You have made content that matches user intent, compatible to what people are searching for, satisfies their queries, as well as search engines. Now you want to stand out from others.
To do so, you must build authority!
Authority can be built by getting backlinks to your site from authoritative websites.
But what are links? And how do you earn them? Let’s get a better insight into it!
Links
External links are HTML links that are the path from one website to another. Also known as backlinks or inbound links, these are the currency of the Internet world, on behalf of which authorities are earned. These act a lot like real life repute.
Then comes Internal links. Internal links connect different pages of the same domain. Large number of internal links leading to a certain page of your website tells Google that it is important, unless not done in a spammy way.
History of Links
Link building began with the invention of Google, where the important factors of SEO came into existence with the backlink profile showing who is linking to your site.
However, since the late 1990s, Google has treated links as votes for popularity of a page.
Today, it’s all a game of link building, but the question is how do the search engines evaluate all those links?
Whose bread I E-A-T, his song I sing
A proverb truly applicable in SEO. It’s all a tactic of E-A-T.
E-A-T is an acronym for expert, authoritative and trustworthy. Sites that are not able to present these 3 qualities to search engines are seen as of lower quality in their eyes and hence, they won’t sing the song of such sites.
On the contrary, the sites who are successful to present these three qualities are rewarded with better visibility and higher ranking. E-A-T is becoming more and more important as search evolves and increases the importance of solving for user intent.
E-A-T and links to your site
The more popular and important a site is, the more weight the links from that site carry. A site like Wikipedia, for example, has thousands of diverse sites linking to it. This indicates it provides lots of expertise, has cultivated authority, and is trusted among those other sites.
To earn trust and authority with search engines, you’ll need links from websites that display the qualities of E-A-T. These don’t have to be Wikipedia-level sites, but they should provide searchers with credible, trustworthy content.
Link building Do’s for your site
- Links should be earned
- These links should come from authoritative sites
- Links must increase with time
- Must come from categorically relevant topics
- Use natural relevant anchor text
- Bring qualified traffic to your site
- There should be a healthy mix of follow and nofollow links
- Links must be strategically targeted and naturally earned
Link building Don’ts for your site
- Do not purchase links
- Avoid link exchanges/ reciprocal links
- Avoid low quality directory links
How to build a high quality link
Link building is a strategic play, therefore, your link campaigns must always highly relate to your unique business goals.
Before thinking about how to build a link, the initial question is with whom to associate for getting a backlink
Given are techniques for finding the link targets
1. Find list of bloggers
The fundamental place to look for such a list is google search.
One single search gives you hundreds and thousands of search results. The benefit of executing such a search is that someone has already did all the hard work for making a list for you.
With a tool like Scraper, which is a Chrome plugin, you can quickly grab all of the URLs from a list like this. Using the right-click menu, click “Scrape similar.”
On the contrary, unlike the masses of users, you can also use advanced search operators (set of search tools available) to get search results much more targeted and specific to what we need.
2. Find out more about the personas your are seeking
If you want to have a high response rate with your outreach, you need to spend a bit of time making sure that the websites you’ve found are as relevant as possible.
Spend time learning about the bloggers you want to target. Try to get a sense of what they like and dislike by visiting their websites. Browse through their social media networks, such as Twitter, to see what links they’ve posted recently.
Make sure to pay attention to whether or not they promote other people’s content, because in the end, it is what you will be asking for.
3. Find contact details
After you have found the right blogger to contact, find out how you can reach out to them. There are always contact details available somewhere on their website (mostly on the site header or footer) or a separate web page might be available.
You can also check their social media accounts to get their contact details.
Prioritizing Link Targets
Your link targets at this point probably number in the hundreds, and you should prioritize them and group them into buckets so that you can tailor your message to them as efficiently as possible.
Outreach to link targets can be prioritized in many ways.
Following are a few possible ways:
- By Domain metrics, like Domain Authority
- Via Blogger influence, like number of Twitter followers
- By the likelihood of linking, like a cupcake blogger vs. a generic food blogger
