trust and citation metrics, it’s likely to be unbeneficial to your SEO performance.
To Finish Up…
Building a backlink profile is a fine art to balance. But it pays off.
A beneficial backlink hits the sweet spot between quality content, authority and frequency.
There are a host of useful and insightful industry tools out there to help, but it is still quite a manual process.
Once you’ve mastered these basics, including monitoring the performance of your authority and backlink profile, you can start to look into more advanced backlink analysis.
This will help you control your profile and will include things like toxicity analysis, fixing or regaining lost backlinks and removing harmful ones.
Building up your backlinks contributes to your organic rankings. So, although it might be a long-game, establishing a credible platform online could help you keep profits for yourself, rather than sharing with other channels for online marketing.
Tom Welbourne is the Director & Founder of The Good Marketer, a Digital Marketing Agency in London which works with Small Businesses to drive more traffic, generate conversions and increase sales.
