Effective strategies in building links [new study]

Link building is acquiring hyperlinks from other sites to your website in the form of naked URLs (www.domain.com) or anchor texts (keywords). There are many ways to build links that vary in difficulty, and most of the time SEO’s tend to find it very challenging as it is said to be the hardest part of their job.

Via neilpatel.com

Why links still matter?

• Links always matter, it’s the best source of getting instant traffic, promote brand awareness and increase the keyword visibility in any search engine. Links matter in a different form, mastering the art of it can get your site ahead of the others especially with your competitors which should be your aim.

4 Types of link building

1. Informational link building

1. It could be contextual types of links or an article that provides more information on any particular topic

2. Definitional link building

1. It could still be contextual types of links that define the terminologies and explaining the meaning of any specific topic.

3. Referential link building

1. It could be a citation link, sources link, statistics, reference or infographics.

4. Promotional link building

It could be copywriting styles of contextual link building that could offer incentives, product features, or pricing reviews and feature comparisons.

 

Check your website’s effectiveness through bounce rate

• Bounce rate is a record of visits (as calculated in percentage) of one page before leaving the website and referred as sessions in Google Analytics. It’s also a strong indication of how engaging the site is and how it provides an excellent user experience from a user usability standpoint.

• Bounce rate calculation sample – if you get a total of 100 visitors and get 87 unique visits on just one single page, your bounce rate would be 87%.

• 100 / 87 = 87%

Bounce rate ratings:

• <40% Excellent
• 40-55% Good
• 56-70% Fair
• > 70% Poor

 

5 ways to decrease your bounce rate

1. Open new link tab browser every time they click links on your website.
2. Use a responsive and mobile optimised page.
3. Enhance menu navigational access.
4. Add related links, recent or past posts every time you create new content (this method is also called link wheel).
5. Keep your content more focused.

 

Build links to satisfy user’s needs [Case Study]

• Gaining traffic comes with different methods, but this case study method is surely a win-win. As far as the link building is concerned, it frequently evolves from time to time. The content is considered as the king (always on the top), and it will always be the best source of traffic for many years to come.

• We conducted a content case study in reaching out the possible content ROI or content engagement. We have written 2 test contents that thoroughly undergoes full analysis in keyword research, content topic research, competitors backlinks analysis and Google search results in comparison that apparently composed of 1000+ words. This is totally a new website, and it has only a little website traffic that comes only from “direct traffic” as verified in Google Analytics.

• We made sure that the content was 100% free from plagiarism through Copyscape, contains an interesting topic, targets readers’ interests, but not for search engines (Avoiding Link Schemes) and last but not least added a personal recommendation to make it more unique.

• The title and the URL structure is generating a variation of keywords in line with the most visited websites like majestic.com. Notice in the image below, majestic is a tool which offers a free link checker, and our test content is just for reviewing the hidden features of each tool that we mentioned in our article. We only amplify each to expand the reach through social media submissions.

 

• Notice again on the image below for our 2nd test content. It’s apparently outranking the most visited and high authoritative websites. Most of its ranking competitors in Google AU (Australia) have been published a year or a month ago. There are still huge possibilities to outrank its search results ranking once this published content gains more users’ interest.

 

• A comparison from Google Analytics after we published 2 test contents.

Two tests published content links:

SEO on-page from scratch and Ultimate backlinks checker guide checklist.

We also tracked our website metrics and keyword rankings in MOZ and set a bi-weekly result update. Notice on the screenshot below, from almost zero results it gained 80% recorded visits.

MOZ bi-weekly update

Free link opportunities in an effective way

• Free links from niche related high authority sites are apparently very hard to find.  Links opportunities are the key to achieving instant boost on your traffic using organic or direct referrals. The traffic comes from those links posted from one site to another and links back to your site that can generate user engagements that could convert to website traffic. You can view your more detailed traffic sources through your Google Analytics Account > Acquisition > Source/Medium as a reference.

• Link outreach campaigns are the method we used to gain free links opportunities. It gives you a way to contact them personally and introduce your interest. You need to present yourself, your product, your official social media accounts, and what you can offer to them in return via email pitching. As we pitched to almost 500+ local bloggers for our digital marketing niche, we gained approximately 60% of guest post opportunities in which we’re planning to use to diversify our anchor text. We created different columns on our spreadsheet to check the credibility of each local blog sites we pitch.

• We searched local blog owners, listed their local blog sites on a spreadsheet, and gathered their email contacts. We used keyword footprints that relate to the industry that was looking for any link opportunities. For example:

1. keyword + write for us
2. Keyword + blog + write for us
3. keyword + guest post
4. keyword + add content
5. keyword + submit post
6. keyword + contribute
7. Inurl: guest-post + keyword
8. Inurl: write-for-us + keyword

Then we search each footprint on any search engine browser. We also combined the data we gathered from all of our competitors using backlink checker online tools.

Spreadsheet Custom Columns to check website credibility

1. Topic / Keyword Footprints
2. Alexa Rank
3. Contact Email
4. Semrush Estimated Organic Traffic (US based)
5. Trust Flow (using Majestic tool)
6. Citation Flow (using Majestic tool)
7. Domain Authority (using MOZ tool)
8. Pitched Sent Date
9. Reply Status and Notes
10. Blog Post Exchange
11. Article Link Source
12. Notes

Pitch format Sample:

Subject: Website Enquiry

• We used a uniform subject, which is “Website Enquiry” just to catch their attention that we’re enquiring something from them without anticipating your primary interest. The word “enquiry” is common in British English.

Content Body:

Hi,

We’d like to enquire if you accept guest posts? I’d like to make this short. I’m Joel from Websavii.com.au. We’d like to offer a guest blog post with topics,  e.g. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) case studies, Web Designing tutorial, PPC management to the lowest cost-per-click (CPC), Digital Marketing ideas, and much more that will interest your readers. In exchange, we’d share it to our entire social media portfolio that will gain massive likes and engagement.

Visit our viral content as reference at  http://bit.ly/2fVuikn

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Websavii Australiahttps://www.facebook.com/websaviihttps://twitter.com/websavii

• As we gathered data on competitors backlinks, we also listed the traffic volume, number of anchor texts used per content and hyperlink keyword. The diversification of anchor text in link building is far more efficient than focusing on a single URL.

Ranking without building links

• There are still possibilities that you can rank a keyword without extensive link building activity. I’ve run a test which determines the factors that enable it to surpass the keyword competition and volume, or it generates keywords from the content itself and gains unexpected traffic sources.

• The first thing I did was to do keyword research, constant content audit, and research on particular topics. I also ask frequent questions online e.g. in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or in Quora just to strengthen the reach possibilities of the topic.  

 

Here are 11 ways to rank in Google without building links

1. Writing content for in-depth articles.
2. Content that will satisfy users needs.
3. Video Submission.
4. Verified Google Map submission.
5. Website Speed and more speed.
6. Mobile Optimisation – Configure Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
7. Target International Audiences
   • Add a variation of languages in your landing pages and set preferred languages in Google Search Console.
   • Add href language attributes on each of your landing pages.
8. Gain more engagement, interact and always mention your website brand on different social online discussions.
9. Schema and Snippet Optimisation
   • Implement Rich snippet structure using Schema.
   • Implement Structured Data in Google Search Console.
10. Update fresh content frequently.
11. Constant On-Page SEO analysis.

Recommendation

To broaden the approach, we asked a few questions in Quora.com and Linkedin.com.

Read more recommendations here from Quora (can you rank without building links?) and for Linkedin click here.