Link building methods | Weboptim

It's no secret that Google uses more than 200 factors when displaying the most relevant pages to users' searches.

With so many factors influencing ranking, SEO experts agree that links are one of the most powerful signals for search engines, outranking all other ranking factors.

Link building requires a well-developed strategy, thanks in part to Google's Penguin algorithms.

Effective and Google-friendly link building consists of 5 main parts:

situation identification
research into link building methods
search for links/partners
contact
monitoring the process

Let's look at each step in a little more detail:

1. Situation identification and competitor analysis

Unless you're link building for a new brand, it's important to first check the website's your current link profile. In addition, we need to analyse the well-ranked link profiles of competitors is. Let's take a look at the link building practices that work best for them, it will most likely work for us too.

2. Find link building techniques

There are many ways to get started. The most common methods are:

Mentions

There is a website that mentions our brand or company name, but does not link to our website. We can contact the webmaster of that site and ask them to place the link. We can also look for sites that mention competitors (with or without a link). They will probably place a link to us if we ask them to.

Professional directories, business pages

Local business directories, trade and business pages are a good place to place a link. This method works well for most businesses.

Product/service ratings

There are many blog posts about the activities of a company. The blogger gets an idea for a new article and we get a quality link and increased traffic.

TIP: Bloggers often produce public product comparison reviews. This can include the brand name, product name, and can also be a good place for a link.

TIP: An outdated review that is similar to our product or service can be a great way to gain links if the author of the post is willing to update the link on the page.

Guest blogging

We only use this method for public and relevant websites. Beware of networks that are only concerned with the placement of posts. It can be difficult to identify such sites, but they share the following common characteristics:

standard design
articles and posts are not grouped around a single theme
no comment/sharing facilities for users
no real author bio
no contact information

TIP: Don't forget to check these websites against the 10 quality guidelines below.

Press releases

There are several websites where you can publish a press release, e.g. origo.hu
It can provide a quality inbound link, but use with caution - mass use is prohibited by Google's guidelines.
TIP: Real journalists and bloggers are reluctant to place articles from press releases. If you want real feedback, contact journalists directly.

Broken link building

This can be used if you find a broken link when checking links on relevant websites. Alternatively, we can suggest another link (to our own site).

It consists of the following steps:

search for relevant pages using keywords
check HTTP status codes for outgoing links
contact the webmaster and ask him to replace the 404 link with a link to our website

The success of the method depends on the type of content we can offer to replace the broken link.

3. Find potential link partners

Once you've chosen the best link building technique for your industry, it's time to to find potential partners. It may take longer, but it can be done automatically and quickly using various programs.

4. Contact us

You have your partners, now it's time to contact them.

For each partner, we look for the necessary contact details
Group partners according to the purpose of your request to them
Create a template email for each group and send it out
Check your inbox, the replies

5. Report on the process

The report gives you a comprehensive picture of the status of link building, for example, the proportion of link texts, the success rate of partner relations.

These 5 steps will help you get quality links for your website, but keep in mind some important rules:

10 quality guidelines for link building

1. do not get the same type of links (with the same link text) too quickly - of course there is no limit to how many new links per month can be considered as appropriate, but let's do it slowly and judiciously.
2. minimise the number of easy-to-get links - keep the number of links from blog, forum posts, link collectors low
3. avoid placing links in places that are not intended for editorial links - includes page header, footer, sidebar, navigation elements
4. check the search engine availability of the linking page (twice) - do not set the noindex/nofollow attribute in the robots.txt file
5. make sure that the linking page is indexed and cached - if the page does not contain cach data from the last 3 months, it may result in search engines not considering it relevant
6. do not engage in guest blogging or article marketing unless you know what you are doing - do not get links from guest posts, article directories or similar sites unless you are sure of the quality of the site.
7. the linking subpage and website should be related to the topic - a website about aquarium fish is not a good link source for a restaurant review.
8. check the position of the linking site (domain) in the top 100 results - if it is not ranked in the top 100 for keywords in the title, it is likely that the search engine does not consider it to be very valuable
9. pay attention to social media indicators - if the domain does not contain any like or share elements, it may indicate that the visitors are not real people or that the site is low value/low traffic
10. do multi-level link building - support the website hosting our content and our link. Share it on social media sites or link to it in other publications.

If you follow all these steps, you are likely to be successful in link building.

Source: link-assistant.com