A few years ago, SEO was a straightforward process for people – they would just buy links in bulk and cram them onto their pages. This sort of spamming may have been overlooked then but it is certainly not the case now. Google’s new algorithms don’t allow spammers and it pushes their webpages out of the search results entirely. Follow these simple link building hacks to keep your website on Google good side and create a strong link building network.
Internal links are hyperlinks that link to different pages on the same domain. Internal linking tends to be overlooked by most business owners, but rest assured, it is crucial for strengthening your link-building situation. There are two things you should know about it: firstly, internal linking is completely under your control, and secondly, it not only helps you transfer link equity – that is, the value passed from one webpage to another – between your pages, but it also enables fast crawling by Google.
As mentioned above, link buying does not only put a strain on your wallet, it also damages the ranking of your webpages. Ever since Google Panda was released, it’s been easy to detect links that have come from bulk sites. If your webpage contains links that also pop up on a lot of different pages, it will likely consider it as spam, and your ranking will take a hit.
Sometimes you might come across web pages where your website’s name is mentioned but that’s it. Someone might be talking about your products or services but without a link. Here’s how you should handle this situation. First of all, take a step back and count your blessings that people are actually talking about your brand! Afterwards, you should draft up a carefully worded email saying that you really appreciated that they mentioned you, but you noticed the absence of a link to your website. Just remind them that you are still growing as a brand, and you can easily earn you links while also possibly leading to a sustained mutual relationship.
You need to keep a close check on all your webpages to ensure that none of the linked sites have gone AWOL. Maybe you linked during a spike in traffic that isn’t there anymore. Here are a few things you should check to ensure that the links are still fresh:
While being a follower isn’t exactly what most people prefer, that’s all you should be with link building. You can’t be unique in all aspects of your link-building strategy. You should follow the crowd considering the fact that Google evaluates how relevant your webpages are by the popularity of your links.
Don’t just start link-building just because you need to link. Your links should be used to fulfil a purpose other than earning recognition from Google. You know what they say – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Don’t create links if you’ve got nothing valuable to share with your audience.
The websites you link to must be useful to your company’s overall content marketing strategy, otherwise your audience won’t really care about them at all. If your links are truly utilitarian and benefit your viewers in some way, you’ll get a lot of clicks and new traffic. You’ll also be identified as an authoritative website, thus earning supplementary backlinks from plenty of other websites.
Whenever you’re researching what keywords to employ for link building, it’s best if you’re precise with your search queries. For example, if you run a shoe store and you decide to look up ‘latest shoe fashion blogs’, it won’t do you much good. You’ll have to do a lot of sorting and scanning to end up with good options.
If you specifically wish to link your latest line of formal shoes for women, it’s better to search for ‘women formal shoes fashion blogs’. You can even add ‘list’ to the end of your query to get much better results with pre-made lists.
These are some of the hacks that us as a blogger outreach agency has to share with all of you. We offer highly trusted link building services using a lot more than the aforementioned hacks! Guest posting is one of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to strong link building. We always keep it completely natural, providing you with the opportunity for your brand to be viewed as trustworthy and well-informed. You can rest assured that our guest post service will boost your SEO fortunes.
Link builders are individuals who specialise in content publicity. They advertise a website’s assets – products, pages, services – to other websites in the hopes of them leading back to it. As such, hiring the right person who provides exceptional link building services is pivotal to a company’s overall success.
Here are some things you should definitely check to make sure that you hire the right person:
Outstanding Communication Skills: A good link builder must have exceptional written and oral communication skills. If a candidate sends a CV or cover letter with grammatical errors, it is likely that their outreach emails will include the same. Moreover, if you can’t make people understand what you’re saying or vice versa, that’s not a good sign either.
Experience: The right candidate should have experience in any line of work related to the service industry – retail, bartending, or waiting tables. Basically, if they have dealt with people one-on-one, they certainly know how to build and maintain relationships, which is what link building is all about!
Persistence: Following up after an interview shows perseverance and dedication which are both admirable qualities to have in a link builder. If a link builder follows up even several months after the job is done, they’re highly likely to be able to handle your average webmaster. It is very common for webmasters to occasionally drop out of sight which can be annoying to deal with. However, a great link builder would never let them drop out of mind. Persistence is key here because that means they will be able to follow-up politely and land that link!
A Willingness to Make Mistakes: Some people might disagree with this approach but we believe that making mistakes leads to more lessons learned. A great link builder is not afraid to make mistakes, but of course, never the same one twice. More lessons learned automatically equate to better link building skills.
Good Manners: Of course, manners are important regardless of where you go or what you do. Webmasters can often resort to abusive language with link builders. They can lose their patience pretty quickly so it’s pivotal to have someone who won’t fight fire with fire but instead respond politely to get the desired links. By taking the blame and apologising politely, a good link builder can diffuse the situation easily and avoid conflict escalation.
Approaching Nuances with Proper Reasoning: This characteristic is particularly important because link builders need to think like a human being. To elaborate, they shouldn’t rely solely on what the numbers say. For example, it’s not wise to get a link on a website just because of its high Domain Authority even though it holds no relevance to the client’s brand. Nuance is the key here for comprehending these varying concepts and thus, creating a natural link profile.
Asking for Help: It’s an admirable quality to acknowledge your weaknesses or limits and ask for guidance from others. It’s common to hit a wall every now and then and asking someone else gives you a fresher perspective. It also means they’re thorough and care deeply about doing a great job.
Willingness to Argue: In this case, arguing translates to being confident about getting your point across. Sometimes, a superior may not be able to understand properly and that leads to bad decisions made. A great link builder would not be deterred in this scenario and continue to argue their point to get the job done right.
Regularity: Showing up on time is an important trait that a great link builder must possess. Unless extreme circumstances arise, they would show up on time if they’re truly dedicated.
Here are some warning signs that you should definitely look out for:
Having to Be Told the Same Thing Multiple Times: Dealing with each client’s specific requirements can be tricky. So, you need to have everything written down and ensure that it’s accessible to all our link builders. It’s OK if a link builder needs time to understand these things but some things shouldn’t really need repeating. For example, ‘We don’t want links on sites that aren’t indexed in Google’ or ‘We don’t deal with sites that are highly controversial’ aren’t things that should need repeating multiple times.
They Can’t Build Links: This is the bottom line. If you can’t achieve the key task of your job, what good are your services to a link-building company? Understandably, it can be a daunting task to build good links – sometimes you send dozens of outreach emails but get no response. However, it’s important to learn from your mistakes and generate better results the next time around.
Here at WooContent, we are an exceptional blogger outreach agency that offers unparalleled outreach and guest post services. If you wish to attract a significant amount of traffic to your website, then we certainly won’t let you down. WooContent is connected with thousands of real bloggers in a variety of sectors, so if you need help with your link building, please get in touch with us today.
Link building and backlinks are a vital part of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). How essential they are to the whole SEO dynamics is underlined by the fact that Google uses backlinks as a kind of reputation management tool.
Links are the number one ranking factor for Google. So, in reality, if you want to rank your website without link building, you’ll be setting yourself up for a pretty tall order.
Link building involves getting web pages to link to one another. With the existence of links on the web, users are better able to move across the various web pages on the internet.
Links are also important to search engines because they helps them crawl the pages of a website. This is why your link building strategy has to be top-notch.
If you take your link building methods seriously and do it the right way, just like a good link building agency would, you can boost the ranking of your website and help your readership discover great content.
Let’s check out some link building tips that still work in 2020.
This is standard practice for a professional link building service. Creating a blog post or content around trending topics is a great way to earn backlinks. Since these topics are fairly new, there is limited information around them on the internet.
So, if you can create relevant content within a quick time frame, your blog will become the reference point for those topics. This way, you can earn a large number of backlinks from different sites.
Most websites have broken links, including your website. These links can become a great asset for you during the link building activity for your website. On your own site, all you have to do is use a tool to find broken backlinks, recover them and then repurpose the content.
Also, you can try to discover broken links on other websites. Once you discover any broken links, notify their admin about them. You can then send them a request to allow you to create content around those topics. However, this is entirely up to the discretion of the website admins for the other sites.
Also called HARO, the Help a Reporter Out method works via a platform intended for journalists and their sources. While journalists try to find stories through the platform, you can use it to pitch a story to a journalist so that you can get backlinks. To get started, you would need to register on the website, then you can start getting emails for source requests. With this technique, you’ll be getting authoritative backlinks.
If you want to create a good link profile, it’s important that you build good professional relationships. You will have to build new business contacts to tap into link building opportunities. One way to do this is by joining communities relevant to your niche so that you can discover other websites that are open to organic link building activities.
You might not achieve results overnight. You will need to engage with the people on these platforms, comment on their posts, and show interest in their content.
Once your goals are aligned, you can then partner for a link building relationship. Also, you can provide testimonials for these websites by writing about them. This can earn you more backlinks.
You can propose your content ideas to various site admins and ask them to allow you to co-author a piece with their content creators, clearly stating the backlink clause.
For subject-matter experts, you don’t have to worry about whether this is being done in return for another favour, or if it could be an unethical link building strategy. This works because it’s a win-win for everyone; you will get a good quality backlink from an authority site and the other admin will get high-quality content created by you.
This trick is clever but really simple. It is great for link building to your website. What you need to do to turn mentions into backlinks is this; anytime someone mentions your website or your products and services, you can contact them to ask them if they can turn the mention into a backlink. This only works if they’ve not already added a link to your site in their content.
This is a rather difficult technique, but it’s highly effective. What you need to do is create great content around a particular topic within your industry, then offer a solution through your content.
If your solution turns out to be a great one, you will ultimately end up gaining loads of authoritative backlinks.
One link building technique that will continue to work in 2020 and beyond is developing a blog on your website.
Once you start blogging, you can begin creating content around niches that are relevant to your website, thereby earning backlinks for authoritative content. Regular blogging is a giant step towards creating an effective link profile for your site.
Link building still has a great impact on the way we optimise our websites to rank high in search engines. Therefore, the link building activities mentioned in this post are still effective for building a solid link profile for your website so it can rank better in SERPs. If you need a professional link building agency to handle this for you, then you are at the right place.
If you need help with link building, we'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch today.
Google today considers the number of backlinks a website possesses in determining the rank it deserves. Search Engine Optimisation strategies have always involved link building, and experts believe it is one of the most important strategies in digital marketing.
Link building is often done to place your website’s backlinks in external websites of a higher authority. Think of it as a recommendation of your website by these other websites. Getting your site many backlinks means the big players recognise your contributions in the industry and are willing to refer you to their audience. This rationale is what informs Google ranking; a website with more quality backlinks is of higher value than one that isn’t.
There are two types of backlinks:
Despite these definitions, No-Follow links have been observed to improve rankings of smaller websites when they originate from big social media sites. It is good to take those wins, whether do-follow or no-follow, en-route to better SEO scores. More traffic will eventually lead to high-quality backlinks, with a good marketing strategy.
1. Premium content - At the heart of every content writer’s mind is a desire to disseminate quality content to their readers. This is the most important way to keep your audience coming back for more. Link building ensures you aren’t just smiling to yourself in a dark room; it makes certain that your community is better informed and that anyone else who is interested in learning can get the very best information out there.
2. Search ranking improvement - When someone searches for any keyword or subject, the search rank of your website determines what page your link will appear on. Search Engine Optimisation experts will tell you that building backlinks will improve this ranking score. To move from page 2 to the top of page 1, you need to garner more backlinks than the websites above you.
3. Improved website metrics - Link building improves your website metrics, such as Domain Rating (DR), Domain Authority (DA), and Page Rank (PR). Google has an SEO score for each website. Building your backlinks ensures that your rank and ratings increase, and give you a bigger podium to reach your target audience.
4. Wider reach - One of the signs that your website is healthy is the number of visitors that visit. Making use of a professional link building service will drive traffic to your website and increase your visibility amongst your target audience. Sites with high traffic are often one article away from a top-quality backlink.
5. Improved revenue - Link building drives more sales from your website. When you have goods and services for sale, the growth of your reading audience improves your chances of patronage and finding buyers for your products. Exposing your work to more industry players opens you up to partnerships and consultancy gigs, not to mention paid promotions for other companies.
6. Recognition - The higher the number of backlinks you have, the higher your credibility in your niche community. This generally means that the bigger players recognise your content and endorse it. The frequency with which your site pops up on bigger websites ingrains the perception that you can be trusted, and more people are likely to take the word of your articles before checking other opinions.
7. Relevance in your niche - An effective link building strategy will improve your chances of being invited to stakeholder meetings, whether as a result of your contributions in your industry or for the reach you possess with your online audience. You also stand to benefit from networking with industry players and parallel industries in your niche. All because of your backlinks. Pay attention to your marketing strategy, or better still, hire a link building agency.
8. Uninterrupted traffic - One very important advantage of continuously building backlinks is that for as long as the reciprocal website is operational, you will continue to receive traffic from there. Writers outside your industry may also come in contact with your website as a result. The continued building of backlinks ensures you are not left behind in the race for relevance and better SEO scores.
9. Brand clout - Maintaining your relevance as a brand requires you to continue to execute and improve your strategy. Enlisting the services of a link building agency affords you the very best execution of your strategy in an ever-changing ecosystem. Maintaining consumer trust using the advantages of link building means even a new product/service has better chances of acceptance from your audience.
10. Improved geographical reach - Most Search Engine Optimisation strategies focus on improving your Google ranks, Domain ratings (DR), and so on, but implementing a good link-building strategy could also help you connect with people outside your geographical location. You can break new ground in countries on a far-away continent through link building. With such benefits also come improved sales and tapping into a global market for your brand, products, and services.
All websites are bound by a code of ethics in how we go about building backlinks. Use of link directories or a private network of blogs to influence search rankings and domain ratings are illegal. The benefits of link-building are evident, but the strategy to get there might differ from one person to another. If you need help creating the right strategy, or you can’t figure out how to go about planning and execution, then you need a link building agency. Your business will be better for it.
If you need help with your link building strategy, we'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch today.
Link building refers to the art of adding links to your website from any other website(s). Even though it doesn't sound complicated, link building is actually one of the most intricate, and tedious, parts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Links are an important part of how ranking is done by Google for websites. A link from one website to another means an up-vote for the latter site. In Search Engine Optimisation, this boosts the rank of the receiving website and increases its visibility when keywords are typed into the search engine, otherwise your content could just sit alone somewhere in cyberspace without anyone finding it.
Well, first of all, it's a contravention of Google Webmaster Guidelines to engage in website linking for any form of payment, so there are no costs! Getting linked by another website attests to the quality of content on the recipient site and so it is understandable why some people would consider circumventing the rules to make things easier.
Read on to learn what to do and what not to do when it comes to link building.
An important part of blogging and creating content means you will often search for content in your own niche from time to time. This could lead to opportunities for strategic relationships and link building with other bloggers.
Moz Open Site Explorer allows you to search through content that ranks above yours. Any backlinks with inaccurate, outdated, or irrelevant content can be replaced with yours when you get in touch with the poster. It takes time, and sometimes you get ignored, but eventually, you will breakthrough.
Building links to a website with quality content and high traffic will help your visibility.
The average web surfer scrolls past dead links and 404 errors. When you search for where your content ranks in searches, you’ll do well to report any errors to the webmaster of the website. Pages get removed and links get broken from time to time. Reporting this sometimes means your content may be used to replace these ones, where your niche is concerned. Since you are out to build links, a good relationship with the webmaster can improve your chances. So, when next you’re going surfing through the web, spare a thought for those links.
This is a time-tested method you can use to build links in your industry. A good example is presenting an article to a popular beauty care products blogger on how to keep your make-up intact for longer. As long as you plug your links into the post, you can gain thousands in backlinks from this. There’s the issue of constantly sending emails out to target industry bloggers and your mails being treated as spam, but there is always that one reply that could make the difference. It’s cheap and will guarantee that new visitors will seek out the articles on your blog.
Certain content tends to get over-flogged, often without any real new information added. Of course, we are better off with diverse viewpoints and expressions on the same subject, but if you are a new player trying to get noticed, the odds are firmly stacked against you. In addition to your regular articles, dabbling into content that is not saturated will ensure you get noticed. Here’s how:
If you are a business whose trade is providing goods and services to other businesses, an effective way to increase your reach and boost traffic to your blog is to get your clients’ permission to upload their impressions of your service. If they have a company website, you can also get your piece plugged into their site. This also means you must be willing to do the same for other businesses that need the favour. A few endorsements here, case studies there, and you are on your way up. This works well for an expert link building service as well. A well-written reference might be all you need to reach some of their followers who share an interest in your content.
Businesses are often modest about their achievements, choosing to focus on the next rung on the ladder, rather than talk about them. The truth is everyone loves a good success story. Sharing your successes online will get you the buzz you need for your business growth. PR agencies will tell you that anything from an award, to the expansion of your services or corporate social events, will get your business buzzing within your community, and lots of backlinks for your company.
Google has a system that optimises your ranking on their search engine. When you use these pointers, you will be building a strong marketing strategy, and if you consider outsourcing this job to a link building agency, you’ll reap multiple backlinks for your business.
Do you need any help with growing quality backlinks for your website? Please get in touch. We’d love to help you out.
Traffic is one of the most coveted resources on the web. Generally, the more traffic to your website and other digital assets, the more exposure for your brand and, possibly, sales of your products and services. While you can opt for paid traffic, organic traffic is gold. Paid traffic usually doesn’t last much longer than your campaign, but organic traffic keeps coming in even when you’re doing nothing. To get organic traffic, you have to get your SEO – on-page and off-page SEO – right. And at the heart of off-page SEO is creating backlinks.
Understanding that backlinks play an important place in your organic traffic campaign, it is essential to explore what they are and the link building process (and how to create them). You need the knowledge for your SEO campaigns. And even if you choose to get an SEO agency to provide the link building service you’ll need, you should at least know what they’ll be doing, how it fits into your traffic generation campaign, and how it affects your site’s ranking.
In simple terms, backlinks are links created on one website or webpage linking back to another website or webpage. In other words, when you create a link on another website that links back to your website, you have created a backlink. They are also called incoming links or inbound links.
We already stated that SEO is important for generating organic traffic and that at the heart of off-page SEO are backlinks. But one of the reasons they are vital is that they pass link equity when done right. Link equity, in effect, is value passed from a higher-authority domain to your webpage or site through a backlink to your website, giving your webpage a higher value in the eyes of the search engines.
Here’s how it works: when a link is created on a website with a high DA (Domain Authority) and links back to you, the search engines view it as though the website with a higher authority is passing a vote of confidence on the linked site. The result is that they rank the linked site or webpage high, because some of the value of the higher-DA site is passed to the linked site, assuming all the other conditions are met. The more backlinks to your website, the better and higher your website ranks in the search engine result pages.
The process of building backlinks can be hectic and time-consuming, so you should leave it to a link building agency to handle while you focus on other vital tasks. In general, the process can be broken down into two main phases: research and link building.
The Research Phase: The activities in this phase are twofold. The first task is to research the backlink profile of your competitors who are ranking well for your target keyword. If you haven’t done your keyword research, that’s where you will need to start from.
The reason for researching the collection of webpages and websites linking to your competitors’ site is to get an insight into the kind of link building that is helping them, and an idea of what you have to do.
Your second task is to research websites or webpages with high DA that qualify to pass link equity to your website. Yes, not all websites will pass value to yours. Even those that do will not all pass equal value. Some of the criteria that the search engines use include the relevance of the link, the trustworthiness and authority of the linking site, whether or not the link is followed or nofollow, and more.
Backlinks from pages with high authority and trust will pass more value through the backlink to your website than others with low authority and trust levels. Also, followed links will do more for your ranking than nofollow links. That doesn’t mean you should discard nofollow links. The mere fact that your brand was mentioned on high DA sites will do a lot for your brand.
The Link Building Phase: The activities in this phase include everything you do to post a link back to your webpages or site on the websites and webpages you have researched. It includes activities like posting on social media, guest blogging yourself or using a guest post service, linked brand mentions, influencer marketing and many more.
The important thing in this phase is that, whatever you do, you create a link back to your page. While inbound links from as many sites as possible may help, you have to be strategic about your backlinking. Whatever you do here will impact your site’s visibility, ranking, and traffic generation capabilities for good or for bad. It will determine whether your site appears high in the search engine results pages or further down.
The place of content relevancy cannot be overemphasised. It is crucial to ensure that the links are relevant to the content they link to. If the work involved in searching for high DA pages with relevant content is too tedious (which it often is), you can contact a blogger outreach agency to do the search and connect you with influencers or owners of relevant websites with high authority.
Besides ensuring that you are creating the incoming links on webpages with high authority, whose content is relevant to the page being linked to on your website, and the other factors already discussed, you need to ensure that your on-page SEO is also intact.
For example, you need to ensure that the content on your page is of a high quality. If you create thousands of backlinks to a poorly written article, while that article may rank higher initially, it will get demoted eventually. This is not necessarily because your competitors have implemented a better SEO strategy or created more backlinks, but because search engines also check other factors like bounce rate and time spent on your page.
If they notice that people are leaving your webpage almost immediately they land on it, it is a signal to the search engines that something is fundamentally wrong and that the page is not as valuable as ‘advertised.’
This will only hurt you more. So ensure your entire SEO strategy is solid. To do this, if you’re not a professional or don’t have the amount of time it will take, you can contact an SEO agency or expert to help.
In conclusion, backlinks are links on other websites linking back to yours. They are a fundamental part of off-page SEO which is critical to your website’s organic traffic generation campaign.
Growing your business online is all about attracting traffic. For that, you’ll need great SEO. There are a few ways to boost your search engine ranking, but one of the most important is link building.
There are two principal types of links: external and internal. In this article, we’ll focus on internal links. Whether you use a link building service or your own team, these are far easier to build up than external links.
Let’s examine how to use internal links and why they’re important.
SEO can get complex, but internal links are one of the easier concepts to wrap your head around. An internal link is a link to another page on the same website.
If we include a link here to our blogger outreach agency, that’s an internal link right there.
There are lots of valid reasons to include internal links in your writing. They don’t just improve your SEO, they direct readers to other relevant and valuable content on your website and establish an information hierarchy on your site.
However, to get the most out of internal links, you need to use them properly.
The first thing you need to keep in mind is the anchor text – that’s the text you attach the hyperlink to. Ideally, it should contain relevant keywords.
Then, you can think about setting your page or post out in the right way.
Search engines use ‘spiders’ to crawl through your websites and make sense of it; the data helps them to decide how you’ll rank.
To aid this process, your page site must have a logical structure.
What does this optimal structure look like? A pyramid. Your homepage should be the foundation of your site, which leads to categories; these categories should lead to subcategories, and so on. To ensure each page has great ranking potential, limit links between the homepage and other pages.
You should also choose the right keywords to put in your anchor text, or the text containing the link. The word or phrase you use should be concise, relevant to the destination page, and not too spammy.
This helps search engines to understand what your website is about and include it in their index.
Now you have a basic idea of what internal links are and how they work, let’s look at some common mistakes new websites make. Avoid these to make sure search engines index your site.
Forms are a common feature on websites. You can ask prospects to fill them in to gather further information or arrange a meeting. There’s just one problem – if users have to submit the form, search engine crawlers can’t find them.
This means any links to or content that can only be accessed by the form will be invisible. If the content is important, make sure you put links to it elsewhere, too.
Something else you need to look out for is content that can only be found by searching for it. This is a surefire way to render all your content inaccessible!
If you have lots of posts, display them on a blog or contents page – as well as including lots of internal links, of course!
You might wonder what on earth on-parseable Javascript is. We could give you a technical definition, but the underlying problem is that using Javascript to build links can lead to problems.
Crawlers may not detect the links, or they could devalue your site for implementing the Javascript links wrong. A safer option is to use HTML for your links instead.
It’s not just Javascript you need to watch out for. A few plug-ins can cause problems, especially Java and Flash.
If you embed links inside them, they’ll most likely be inaccessible.
Besides, browsers will no longer support Flash after December 2020, so it is best to steer clear of these altogether.
It’s obvious that crawlers won’t be able to reach blocked pages. But why would your pages end up blocked in the first place?
Two culprits are the Meta Robots tag and the robots.txt file. If a site owner activates them, spiders won’t be able to see anything, so check that your web development team hasn’t activated them.
We’ve all visited pages that have a ridiculous number of links, to the point where every other word on the page has a link. Don’t think search engines are stupid – they view this behaviour as spammy and will punish your page.
After crawling around 150 links on the page, it’s possible the spider will give up, although this varies depending on the length of the content. Choose quality over quantity and don’t try to cram all your links on one page.
Placing links in frames and I-frames isn’t always problematic, but it can be. Although crawlers can access them, they struggle to understand the organisation and structure. Unless you know what you’re doing well enough to implement them in the proper way for search engines, it’s wisest to avoid.
If the number of pitfalls outlined above has worried you about your site’s performance, it might be a great idea to check your site indexation works correctly.
Luckily, there are a few tools you can use to check. MozPro and Screaming Frog are two of the most popular options, although they’ll come at a slight cost to get the full range of features.
Internal links are an essential part of an inbound marketing strategy. To increase your site’s general authority and ranking on search engines, you must make sure you have the right structure in place.
It’s a simple concept, but don’t overlook the complexity.
Once you have your internal links sorted out, it’s time to think about external links, too. A guest posting service can help with this.
No business, brand, or individual wants their digital assets lost among a sea of others. When you create any digital property, including a website, you want it to be visible and accessible to those that need it and those you wish to target – your audience, prospects, customers and anyone else. That's where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) comes in. It helps to increase your brand’s (and digital assets’) visibility and searchability. A good SEO strategy consists of several components and activities, but one very essential part of it is link building and link equity.
Link equity is one of several search engine ranking factors. It primarily refers to the 'value' and authority (or equity) passed from one page or website to another website or page through links posted on the site or page passing the value.
When a link is posted on a website or page, search engines like Google view them as votes that indicate that the page linked is valuable and should be promoted. Links such as these are among several signals that search engines employ in determining a page’s ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Of course, not all links pass value. And some links are worth more than others. As you will see later, several factors, including topic relevance, the HTTP status of the linking page, the linking page’s authority and many more, determine the value passed by a link.
So, if a page with very high authority features a followed link to an article on a smaller site, the search engines view it as though the site with the high authority is passing a vote of confidence for the linked page. Hence the value is also passed to the page through the followed link.
When Google first began ranking pages, it started with the use of an algorithm called PageRank. It was the major determinant of how a page ranked. Several SEO experts formulated an SEO tactic called PageRank sculpting to take advantage of that algorithm. Using this tactic meant that a page's owner, to control the flow of authority from one page to another, would strategically decide which links were to be followed and which ones were to be no-followed.
Today, PageRank is just one of about 200 ranking factors and the 'PageRank sculpting' tactic isn't something we would recommend because it can easily hurt you if it is not done right. If you use a good link building agency or a blogger outreach agency, they would know how to use the strategy because it is still effective under the right conditions. Better yet, they will implement a good ranking strategy for your digital assets.
There are three main types of links you to understand when talking of link equity. They are:
To illustrate, if website A links to website B, website A has an outbound link to website B while website B has a backlink from website A. But if a page on website A links to another page on website A, the link is internal.
Link equity plays a vital role in SEO to help you draw in organic traffic. It should be an essential part of your SEO strategy. While there are many ways you can build links that pass link equity to your site or page, the fundamentals include having a relevant post on the target authority site post a link to your website or page. You can achieve this by getting the owner of the other site to write a post and then kink back to your desired page, or you can write a guest post on the other site yourself.
Alternatively, you can contact an agency that will offer a guest post service to handle it. Once the post is created, and the link has been added, all that remains is for search engine crawlers to crawl both sites and you can start having the value passed down to your site.
All three types of links mentioned above can pass link equity. Several factors determine the value passed down via a link. Before attempting to build links to get link equity, here's are some things you must know about how link equity is determined.
Link building to get link equity may appear to be overwhelming to some. And it usually is. Hence it is wise to get a link building agency that knows what they are doing and offers a link building service that will help you achieve your organic traffic and SEO goals.
Do you dream of getting your website’s blog posts referenced by the likes of Forbes and Entrepreneur? It’s the ultimate stamp of authority. This isn’t just a vanity metric – having a wide range of external links is one of the best ways to signal to search engines that you’re providing value.
Using a guest post service or similar can have a shady reputation, and not everyone has connections they can ask to place their links on their high-authority websites.
Here’s a guide to everything you need to know about external links and how to make the first strides toward link building.
Since you’ve clicked on this article, you should at least have a vague idea of what external links are – the clue is in the name. External links that direct users to websites other than the domain hosting the content.
If we place a link to a BBC article here, that’s an external link. If the BBC posts a link to this article on their website, that’s also an external link.
Including external links to high-authority websites – especially academic sources – is a useful signal to prove your articles have excellent research behind them. However, the more complicated and important aspect of external links is building links on other sites. That’s what we’ll focus on today.
The world of SEO is clouded in mystery. Despite what some digital marketing gurus might tell you, nobody is 100% sure how Google and other search engines determine which sites rank highest.
However, according to search engine ranking factor data, external links may be one of the most influential elements.
Effectively, every time another website places a link to your website, it’s a vote that you’re providing high-quality content. If hundreds or even thousands of sites link to your site, that’s a lot of votes, and search engines will likely take notice.
External links are also less open to manipulation than other metrics. Although you can go to a link building service or similar to pay for external links, it’s nowhere near as easy as building internal links or including keywords in your articles. Besides, websites with the highest domain authorities are notoriously hard to get links from.
The importance of external links goes way back to the first-ever search engine, AltaVista. Google then adopted the idea through its PageRank algorithm, which explicitly used external links as a mechanism to figure out which websites had the best content.
It’s easy to see why people think the search engines of today value external links highly, too.
Not all external links are made equal. Having a backlink from the blog your brother started last month is not as strong a vote for your website as a site that pulls in millions of unique visitors each month.
This seems obvious given such an extreme example, but you might wonder how search engines decide the value of an external link.
There are many factors – things as simple as using anchor text with a relevant keyword and a lower density of other links on the same page are important. Even finer points like the ownership of both domains matter (does the same person or company own both sites?). You can’t get anything past Google!
However, the value of a website can ultimately be put down to two principal factors: popularity and relevancy.
You’ve probably heard the term ‘domain authority’ bounced around. This is another way of saying a website is popular and trusted.
Moz developed a ranking method that gives each website a score from 0 to 100 – the larger the number, the better. But don’t get bogged down with the numbers, and a site doesn’t need a near-perfect score to offer you a valuable link.
If you have a website about Korean skincare products and you get a backlink from a website full of technology and software reviews, that will flag up as being strange.
Even if the website has great domain authority and is extremely popular, search engines will realise through crawling both site indexes that relevancy is low. That’s bad news.
Having the right mix of popularity and relevancy is essential for effective external links.
If you’re relying on another blog or website to upload your content or give you a backlink, you won’t have full control of exactly how they present their external links.
But here are some guidelines to remember if you have some control over the process.
We’ve already mentioned that search engines use anchor text to figure out the value of a link. So, make sure you choose anchor text that reflects relevant keywords within your topic. Also, the anchor text should only contain a few words, not an entire sentence.
Where possible, limit the number of external links within the article. Search engines will think your link is more valuable if it’s one of five links rather than one of 50.
You should also consider what the other external links in a post are. There shouldn’t be any links to your competitors, although sometimes the line is blurred between competitors and useful resources.
Now you know how important external links are, you can’t afford to wait any longer to implement an effective strategy. SEO is a slow process. Lots of medium-authority websites offer the chance to place guest posts on their sites, so take advantage of the opportunity.
However, writing content and reaching out to potential websites is a time-consuming and laborious process. If you’d prefer to invest in a service that will do it for you and get the results you want, consider trying a blogger outreach agency that already has the connections.
Although you won’t reap the fruits of your work immediately, you’ll be thanking yourself further down the line when your website is bringing in organic traffic.
When exploring the world of online content, you’ll come across lots of technical terms and industry jargon. SEO, guest post service, keywords. Another one is anchor text.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed or lost already, we’ve got your back. In this article, we’ll outline what anchor texts are, ways you can use them, and how to start link building.
This is the first step to growing your site, so get excited!
We have to start with the basics. Anchor text is just the text that contains a hyperlink. For this hyperlink, the word ‘this’ is the anchor text. This usually appears as blue and underlined, but may vary depending on how the code is edited.
It really is that simple – you’ve probably used hundreds of pieces of anchor text in your time without even knowing what the official term was.
But despite the simplicity, it’s definitely possible to get anchor texts right or wrong. That’s why we want to examine this concept in a little more detail.
You might think anchor text is just a random word or phrase you attach a hyperlink to because, well, you have to link it to something. That’s not quite true.
Just like alt text and meta descriptions, anchor text is another way of providing context to search engines.
Using anchor text correctly forms part of a solid SEO strategy. If your anchor text is a keyword related to the page you’re linking to, it demonstrates the purpose of your page to search engines.
But don’t just take our word for it, listen to what Google has to say: ‘Google uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject.’ Although it’s referring to alt text for images here, the same thing applies to all anchor text.
Unfortunately, we can’t control how other websites who link back to our site use their anchor links. That’s one advantage of using a link building service to get it right.
Although all anchor text serves the same purpose, it can take a few distinct forms. Here are some of the most common anchor text strategies.
When the anchor text is a perfect match for the keyword of the page linked to, it’s an exact-match anchor text. Using the anchor text 'blogger outreach agency' to a webpage about blogger outreach agencies is a perfect example.
One step removed from this is using anchor text that’s a variation of the keyword on the linked page, but not a perfect match.
Here, you might use the anchor text ‘link building agency’ to a page about how to find the perfect link building agency for you. This is a more common approach.
This is another common one. If we namedrop ourselves and include a link to our homepage, that’s branded anchor text: WooContent.
Including the entire URL is naked anchor text. For example, www.woocontent.com. Yes, we just name-dropped ourselves again, and we’re not ashamed of it.
You might not use a related keyword at all, and opt for a generic phrase instead, like ‘click here’ or just ‘here’.
We recommend using something more imaginative than ‘click here’ in your content, but that’s generic anchor text for you.
You might have assumed anchor text only ever refers to hyperlinked text. It’s a fair assumption given the name, but images can contain anchor text, too.
Search engines use the alt attribute of the image as the anchor text by default.
Now you know how important anchor text is, we bet you want to know how to use it properly. Here are a few tips, tricks, and best practices for you to follow.
In a nutshell, your anchor text should be short, relevant, and feature a low keyword density. Now, let’s look at each point in greater detail.
How often do you see an entire sentence hyperlinked as anchor text? Not very often, and when it does happen, it looks unprofessional.
Be succinct and try to limit your anchor text to a few words at most. Think ‘link building agency’ instead of ‘agency that helps you build links’.
Now onto the more technical stuff. To harness the full potential of anchor text, you need to think about finding the most relevant and effective keywords.
Search engines compare and assess pages for their relevancy. For example, if we included a link to another highly relevant article about anchor text, search engines would recognise this and reward both pages with a higher search ranking.
Both the anchor text and the content on the pages determine relevancy.
Likewise, links leading to irrelevant content can result in negative SEO. That’s why you need to be careful that your results don’t backfire when taking part in link building and guest posting.
Most of the time, following basic common sense principles will ensure you do just fine.
Keeping things relevant with the right keywords is important, but don’t go overboard. Google is getting smarter every day, and the Penguin update penalised links that seem suspicious or inorganic.
If you write an article with dozens of inbound links to your website and they all contain the same or related anchor text, you’re unlikely to fool Google. There’s no magic number for how many links are acceptable, so use your own judgement. If the number of links is interrupting the user and reader experience, you probably went too far.
Not every single anchor text has to be an exact or partial match. Keeping your writing engaging is important, too.
Anchor text: it’s such a simple concept, but there’s so much nuance surrounding its correct use. If this is all sounding like a lot of technicality and hassle, you don’t have to go it alone.
Using a link building service is a great way to grow your website or business without having to worry about keeping up to date with the latest SEO developments.
