6 link building tips!
It is safe to say that link-building is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. A vote of confidence from real, high-authority websites plays an important role in getting your website on the top in the search engine results pages. For beginners and newbie SEOs, it can be tough to grasp the various concepts of link-building. In this blog post, we highlight six link building tips that form the fundamentals and will help increase your understanding of how back links should be built.
1. Vet websites before targeting them
Back links are hard to come. It’s not easy to acquire a powerful link from high-profile websites whenever you want. Because of this difficulty and inaccessibility, it becomes tempting to target websites that are relatively easier and to get links from whatever source you can get. However, that’s a wrong strategy. There are a few factors that you must consider when selecting websites to target:
- The age of the website
- Its inbound/outbound ratio
- The relevance of the niche (we will talk more about it in the next point)
- Page Rank / Domain Authority
One of the most common ways to find potential sources is to analyse your competitors and see where they get their links from. While this is a valid technique, know that your competitors can be wrong as well. Therefore, make sure to vet your targets carefully before finalising the sources of your next back links.
2. Industry and niches matter
As we mentioned earlier, the relevance of the niche is an important factor to consider during link-building. Ideally, a large majority of your back links should come from relevant websites. Irrelevant back links are not natural and may lead to a Google penalty. For example, if a website that talks about fashion gets the most number of links from gardening websites, that’d look odd.
3. Generic anchor text should be avoided
The anchor text for your link is another aspect you should manage carefully. Most importantly, generic anchor text must generally be avoided. Generic anchor texts, such as “check this”, “click here”, “read more”, “go to”, don’t add any value for search engine crawlers or online users. Instead, you should try to include keyword-rich anchor text whenever it is possible and natural to do so.
4. Anchor text spam is real
We just learned that keyword-rich anchor text is better than generic anchor text, such as “click here”. However, even that has its caveat. In an attempt to optimise a web page for a certain keyword, some SEOs tend to use a particular anchor text too often. Doing so will make it look dubious and unnatural. If back links are made naturally and without any intervention — which is how they are supposed to be — there would be a wide variety of anchor texts used, and not a specific keyword phrase. Therefore, mixing related keywords is a great way to make sure your back link profile is natural and that you are not spamming a particular keyword phrase as anchor text.
5. Build back links deep into your site
One common mistake that many newbie SEOs make is that they redirect links to the home page of their website. A better practice, however, is to create links deep within your website. This tactic has two advantages:
- Your back link profile will look more natural with a diversified link network.
- Visitors coming via that link will get to more relevant content instead of landing on the home page.
6. Take it slow
Back links are great for improving your search engine rankings and authority. However, you do not want a very steep growth. Take it slow and gradually build your back link profile, so it looks more natural. If there is a sharp increase in back links, this may point out to a back link campaign, which does not always go well with Google and other search engines. To avoid a search engine penalty, take things slow.
Conclusion
Building back links for your website often takes a lot of time, hard work and persistence. Stick to it, though, and you will reap the rewards with our link building tips as well as your own research to further improve your back-link profile.