13 Sep How to Design Your Backlink Strategy
Building high-quality backlinks is a key part of any SEO strategy. Backlinks are one of the top-ranking factors for search engines, including Google. However, Google doesn’t want you to pay for links or use linking schemes to get links for your site. So it’s essential to have a backlink strategy that helps you to build links naturally. There are various techniques that you can use to gain more backlinks to your site in an ethical and effective way. If you want to improve your link profile for your site, you need to have a clear strategy for how you’re going to build links.
Try some of the following tips to design your own backlink strategy and start gaining more quality links to your site.
Make Sure You Understand Backlinks
Before you do anything else, make sure you have a firm understanding of what backlinks are, why they’re so important, and the right and wrong ways to build them. Backlinks are essential for your SEO strategy, but it’s important to use ethical, white hat methods to build your links instead of using methods that Google doesn’t approve of, such as paying for links.
Backlinks essentially signal that your website is valuable and useful. Other sites link to your content because they feel that it’s useful to their audience. So it’s crucial to create quality content that the right websites will link to. You need to know what types of backlinks provide the most value for your site so that you can work on building them.
Take Stock of Current Backlinks
It’s always smart to get a good idea of your starting position when you want to drive your SEO forward. Before you create your link building strategy, you need to know how many existing backlinks you have and their quality. If you want to perform an audit of your backlinks, there are various tools that you can use to check them. Google Search Console and Google Analytics offer you free options to use, while there are also paid SEO tools that help you to check and track backlinks too.
Look at Your Competitors
Looking at your competitors can often give you a good idea of whether you’re doing the right thing and what you should do next. You can look at your competitor’s backlinks to give you an idea of what types of sites you should be looking at to link to your site. Your competitor’s backlinks can reveal sites with high domain authority that are linking to them and are therefore likely to link to your site too. Most SEO tools have a backlink checker option that you can use on any site so that you can easily examine backlinks for your competitors.
Publish High-quality, Valuable Content
Good link building ultimately comes down to publishing high-quality content that provides value to your audience. If you produce valuable content, it’s more likely that other people will choose to link to it. There are different types of content that you can produce, but one way to create quality content is to publish pages that serve as great resources to your audience.
Content can come in various forms, from short blog posts to long cornerstone resources or even infographics. Publishing a range of high-quality content in different formats will get attention for your site.
Find Broken Links
The broken link building strategy is about finding web pages that have broken links and suggesting that a link to your site is used in their place. If you can find a broken link and you have a piece of content that is as good or better than the original content that was linked, you can get in touch with the owner or webmaster of the site and politely suggest your link as a replacement. SEO tool providers like Ahrefs provide broken link checker tools that you can use with any site.
Get Brand Mentions Linked
You can often find that your brand is mentioned on various sites across the web. However, although the name of your brand might be mentioned, there might not be a link. If a link is missing, you can get in touch with the site runner to ask them if they would add a link to your site.
Track Your Backlinks
Don’t forget to track your backlinks to ensure you know when people are linking to your content. Whether you use a free or paid tool, you can set up tracking and regularly check if you have any new, quality links to your site.
Whether you already have some quality backlinks or you’re starting from nothing, you can use a range of strategies to build links.
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