Link Building Guide – Developing Your Online Profile and Reputation Through Quality Links

Introduction:

The Effect Links Have on Your Search Profile

Links have always affected how a search engine perceives a website. The type of pages that link back to your site can have a significant effect on your brand’s visibility and traffic. Link building processes have changed as search engines evolve, and you need to make sure the links to your website are “good” ones that improve its standing with search engines and online customers alike. Google’s Penguin update just proved that “bad” links from questionable websites or massive amounts of paid links can be major liabilities.

Our link building strategies have always ensured that your website’s links are composed of genuine website endorsements or relevant citations that improve your overall link profile.

We are currently working with several clients that were victims to low quality link building. The result has been catastrophic for their businesses. Where they once ranked high for very competitive keywords, now their business has dropped off significantly because Google has penalized them for their questionable link profile.

Evaluating Your Link Profile

Knowing your website’s current link profile is the first step in your link building strategy. Our website and link auditing processes will examine the quality, quantity, and diversity of the existing links to your website. We watch out for low-quality links that risk Google penalties, and broken internal links that have negative effects on search engine crawling and indexing.

We start  cleaning  up your  link profile by fixing  your web page and internal linking structure. We make sure all your links are working, and that all the necessary redirects and error pages are in place. We will then work on taking down or disavowing detrimental third-party backlinks, and concentrate on building quality links to strengthen your link profile.

If you want to do it yourself and you have a Google Webmaster Tools account for your website you can find a list of links to your site in the “Search Traffic” / “Links To Your Site” section. There you can download the links in a number of different formats.  There are also some great tools out there for examining links like Open Site Explorer and ahrefs.

Creating Sharable Content

Although we use the term “link building”, you need to earn most of your links by creating link-worthy content. Our writers produce original, relevant content that provides value to your online audience. This convinces your readers and website visitors that your content is worth discussing and sharing with their friends and business associates on social networks.

Diversity and Context

Context is the key concept behind our content marketing and link building strategies. We make sure everything from keywords to anchor text placements and landing pages is optimized for your target audience and search engines.

Inserting links that are out of context or irrelevant is bad practice, and could risk getting your website penalized. We make sure to select anchor text and keywords that are related to your content.

Building a lot of contextual links is not enough to create a future-proof link profile. You need to keep your links and your anchor text diverse to avoid being penalized for over-optimization or link spamming.

Link Diversification

It’s much easier to create fake profiles and link spam websites these days, so search algorithms continue to emphasize the importance of having a diverse link portfolio. Diversifying your links means building inbound links on multiple websites with unique domains and IP addresses. The more unique links search engines see, the more they will treat your website as a trusted source of information.

Creating and managing social network accounts for your brand can also help with diversification. These accounts can improve your brand’s social signals, and act as a cushion when major algorithm changes are applied in the future. It’s also easier to make your content go viral when you post or share them in your social accounts.

We give your link portfolio the diversity it needs by building social sharing links and making sure your other links are coming from unique, relevant, and reputable third-party websites.

Anchor Text Diversification

You should no longer be focusing on inserting exact-match anchor text to rank for  your keywords. You need to diversify your anchor text and make your keyword insertions as “natural” as possible. We use four types of keywords as anchor text:

• Brand keywords focus on your brand or website name, or your website’s naked URL. By using your brand name as anchor text, we promote your business, attract more leads, and improve your SERP rankings by associating your brand with your target keywords.

• Exact match keywords are standard key phrases used as-is in linking.

• Partial match keywords are variants of your exact match keywords. This includes synonymous keywords (e.g. “bankruptcy attorney in LA” is a partial match for “bankruptcy lawyer in LA”), or long-tail keywords (e.g. “ceramic coffee mugs” is a partial match for “coffee mugs”). We provide partial match keyword options when we perform keyword research and selection for your campaign.

• Generic keywords include calls to action such as “click here” or “visit this website”, or any other phrases that encourage readers to click on the link.