LINK BUILDING & ESTABLISHING AUTHORITY
CHAPTER SEVEN : LINK BUILDING & ESTABLISHING AUTHORITY
You've generated content that people want, that answers their questions, and that search engines can understand, but that doesn't guarantee it'll rank. To outrank the other sites with such characteristics, you must create authority. Earning links from authoritative websites, creating your brand, and cultivating an audience that will assist amplify your content are all ways to accomplish this.
Google has stated that links and quality content (both of which we discussed in Chapter 4) are two of the three most essential SEO ranking variables. Sites that are trustworthy prefer to link to other trustworthy sites, while spammy sites tend to link to other spammy ones.
But what exactly is a link? How do you acquire them from other websites? Let's start with the fundamentals.
What exactly are links?
Inbound links are HTML hyperlinks that point from one website to another. They are also known as backlinks or external links. They are the Internet's currency because they function similarly to real-life reputation. If you went on vacation and asked three people (all unconnected to one another) what the greatest coffee shop in town was, and they all responded "Cuppa Joe on Main Street," you'd be certain that Cuppa Joe is the best coffee shop in town. Links accomplish this for search engines.
Search engines have treated links as votes for popularity and importance on the web since the late 1990s.
Internal connections, or links connecting internal sites under the same domain, function similarly for your website. A high number of internal links connecting to a specific page on your site will indicate to Google that the page is valuable, as long as it is done legitimately and not spammy.
The engines have modified their perspective of links, currently using algorithms to evaluate sites and pages based on the links they discover. But what exactly are those algorithms? How do the search engines assess all of those links? It all begins with the letter E-A-T.
Improve your links
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You are what you E-A-T.
The notion of E-A-T – an acronym for expert, authoritative, and trustworthy — is highly valued in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Sites that do not exhibit these qualities are perceived as lower-quality by search engines, while those that do are rewarded. E-A-T is becoming increasingly vital as search improves and the importance of solving for user intent grows.
Creating an expert, authoritative, and trustworthy site should be your guiding light as you conduct SEO. It will not only result in a better site, but it will also be future-proof. After all, Google is attempting to provide enormous value to searchers.
E-A-T and website linkages
The more popular and valuable a site is, the more weight its links carry. For example, Wikipedia has dozens of different sites linked to it. This suggests that it has a lot of experience, authority, and trust among those other sites.
To build trust and authority with search engines, you'll need links from websites that exhibit E-A-T traits. These don't have to be Wikipedia-level sites, but they should deliver credible, trustworthy content to searchers.
Links that are followed vs. links that are not followed
Remember how URLs may be used to cast votes? The rel=nofollow tag (pronounced "no follow") allows you to connect to a resource while hiding your "vote" from search engines.
The term "nofollow" instructs search engines not to follow the link. Some engines still follow them to discover new pages, but because they don't pass link equity (the "votes of popularity" we discussed earlier), they can be useful in situations where a page is either linking to an untrustworthy source or was paid for or created by the owner of the destination page (creating an unnatural link).
Assume you're writing a piece about link building methods and want to highlight an example of poor, spammy link building. You might link to the infringing site without telling Google you trust it.
Standard links (those without nofollow) appear as follows:
<a href="">I adore Dreamsiteco</a>
This is how nofollow link markup looks:
<a href="" rel="nofollow">I adore Dreamsiteco</a>If follow links pass all link equity, shouldn't you solely desire follow links?
No, not always. Consider all of the acceptable locations you may make links to your own website, such as a Facebook profile, a Yelp page, a Twitter account, and so on. These are all obvious places to provide links to your website, but they should not be considered votes. (Creating a Twitter profile with a link to your site does not imply that Twitter likes your site.)
It's natural for your site's link profile to contain a mix of nofollowed and followed backlinks (more on link profiles below). Although a nofollow link does not convey authority, it can deliver significant traffic to your site and possibly lead to future followed links.
Use the MozBar Chrome plugin to highlight links on any page and determine if they are nofollow or follow without ever having to study the source code!
Your hyperlink profile
Your link profile is an overall evaluation of all the inbound links your site has received, including the total number of links, their quality (or spamminess), diversity (is one site connecting to you hundreds of times, or are hundreds of sites linked to you once? ), and more. The state of your link profile informs search engines about how your site is related to other sites on the Internet. There are numerous SEO tools available to help you assess your link profile and gain a better understanding of its general composition.
What characteristics distinguish a healthy link profile?
When humans discovered the potential of linkages, they began to manipulate them to their advantage. They'd look for strategies to gain artificial links in order to boost their search engine results. While these risky approaches can occasionally work, they violate Google's terms of service and can result in a website being deindexed (the removal of web pages or entire domains from search results). You should constantly strive to keep a healthy connection profile.
A healthy link profile tells search engines that you've earned your links and authority legitimately. You should attempt to guarantee that your link profile is honest and acquired through good, old-fashioned hard labor, just as you should not lie, cheat, or steal.
Links are either earned or placed editorially.
Editorial links are links that are naturally contributed to your website by sites and pages who desire to link to it.
Creating high-quality content that people actually want to reference is usually always the cornerstone of gaining earned links. This is when developing 10X content (a fancy way of saying exceptionally high-quality material) comes in handy! People will naturally link to you if you provide the best and most fascinating resource on the web.
The links are related and come from websites that are topically similar.
Links from websites within a topic-specific community are often preferable than links from non-relevant websites. If you sell dog houses on your website, a link from the Society of Dog Breeders is far more valuable than one from the Roller Skating Association. Furthermore, links from thematically irrelevant sources can confuse search engines about what your page is about.
Without being spammy, the anchor text is descriptive and relevant.
Anchor text informs Google about the topic of your page. If dozens of links connect to a website that contains a version of a word or phrase, the page is more likely to score well for those phrases. But proceed with caution! Too many backlinks with the same anchor text may indicate to search engines that you are attempting to influence the ranking of your site in search results.
Take a look at this. You asked ten different friends how their days were going at different times, and they all said the same thing:
Great! I began my day by walking Peanut, my puppy, and then having a picante beef Top Ramen for lunch.
That's odd, and you'd be wary of your buddies. The same is true for Google. The anchor text used to describe the content of the target page helps them grasp what the page is about, but using the same description from many sources tends to look suspect. Aim for relevancy while avoiding spam.
Links drive targeted visitors to your website.
Link building should never be done exclusively for the purpose of improving search engine results. Eric Ward, an esteemed SEO and link building thought leader, has said that you should build links as though Google was going away tomorrow. In summary, you should concentrate on getting connections that will deliver qualified traffic to your website - another reason why it's critical to obtain links from relevant websites whose readership would also find value in your site.
Things to avoid when it comes to link building
Spammy link profiles are simply that: they are comprised of links that were built in an unnatural, deceptive, or otherwise low-quality manner. Buying links or participating in a link exchange may appear to be the easy way out, but doing so is risky and could jeopardize all of your hard work. Google penalizes sites with spammy link profiles, so resist the urge.
Never try to influence a site's rating in search results as a guiding concept for your link building efforts.
But isn't that the whole point of SEO? To boost a website's ranking in search results? And this is when things become complicated. Google prefers that you earn links rather than manufacture them, but the border between the two is frequently blurred. Google has made it obvious what should be avoided in order to avoid penalties for artificial links (sometimes known as "link spam").
🚫Links purchased
Google and Bing both attempt to minimize the impact of purchased links in their organic search results. While a search engine cannot tell which links were earned vs paid for by simply viewing the link, it can discover patterns that indicate foul behavior. Websites detected purchasing or selling following links face harsh penalties that will cause their rankings to plummet. (Exchanging products or services for a link is also a kind of payment and counts as buying links.)
🚫Exchange of links / reciprocal linking
You've been targeted for a link exchange if you've ever gotten a "you link to me and I'll link to you" email from someone with whom you have no affiliation. Google's quality guidelines warn against "excessive" link exchange and similar partner programs performed only for the purpose of cross-linking, therefore this type of exchange on a lower scale may not raise any link spam concerns.
It is okay, and even beneficial, to link to persons with whom you work, partner, or have some other affiliation and have them link back to you.
The bulk exchange of links with unaffiliated sites can result in sanctions.
🚫Links to low-quality directories
These were once a common source of manipulation. To serve this market and pass themselves off as respectable, a significant number of pay-for-placement web directories exist, with varied degrees of success. These sites often include long lists of websites and their descriptions (typically, the site's essential keyword is utilized as anchor text to connect back to the submitter's site).
Search engines have recognized numerous other deceptive link building strategies. In most cases, they have discovered algorithmic strategies to mitigate their influence. Engineers will continue to fight new spam systems using targeted algorithms, human reviews, and the collection of spam reports from webmasters and SEOs. Finding ways around them is generally not worth the effort.
Links should always include:
How to Generate High-Quality Backlinks
Link building takes various forms, but one thing always constant: link campaigns should always be tailored to your specific aims. Having said that, there are some popular approaches that work effectively for most campaigns. This is not an entire list; for additional information on link building, see Moz's blog postings.
Find links to customers and partners.
If you have frequent partners or devoted clients who appreciate your business, there are ways to gain links from them quite easily. You may send out partnership badges (graphic icons that represent mutual respect) or offer to write product testimonials. Both of these provide items that can be displayed on their website, as well as links back to you.
Create a blog.
This content and link building method is so popular and beneficial that it is one of the handful that Google engineers personally advocate. Blogs have the unique capacity to consistently provide new content, stimulate web-wide dialogues, and gain listings and connections from other blogs.
But be cautious — you should avoid low-quality guest posting only for the purpose of link development. Google has warned against it, and your efforts would be better spent elsewhere.
Make one-of-a-kind resources
Creating one-of-a-kind, high-quality resources is a difficult task, but it is well worth the effort. High-quality information that is properly promoted can be widely disseminated. It can aid in the creation of items that have the following characteristics:
- Elicits powerful emotions (such as joy, despair, and so on).
- Something new, or at least a new means of communicating.
- Beautifully designed.
- Responds to a current demand or interest.
- Location-specific (for example, the most popular Halloween costumes per state).
Creating a resource like this is an excellent approach to generate a large number of links with a single page. You could even construct a highly specialised resource with a narrower appeal that targeted a few websites. You might have a better success rate, but that strategy isn't as scalable.
Users who come across this type of unique content are likely to want to share it with their friends, and bloggers/tech-savvy webmasters who come across it are likely to do so via links. These high-quality, editorially earned votes are priceless in terms of establishing trust, authority, and ranking potential.
Create resource pages.
Resource pages are an excellent approach to generate links. However, in order to find them, you'll need to be familiar with some complex Google operators.
For example, if you were performing link building for a company that manufactured pots and pans, you could look up:
cooking intitle:"resources"
...and see which pages could be excellent link candidates.
This can also inspire you to develop new material - simply consider what kinds of resources you might create that these pages would all like to reference and link to.
Participate in your local community.
Community engagement can result in some of the most significant and influential links for a local firm (one that sees its consumers in person).
- Participate in sponsorships and scholarships.
- Participate in or host community events, seminars, workshops, and organizations.
- Donate to important local initiatives and become a member of local business organisations.
- Advertise jobs and internships
- Encourage the use of loyalty programs.
- Organize a local competition.
- Develop real-world relationships with related local businesses to learn how you might work together to improve the health of your community's economy.
All of these clever and genuine tactics offer excellent opportunity for local link building.
Restore top content
You probably already know which of your site's content generates the most traffic, converts the most customers, and keeps users on your site the longest.
Repurpose the content for other platforms (Slideshare, YouTube, Instagram, Quora, and so on) to broaden your acquisition funnel beyond Google.
You can also republish earlier content on the same platform by dusting it off, updating it, and simply republishing it. If you notice that a few reliable industry websites have all linked to an outdated popular resource, update it and notify those industry websites — you might just earn a nice link.
This is also possible with images. Ask websites who are utilizing your photographs but without citing you or referring back to you if they would mind putting a link.
Make yourself newsworthy.
Getting the attention of the press, bloggers, and news media is a tried-and-true method of gaining links. Giving something away for free, delivering a terrific new product, or saying something controversial can all help. Because so much of SEO is about generating a digital reflection of your brand in the real world, you must have a great brand to succeed in SEO.
Be authentic and friendly.
The most typical error that new SEOs make when trying to generate links is failing to take the time to develop a personalized, valuable initial outreach email. You know how irritating spamming emails can be, so make sure yours doesn't make folks roll their eyes.
The purpose of your initial outreach email is to simply elicit a response. Here are some pointers:
- Personalize it by noting anything the individual is working on, where they went to school, their dog, and so on.
- Give something of value. Inform them of a broken link on their website or a page that does not operate on mobile.
- Keep it brief.
- Ask one straightforward question (not for a connection; you'll want to establish rapport first).
Measuring and optimizing your link-building efforts
So far, we've discussed the significance of building quality connections to your website over time, as well as some common methods for doing so. Now, we'll talk about how to track the results on your link-building effort and tactics for maintaining excellent backlink growth over time.
The total number of links is
Tracking the growth of total links to your site or page is the most direct way to measure your link development activities. Moz's Link Explorer is an excellent tool for this. Assume you recently wrote a blog article that gained a lot of attention and want to track the total number of links that resource received.
Enter the URL into Link Explorer...
This might be done with a root domain, a subdomain, or a specific page.
A word about link cleaning
Some SEOs must not only build good links, but also get rid of bad ones. If you're undertaking link cleanup while also generating solid links, keep in mind that a "linking domains over time" graph that is stagnant or dropping is totally typical. You might also look into Link Explorer's "Discovered and Lost" option to keep track of the links you've obtained and lost.
If you did not receive the quantity of backlinks that you desired, all is not lost! Each link building effort teaches you something new. Consider the following questions if you want to increase the overall number of links you earn for your next campaign:
Did you produce material that was ten times better than anything else on the market?
It's possible that your link-building attempts failed since your material wasn't much more value than anything else like it. Examine the pages that are ranking for the term you're targeting and see if there's anything further you can do to enhance.
Did you advertise your content? How?
One of the most difficult components of link building is promotion, but getting others to know about your content and convincing them to link to you is what will actually move the needle.
How many links are truly required?
Consider how many backlinks you could require to rank for the keyword you're after. You can see which pages are ranking for the term you're looking for in Keyword Explorer's "SERP Analysis" report, as well as how many backlinks those URLs have. This will provide you with an excellent starting point for assessing how many connections you truly need to compete and which websites would be good link targets.
How good were the links that you received?
One link from a very authoritative source is worth more than ten links from low-quality sites, so remember that quantity isn't everything. When targeting sites for backlinks, you can prioritize them based on their domain authority and page authority.
Beyond links: The effects of awareness, amplification, and sentiment on authority
Many of the strategies you'd use to develop links will also help you build your brand indirectly. In fact, link building may be viewed as an excellent strategy to raise awareness of your brand, the areas on which you are an authority, and the products or services you provide.
When your target audience is familiar with you and you have good stuff to give, let them know! Sharing your material on social media not only makes your audience aware of it, but it can also motivate them to spread that knowledge to their own networks, thereby expanding your own reach.
Are social shares and links the same thing? No. However, sharing with the correct individuals can result in links. Social shares can also improve traffic and new people to your website, which can increase brand recognition, and with brand awareness comes trust and links. The link between social signals and rankings appears to be indirect, yet even indirect correlations can assist advise strategy.
Trustworthiness is important.
For search engines, trust is mostly determined by the quality and amount of links your domain has gained, but that doesn't mean other variables can't influence your site's authority. Consider the several ways you come to trust a brand:
- (You are aware that they exist)
- Helpfulness (they respond to your inquiries)
- Integrity (they follow through on their promises)
- Quality (their product or service is more valuable than others you've tried)
- Continued value (they continue to deliver value after you have received what you required)
- Voice (they communicate in distinctive and memorable ways)
That latter point is what we'll concentrate on today. Reviews of your company's products or services can make or ruin a company.
Follow these review guidelines to gain authority through reviews:
- Never pay anyone or any agency to create a phony positive review for your company or a phony bad review for a competitor.
- Do not examine your own or your competitors' company. Don't make your employees do it either.
- Never give any form of incentive in exchange for evaluations.
- Customers must leave all evaluations directly in their own accounts; never write reviews on behalf of a customer or hire an agency to do so.
- Set up a review station/kiosk in your place of business; multiple reviews coming from the same IP address can be interpreted as spam.
- Examine the policies of each review platform where you hope to gain reviews.
Be warned that review spam has reached epidemic proportions, and that violations of government truth-in-advertising guidelines have resulted in legal prosecution and severe fines. It's simply too unsafe to risk. Following the regulations and providing outstanding customer experiences is a winning mix for establishing trust and authority over time.
When brands do wonderful things in the real world, such as making consumers happy, developing and distributing outstanding content, and getting links from reliable sources, they gain authority.
The following and final section will teach you how to measure the success of all your efforts, as well as strategies for iterating and improving on them. To Chapter 8 (SEO Metrics, Prioritization, and Execution)!
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