SEO Series: External Link Building Tips
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Today, we would like to share with you some external link building tips as used by many SEO companies to improve your website ranking on Google.
What Is External Link Building?
SEO link building means building links from other websites to your website to improve your SEO on search engines. Google says that links and quality content are most important SEO ranking factors. If many high-quality links lead to a website, Google considers it popular and ranks it higher.
You have optimized the content using keyword research best practices as well as On-Page SEO tips for users. Now it is important to ensure your website has high-quality links for better SEO.
What are External Links?
External links or backlinks are hyperlinks that point from an external website to your site. A large number of external links to your website or a particular page on your site tells Google that the site or page is important.
According to Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, Google values expertise, authority, and trust of a website which is important to solving for search intent as one of the Keyword Research Best Practices among many SEO professionals. The more popular and important a site is, the more links that site has.
A nofollow link e.g. <a href=”” rel=”nofollow”>XYZ is the best web agency.</a> tells Google not to follow the link but it will still show in the Google Search Console links report. XYZ will use a nofollow link if XYZ wants to link a page to an untrustworthy source or link a page that was paid for or created by XYZ. However, you should strike a balance between nofollow and follow external links but not overdo nofollow linking.
External Link Profile
Your website external link profile means the number and quality of all the external links your website has. It helps Google understand how your website relates to other websites.
To improve the quality of your website’s external link profile, consider the following external linking building tips.
- Never manipulate Google with artificial links but earn the links and authority by creating high-quality, interesting, worthy content on your website that other websites want to reference otherwise Google would penalize you with spammy links or link spam.
- Do not purchase links.
- Do not exchange links with those you do not work, partner or affiliated with.
- Contact the owners of the websites which have mentioned your content including images but with no link in order to update those mentions with links.
- Get external links from topically relevant websites than from irrelevant websites. Google Analytics’ referral traffic tells you what websites are currently sending you traffic.
- The keywords in anchor text i.e. clickable text in a hyperlink are one of the signals Google uses to determine the topic of a web page so the anchor text should be relevant to the page you are linking to. Avoid overdoing anchor text or it will backfire because Google considers this manipulative.
Build Quality External Links
Here are some quality external link building tips.
- Acquire links from customers and partners e.g. write testimonials of their products or services on their websites with links back to your site.
- Write blog posts regularly to generate traffic and hence listings and links from other websites.
- Create unique, high-quality content that appeals visually, addresses a need or interest, elicits emotions, and sets a new trend in the industry.
- Build good resource pages because they tend to link out to other good resource pages. Use Google Advanced Search to find resource pages on related sites e.g. “keyword” site:.org intitle:”resources” -inurl:pdf -inurl:ppt -inurl:doc. This gives you ideas which types of resources you could create that these pages would all like to reference and link to.
- Reach out to your local community for local SEO links if you operate a local business e.g. local events, seminars, workshops, organizations, business associations, etc.
- Build linked references to a business’ contact information on a blog or a news site for local SEO.
- Update content that has the highest traffic, conversion rate or retention rate on your website and all other platforms like social media channels like Facebook, forums like Quora, etc.
- Draw the attention of the well-known bloggers and news media sites.
- Remove bad external links.
External Link Building Metrics & ROI
Finally, one of the external link building tips is metrics. Link building metrics may include conversions, retention, subscriptions, page views, ranking of keywords, domain authority, and total number of links to a page over time. You need to measure keep track of these metrics versus the amount of time and money you spend as your link building ROI for sustaining quality external link growth over time. For instance, if one of your new blog posts got lots of traffic, you may want to track total links that page resource has earned.
To Be Continued……
Now you know many useful SEO external link building tips employed by SEO agencies to improve your SEO. In the coming week, we will share with you in our SEO series more SEO topics in layman’s terms to help your SEO. Stay tuned.
