Five things to remember when you are building links

You have a company blog. We hope so! You're now ready to get some ROI from your content. It's great! But it's not as simple as just writing an article and pressing publish.

Google's ranking factors determine whether your content appears in search results. If it does, that's a problem. The most important factor is link building. Link building.

Link building, in simplest terms, is the act of creating links between your website and other sites. Link building is a long-term strategy. It takes time, effort and consistency to make it pay off. You'll be able to see huge improvements in the performance of your content once it happens.

To help you stay on the right track, we have compiled 5 key points to remember when link building.

Here are some quick tips:

• It is essential to vet all sites that you use for link building strategies in order to ensure quality and relevancy.

• Link building ROI is dependent on anchor text. Don't spam the same keywords or pages with junk anchors.

• To maintain a balance between do follow and not follow links, it is important to understand what they mean.

• It is possible to research the backlink profiles of competitors to identify high-quality sources that you can reach out to.

• It is important to have backlink diversity. Make sure you don't put all your backlinks in one place (like your homepage).

Avoid backlinks

Backlinks do not all have to be created equally. Your website should be linked to relevant brands and websites, which will bring you the right amount of traffic. Avoid these backlinks:

Reputation or poor quality

Although this is obvious, we will mention it anyway. Be aware of which websites you are earning backlinks. Linking to a suspicious website can cause more damage than good. While you cannot always control the links from other brands to your site's content, you can manage who you contact in your link building efforts.

Irrelevant niches

Linking to websites that aren't relevant to your brand will not help you. Your efforts should be directed at websites and brands that are in line with your message and industry.

Sites are overloaded with hyperlinks

Your website should be linked in a way that makes sense to the user, and drives high-quality organic traffic. You're more likely to get lost in the shuffle or receive traffic that doesn't convert.

It is important to be proactive in finding the right backlinks. Here are some great tips for finding the right link building partners.

Anchor text

Anchor text is important.

Let me repeat it: Anchor text is important.

This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in link building. You can avoid this mistake if you have the right link.

Let's see:

Junk anchors

When it comes to SEO link building, “junk” anchor text such as “here”, “there”, “read more,” or “click here” aren't very helpful. They aren't necessarily bad. These anchors may be the best fit for your sentence. They can also be used to drive conversions.

In short, they can be useful when you need them, but they won't improve your SEO ranking. Use directly relevant keywords for your anchor text when you can.

Anchor spam

Anchor spam is when anchor text is repeated too often.

You don't have to! It's possible to link to more than one webpage.

Yes, you can. However, it can have some very negative consequences such as a drop in rankings or backlinking penalties from Google.

How do you fix it? The solution? Similar to keyword stuffing, forcing links in your content can not only look bad but also hurt the rankings of the pages you are trying to improve.

You can assess your anchor text performance by visiting Serpstat, doing a backlink assessment, and then scrolling down for your anchor profile. This analysis will give you valuable information such as anchor keywords, domains using which anchors and the number of backlinks to a specific anchor.

Here is a screen shot from Serpstat's Backlink Analysis Guide that illustrates how your results will look.

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Follow vs. not follow links

Let's first discuss the differences between do follow and no follow links. Do follow links are SEO-friendly. Follow links do not.

This means that people cannot use any follow links. However, search engine crawlers ignore them and they won't count for a contributing backlink to page rankings.

However, that doesn't mean they aren't necessary. Is it wise to not use follow links?

• Promote an affiliate link

• To avoid spam comments (many companies make their blog comments nofollow)

• You were paid by a brand to share their link

• This is a site that uses low quality content to illustrate a point (i.e. Guides on “what not to Do”

You should use do follow links whenever you link to a trusted brand for a purpose that justifies it (e.g. citing a great source of information in a blog post).

Your competitors

Let's face it, a key part of link building success is beating the competition. It's not wrong to do some detective work in order to achieve that goal. You can spy on the backlinks of your competitors and find out which domains link to their websites. When it makes sense, you can target these sites as well.

Serpstat's Referring Domains Analysis can be used to find out the backlinks of your competitors. This is Serpstat’s guide for conducting a referring-domains analysis. These are your results:

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It will provide you with a list domains linking to the site that you are analyzing, the number and the rank of the domains.

Remember that even the most reputable blogs are not perfect. After you have identified some links that are high-potential, make sure to do your research to ensure they meet your quality standards.

Link building growth rate

Although it may seem tempting to build links quickly, this is a way for Google to penalize you. You should build links slowly and steadily. Do not use all your quality backlinks at once. Spread them out over time for consistent growth results.

Here is an example of how a high rate of link building growth looks:

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Diversity of backlinks

Your primary goal in link building is to create a profile of backlinks that looks natural. It is not the best way to build backlinks to your homepage.

It is better to prioritise the web pages and content that you believe will be most valuable to your audience. Next, you should focus on the strategic ways that backlinks can be earned for these pages.

The saying that all traffic is good traffic is false. People who arrive at your site should understand why they came there, and be able to find the information that will solve their problems or meet their needs.

Search engine rankings are also improved by backlink diversity. This is because SEO power spreads across multiple pages of your website instead of being concentrated in one area.

Link building is not something you can do on your own.

Link building is a complex and ongoing process. It takes experts to execute link building in a professional manner. Marketing Insider Group can assist you in performing a content audit. They will then prepare consistent, publish-ready content that is optimized for link building.

To learn more, check out our Content Builder Service.