If you've heard about SEO, the word Link Building should be familiar to you! Whether you want to launch a new website or optimize your current SEO, Link building is an unmissable step if you want to increase your traffic, improve your SEO and fast-track your website!
1. What is a link building strategy?
A Link building strategy is simply about making other websites redirect to your website. All marketing and SEO specialists in particular attach great importance to this. Indeed, it allows to:
- Generate SEO traffic
- Increase the authority and visibility of your website on search engines.
Google's algorithms are complex and constantly changing, but backlinks remain a determining factor in how each search engine determines which website ranks for which keywords. Link building is one of the many tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO) because the links tell the engine that your site is a quality resource / reference. Therefore, websites with more QUALITY backlinks tend to gain visibility for classement.
2. Different kind of links you can find
Creating backlinks is an important part of the digital marketing mix. If you want to create quality backlinks on your blog, you have to think "natural". Don't waste your time on strategies that will be sold here and there on the Internet, focus on building a sound and solid foundation for a quality backlink and sustainable SEO.
"Natural" links building
According to Google, which uses this definition as a basis for the development of its algorithm, the natural links are those that were not involved in the creation. The natural backlink represents the content that you have produced, which neutral third parties have decided to promote and have posted somewhere to prove a point or offer a resource.
"Outreach" link building
Outreach links are those that one seeks to have by building a Link Building strategy. It involves contacting influencers in your niche or domain to ask them to place your links on their websites. This is not easy because you have to convince them to accept but with quality content, you will have all your chances! If you start your business, this practice can be very useful.
"Self-created" link building
When we talk about Self-created linking, we are talking about links created automatically and without added value. To put it simply, this practice called "Black Hat" aims to lure the search engines into believing that the website is perfectly relevant when it is not necessarily the case. However, with its new algorithms, including "Penguin", these websites are often downgraded or even penalized by search engines.
3. How to develop a Link Building Campaign
Starting a Link building campaign is to increase your web traffic. The campaign can focus on the development and promotion of elements such as content, information, a product or service.
Just like a marketing strategy, there are several things to consider when building a link building campaign:
1) Set a goal
It is the basis of any project. Each goal should be measurable and reasonable so that you can quantify the impact of your campaign on your website traffic. These goals may be related to increased website traffic, number of products sold, or leads generated.
2) Define your assets
Knowing what your strengths are is an important step in defining your strategy. Are you more content or partnership oriented? What competitive advantage can you exploit to make a difference? Try to find out which dissociative element sets you apart from the competition and find out how to exploit it.
3) Define your needs
You need to think about what you need in terms of links (to make it simple, which page you want to be send back from) and with which targeted phrases:
- Link to the homepage?
- Link to deep pages (products, categories ...)?
- Link to presentation pages?
- Link with your targeted keywords?
4) Know your audience
Knowing who your audience is will help you choose your locations. For example, if you are an online clothing store, you will not be targeting culinary blogs but rather fashion blogs because your audience will surely be there. Take the time to understand where your audience is to intercept them in the right places.
4. Find and select your implantation places
The ways to find where to place your links are many, all of which is to find which approach works best in your industry. The industry is becoming more competitive, so you have to learn to be proactive without being intrusive. The most important thing in a Link Building campaign is to succeed in becoming a reference in its field!
Select your implantation places - The sites that will link to yours
You will choose your locations according to your needs and your target! If your objective is to make you known, you will look for influencers who have a good reputation. If it is to sell a product, you will find where your target will navigate so that it falls on you easily.
You can therefore try to implement on blogs or platforms like Reddit, Quora or Medium which are reference resources through which many sites build their backlink but also their notoriety.
Find your implantation places
Here are some useful tools to find locations for your audience:
- Followerwonk: This tool allows you to preview all twitter accounts associated with a keyword. You will be able to establish a direct contact with your future location.
- Google will obviously be your best friend to find your future backlinkers. Search the net, use the right keywords to do your research, analyze the contents of the sites you find to be sure they will match you ...
Seduce your potential Backlinkers
There are many ways to get in touch with your potential backlinkers but 2 come back more often:
- Direct contact: This is the most logical method but not necessarily the most effective. It consists, as its name suggests, directly contacted the person behind the website that interests you. Be concise in your messages, tell them why you are interesting to them, explain to them your idea, show your authenticity. Do not hesitate to use your humor and your originality.
- Ego-bait: It's simple, flatter the ego of the interlocutors you covet by citing them as a reference. When these people are mentioned, they will be more willing to share your content. The format that comes up most often are the rankings including "Here is a list of 10 websites ...", "Find out which are the most stylish influencers of the year" and so on. It's up to you to find the idea that will set you apart and make you want to quote back!
5. Follow your campaign
For you to appreciate the quality of the data collected on your backlinks, keep an eye on your strategy, consider monitoring your link creation statistics, as well as clickthrough rates and return on marketing investment.
To organize yourself in your campaign and above all, keep a record of all your actions, do not hesitate to build a small table (excel, Google sheet ...) clear with the main informations:
- URL, mail and contact name of each location where you have applied for a backlink
- The date of contact, the date of recovery if necessary ...
- The date and answer of it
- The effectiveness of the link
With this you will be able to keep in sight all the locations with which you have built your strategy, but also those with whom you still have not made contact and those who have refused.
Then you can use some backlink analysis tools that are full of features to discover where your links are and help you keep track:
- Ahrefs: An absolute favorite among online marketing professionals, Ahrefs provides you with all the tools you need to track your backlinks and keywords. In addition, you can get an overview of what your competitors are doing. This tool is market leader.
- CognitiveSEO: It brings together a variety of web marketing tools that can all help advance your business. For example, you can use the cognitiveSEO alert system to create triggers and notifications about your website or your competitors. When this feature is enabled, information is delivered directly to your inbox, saving you time.
- LinkResearchTools: One of the main features of this tool is its integration with data from 24 search engines links. Be sure to get the best Backlinks report.
6. Mistakes to avoid
Of course, like every digital marketing strategy, there are things you can not do to avoid bad backlinks and bad e-reputation. Here are some preventable errors:
Black Hat
The Black Hat SEO is a practice aimed at gaining places in the search engines by fooling their algorithms. To make it simple, it consists, for example, of being referenced for a different content than what you propose, of hiding keywords in droves in your pages, or of forcing your link by exploiting a security hole on a page. site. These unethical tactics often lead to a penalty imposed by search engines.
Bad choices in your implantation places
The best content addressed to the wrong audience is irrelevant! In other words, placing your content everywhere will not be very useful if the interests of the target audience do not match. Produce quality content for a well-targeted audience, and your Backlinking strategy is likely to succeed.
You can get started right now!
The link building is a simple practice, creating attractive content and promoting it to the right target, hoping it will be picked up by quality sources. The construction is done methodically and with time. Follow the instructions of the search engines help a lot, but it is strongly discouraged to indulge in following the merchants of dreams proposing an absolute SEO in a few weeks on a relatively exploited niche.
Need help building your Link Building strategy?
Contact the 8P team! We will be happy to share our know-how with you and help you build a TAILOR-MADE backlinks strategy!
Another way to earn places naturally in the search engines is SEO. By intelligently building the pages of your website, you make sure you have a good place. Wondering if you did your SEO job well? Check out our new article on Crawl Website for Titles and Descriptions | Online tools!