Bringing Quality Backlinks Back to Your Small Business

After the much-publicized brouhaha over Google’s aggressive penalties for manipulative link building several years ago, many businesses abandoned most if not all their link buying or building efforts. But the times, they are a changin’… again.

According to a recent Moz survey, about 37% of business owners now spend between $10,000 and $50,000 per month on link building. Other reports say that

SEOs have decreased their link spending budgets over the past few years. Whether people are investing more in this space or are scared to participate effectively in this game with a constantly changing set of rules, link building is still making headlines. Yes, it’s possible to score big if you do it right – backlinks continue to play an important role in helping your business appear on the first pages of the search engine results pages (SERPs). So let’s look at some relatively simple strategies to bring linking – quality link building — back into your consideration set.

It All Comes Down to Value

In his blog “How to Build High Quality Backlinks in a Scalable Way,” Neil Patel dives deep into the world of link building.

It used to be a very straightforward process. SBOs would write articles, submit them to an article submission site, and receive a link back to their own website. These private blog networks could help boost their rankings. Then, Google put the PBN deindexing update into place, changing the game for businesses. In fact, the wrong inbound links can get your website in big trouble with Google if you aren’t following the new rules.

Should you give up on link building all together if you are scared to cross the line? Not so fast. You just need to build them in the right way, focusing on trust. Copyblogger reports that “domain trust/authority” represents 23.87% of Google’s ranking algorithm. In becoming trustworthy, consider Google’s mission: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Instead of selling your products, think about what your readers and buyers want and need. Make your content useful and valuable. In Moz’s book, How to Rank, Cyrus Shepard states the 90/10 rule of link building: “90% of your effort should go into creating great content, and 10% into link building.”
Once you have great content, help Google find it and index it so the resulting links can improve your rankings. Remember not to build links as fast as you can, since it will raise red flags for Google.

Expanding Your Footprint with Quality Backlinks

Once you have achieved relevance and trust with high-quality links, start building relationships with authority sites. Tools like Similar Site Search can help, as well as looking at metrics like trust flow (analyzed by Majestic) that help define quality links. When the majority of your backlinks come from sites with high trust flow metrics, your SEO rankings will also improve.

Another way to assess the quality of a site is to look at the anchor text. Anchor text incorporates keywords and phrases that are core to your business. For instance, if you sell heat pumps, you want people to find you at the top of the first page of search results (SERP 1) when they use that term. So, an anchor text link that includes the non-brand term “heat pumps” can help build greater visibility for your website for that term. This is especially true to help attract new customers — people who may not be familiar with your business – who may be actively looking to purchase a heat pump.

However, there are risks in creating too many backlinks using anchor text links. Google has been known to penalize sites that have an abnormally high percentage of exact phrase anchor text backlinks. While there is disagreement on what that “over-optimization” threshold looks like, consider keeping anchor text links below 50% of all your inbound links. Less can be more when it comes to avoiding being thrown in Google’s penalty box.

At the same time, don’t hesitate to get as many branded links as you can. Branded links will help generate visibility for your company name in the SERPs – especially for people who know you. But your brand does not tell the searcher that does not know you that you sell heat pumps. In this case, you may want to combine your brand name with your core products; i.e. “Spencer’s Heat Pumps.”

Additionally, consider building the strength of your inbound links with a two-tier linking structure for your site, defined in the article as:

  • Tier 1 backlinks are links you earn/build directly to your site
  • Tier 2 backlinks are links that directly pass ranking value to tier-one links

(Side note: It’s important to avoid anchor text over-optimization when you’re using a tier 2 link building structure to strengthen your tier 1 backlinks).

For tier 2 backlinks, the author recommends three steps:

  1. Post valuable articles on web 2.0 sites like Tumblr, Web Node and Blogger.
  2. Get your Tumblr page indexed through sharing the post URL on Google+ and Facebook and pinging it at Pingomatic, which will syndicate your URL to major content aggregators.
  3. Use a branded keyword on the Tumblr page to link back to your site once it is indexed.

As you continue to build high quality inbound links, keep a few things top of mind:

Keyword research: When content is relevant, people will continue to link to it. When you have the right keywords, targeting is more effective, and metrics (like click through rates) will improve. Ultimately, your target audience demographics must stay front and center in defining the right words.

Editorial links: If you can earn editorial links from authority sites, the payoff can be huge. It’s not easy though. You have to create dynamic, out-of-the-park content that people can’t help but share with their own networks of people.

Guest blogging: This is a great strategy to earn authority links so make sure there is relevant synergy before tapping into this.

Looking Forward

If it’s done correctly, with strong content at the helm, link building can be very beneficial to your brand, exposure, and your bottom line.
How much will link building be a part of your strategy in the coming year? Do you have any other tips to share that you have learned along the way in this process? We’d love to hear it!

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Reference: http://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-build-high-quality-backlinks-in-a-scalable-way