Link Building & Establishing Authority Flashcards
Inbound Links
Also known as backlinks or external links are HTML hyperlinks that point from one website to another. They’re said to be the currency of the internet and work very much like real life reputation
Internal links also work as a sort of internal link reputation structure. If you point to a certain page a lot, it’s a clear signal to Google that this is an important page. Just make sure that it’s done in a natural and not a spammy way
E-A-T
Expert, Authoritative, and trustworthy
The Google algorithm puts a great deal of importance on this concept. Sites that display these characteristics are rewarded and this is all becoming ever more important as the idea of solving for user intent becomes the focus of Google’s search developments.
No follow links
Sometimes you might want to link to a page and not give it the vote of authority that you might otherwise give a trustworthy source. You can use the nofollow tag for that.
Moz Link Explorer
You can use this tool to take a look at the health of your link profile
Earned mentions are often unlinked
When websites are referring to your brand or a specific piece of content you’ve published, they will often mention it without linking to it. To find these earned mentions, use Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer. You can then reach out to those publishers to see if they’ll update those mentions with links.
Links are of better quality when relevant
Naturally, it’s more desirable to get links from sites that are relevant to your community/niche
Anchor text is great because it is descriptive and relevant, without being spammy
But be careful of repeatedly linking to a particular web page with the same text over and over again. Think of doing this as similar to you asking each of your friends how they are and them all responding with the exact same answer. It’s not natural
Esteemed SEO and link building thought leader Eric Ward used to say
You should build your links as though Google might disappear tomorrow. Set out to build links to drive qualified traffic to your site.
Link building: Things to Avoid
Don’t build a link profile in a spammy, sneaky or underhand way
- don’t buy links
- Don’t engage in a link exchange
- Google penalises sites with spammy link profiles
- A guiding principle for your link building efforts is to never try to manipulate a site’s search ranking in search results
But isn’t that the entire goal of SEO? To increase a site’s ranking in search results? And herein lies the confusion. Google wants you to earn links, not build them, but the line between the two is often blurry. To avoid penalties for unnatural links (known as “link spam”), Google has made clear what should be avoided. Things not to do:
- Purchase links
- Trade links - Google warn against “excessive” link exchange. It’s more the exchange of links on a mass scale that’s the problem here, especially with unaffiliated sites. The odd exchange with affiliated sites is probs ok.
- Low quality directory links - some people charge to put your URL in a directory and use the site’s description. Usually, the site’s URL is used as a href.
More discouraged tactics can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
Links should always:
- Be earned/editorial
- Come from authoritative pages
- Increase with time
- Come from topically relevant sources
- Use relevant, natural anchor text
- Bring qualified traffic to your site
- Be a healthy mix of follow and nofollow
- Be strategically targeted or naturally earned
List of ways to linkbuild
Find Customer and partner links - you can offer to write testimonials about certain products and people selling those products can link back to your testimonial on their site
- Starting a blog on your site is actually a great way of building links and is also recommended by Google. You can start up conversations between blogs quite efficiently, but be careful about doing guest blog posts that don’t bring that much value. Google advises against doing that.
- If you can create a useful, unique and meaningful resource, you are onto a winner. People love to share tools and resources with friends and maybe colleagues.
- Resource pages are a great way to build links
- Use advanced search operators to find resource pages. For example if you were link building for a company that made pots and pans, you could search for:
cooking intitle:”resources”
and see which pages might be good link targets. Just think about what sort of content you could create that these sorts of pages might want to link to.
For more tips:
https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building
The power of getting involved with your local community for link building
- Engage in sponsorships and scholarships
- Host or participate in community events, seminars, workshops, and organizations
- Donate to worthy local causes and join local business associations
- Post jobs and offer internships
- Promote loyalty programs
- Run a local competition
- Develop real-world relationships with related local businesses to discover how you can team up to improve the health of your local economy
Link building for local SEO
Refurbish top content - you likely already know which content converts the most, drives the most traffic or retains visitors for the longest amount of time.
Take that content and refurbish it for other platforms like Slideshare, YouTube, Instagram, Quora
If a few trusted industry websites all linked to a particular resource that has gone stale, update it and let those websites know - you might just get a good link out of it
You can also do this with images. if a site is using your image but not citing you, get in touch to ask them to include a link to your site.
Building a custom, personal and valuable outreach email
Don’t be annoying with a spammy outreach email
Your goal for an initial outreach email is simply to get a response. These tips can help:
- Make it personal by mentioning something the person is working on, where they went to school, their dog, etc.
- Provide value. Let them know about a broken link on their website or a page that isn’t working on mobile.
- Keep it short.
- Ask one simple question (typically not for a link; you’ll likely want to build a rapport first).
It’s a good idea to keep track of lost links
You can use this too for that https://moz.com/link-explorer
