One of those common topics that always comes up for SEO marketers is the importance of backlinks. Your linking strategy still matters in 2020. SEMrush conducted a study of 600,000 keywords and found that links are a top ranking signal. In fact, our own agency has helped clients with SEO through white hat linking strategies that build your authority and visibility across the web.
Want to leverage link building for your SEO strategy? There are some real benefits of building your links:
- Drive organic traffic
- Get ranking signals from search engine crawlers picking up your links
- Build trust and authority
- Track shares, mentions, and follows from your links
There are several different tactics for link building. Some still work, and others will earn you Google’s wrath. When we talk about link building, we only refer to white hat strategies that follow search engine guidelines. The best part is you don’t have to pay for links or pull any tricks to get ahead with a good linking domain authority domains strategy.
Why Links Matter for SEO and How to Build Your Strategy
While best practices for SEO are always changing, link building remains a key factor in why some websites get to the top and others never make it on the 1st or 2nd page of results.
Keyword usage and linking is one of the easiest ways to get ranked in Google. The logic is simple. With more people sharing your links and content, the more trust and authority you build with Google and other search engines. However, keyword stuffing has made things a little more complicated than before.
Build Better Links with Keyword Research
Today’s marketers have to be conscientious about what keywords they use and how they place links within content. The type of links and the authority of the page also matter. If you want to rank highly, you need to get shared by websites and blogs that are high-ranking themselves and have lots of followers.
Building a linking strategy is pretty straightforward, but you will need to dedicate time to write great content, place your links strategically, and get shares from influencers and bloggers.
What Types of Links You Need for SEO
There are a few terms to learn before link building can begin. These include the following:
- Internal links: These are links within your website that link to other relevant pages. For example, you write a blog article related to one of your services, and you link a keyword like Phoenix SEO strategy within the article. This sends traffic to your internal pages. It’s typical to have 2 to 3 internal links per page.
- External links: These are hyperlinks that link out to an external page with a high authority. You’ll typically have 1 to 2 external links per page, but you may want to include more if you need to cite a study or include a resource.
- Inbound links: These are links from another website linking back to yours. These MUST be a part of your linking strategy, as this is how you build traffic and ranking signals within Google.
Basics of a Link Building Strategy
Whenever one website links to another, it’s a signal that shows your content is credible and trustworthy. As more websites link back to your own, you’ll build higher traffic for keywords that you include in your content.
In essence, linking strategies first begin with keyword research. Once you know what keywords you want to rank for, you can begin building your links across the web.
Here’s a quick start guide to building your links:
- Conduct keyword research using Keywords Everywhere, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or other keyword tool
- Build up your content around keywords that are most relevant to your website
- Use keyphrases in anchor text and try to add them as naturally as possible to the content
- Add internal links in content, site navigation, related pages widgets, and user sitemaps
- Link to .edu, .org, .gov, or other high authority sites for external links, set these to open in a new window using the tag target=”_blank”
- Conduct outreach with influencers on social and bloggers who are popular with your audience, create content to guest post that is helpful and educational to post and share links
- Get more inbound links by building a blog and sharing content across all social media networks
- Within your content, you can also mention influencers and link to their content to encourage link sharing
While it takes time to build a linking strategy, it’s best not to force it or pay for links. Instead, you should create your own blog and web content, adding internal links and high page authority domains with external links to get started. Once you have build a wealth of content on your site, you can start sharing it on social media and attract the attention of other bloggers, influencers, and brands (non-competitive).
These are just some of the traditional ways to build links. Want a more comprehensive SEO linking strategy? Call us or send our SEO team an email.