You've read about how backlinks continue to be one of Google's core ranking criteria, and you've seen how they can boost a site's organic exposure and authority. Now that you know backlinks are important for your site, where do you begin?
To increase traffic to your website, you can employ any number of link-building techniques (guest posting, link reclamation, and content promotion are the ones we use most often). However, before we recommend anyone start a link building campaign, we have them examine their site and make some fundamental modifications to make their site an optimal link target.
Off-Page SEO: What Is a Link Target?
You are aware of the importance of link building, but you aren't sure which pages to connect to. Does clicking a link take you where you want to go on your site? In a word, no. One must carefully select their objectives for a link building strategy if they want to see real results. Even if you don't have a team to support you, it's still crucial to set quarterly goals and reevaluate them; at Portent, our SEO and Content Strategy teams do this. An ideal number of pages to target for link building is between 10 and 15. Pages that are perfect for directing traffic to via links are ones that:
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Extremely persuasive
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Short on credibility as a page
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needing better visibility for the keywords associated with that page
Site, Site, Site!
The internal links you build do more than just boost the rankings of the pages they point to; they also increase the domain's organic visibility. Because of this, it's absolutely vital that the addresses you're targeting are on a TLD (TLD). There is nothing benefit to linking to a subdomain. Nothing you do at www.blog.target.com will ever benefit www.target.com, so stop wasting your time. Verify that your material is not located on a subdomain before launching a link-building campaign.
Guidelines for Effective Guest Posting with an Emphasis on Link-Building
You need to have excellent material on your site for the guest poster to link back to if you plan on starting a guest posting link building campaign. A excellent checklist for determining if material is linkable looks like this:
Does it have a marketing purpose? The pages you choose to link to shouldn't be too promotional or "salesy." Ideally, there wouldn't be any prices or other text on the page that would direct the reader to make a purchase from you.
Have you verified its credibility? The best link targets are authoritative pieces of content that deal with a topic that is only peripherally related to the main theme of the site. When it comes to achieving link-building goals, a blog post headlined "Our L3 Tires Called Tire of the Year!" is not nearly as effective as one headed "How to Choose the Best Winter Tires."
Would you consider it to be advanced? Links should point to content that is quite broad in scope (and hence useful to more people). For instance, "5 Tips for Keeping Your Heart Healthy at Any Age" would be a more applicable target than "How Mitral Valve Regurgitation in Seniors Might Be Avoided."
Content Marketing
Link building through content promotion is rapidly becoming our primary tactic. Making truly remarkable content and spreading word of it far and wide can rapidly shift metrics. Here are just a few examples of what not to do when making promotional content for your website:
Produce a single landing page at most. It is counterproductive, for instance, to split a report across two pages. Your campaign should only have one link target.
Develop a page that performs at its best. You'll need the input of an SEO expert who is well-versed in the technical aspects of the field in order to optimise the content of your page.
There's room for your writing on your blog. You can host your landing page within your business's blog, provided that the blog is not hosted within a subdomain.
The Use of a Slight Deviation
Companies often seek out link building services in order to drive traffic to product sites that are so obviously designed to sell something that no one would ever want to link to them. Perhaps this is the page where they see the most conversions. Hmm...what should I do? You can use jump links, which is the correct response.
Insert your noteworthy information near the end of the page with the highest conversion rate and link directly to it. Next, distribute the landing page's jump link to the press when you begin promoting the page as part of your campaign.
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