When it comes to SEO and link building, it’s essential to obtain excellent backlinks to rank high in Google. Bright Edge notes that 53.3% of all organic website traffic comes from search engines. While the goal may be the same for those whose businesses rely heavily on web-based leads, the strategies to secure great backlinks certainly vary. Depending on one’s website and the audience they are working to reach, one’s backlinking strategy will be tailored to their specific needs. Let’s take a look at some popular backlinking strategies that are commonly used.
White Hat vs. Black Hat Link Building
Businesses can set out to build links in one of two ways. The terms white hat and black hat refer to the old days of westerns in cinema. The good guys always wore white hats, and the bad guys always wore black. However, the nuanced differences between these types of SEO link-building may not be immediately apparent.
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO building follows all the rules and regulations that search engines like Google offer. They look at link-building by the human audience. The changes they implement to a website help visitors find a more rewarding experience. They don’t have any illusions of SEO changing a website overnight and understand this is a gradual process. White Hat SEO may take weeks, even months, to get the desired results. However, because they focus on the long-term, their impacts on the traffic numbers are more substantial.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO tries to work around the accepted guidelines of the search engine system. It attempts to exploit holes in the design and, as a result, has to be changing as search engines remedy exploits frequently. These exploits are core to the practice of black hat SEO. Instead of bringing value to the user, black hat SEO experts prefer to fool visitors into ending up on the site. While this may get a lot of traffic, it won’t do much for conversion rates. This traffic is usually temporary, with most users avoiding the site in the future on general principle. It’s the equivalent of a “get rich quick” scheme in real life. There’s never a good reason to hire a black hat SEO expert.
The Characteristics of High-Quality Backlinks
When a website owner is trying to get backlinks, they don’t want any links they can get their hands on. They want links with quality and authority. But what do “high quality” links mean? Among the factors that affect the quality of a link are:
Authority
A high-quality link comes from an authority site. In the simplest of terms, an authority site is where people get information on a particular topic or niche. They are usually sites with a lot of traffic and regular daily visitors trying to keep up to date with what’s happening in the sector. These authority links are potent testimonies of a website’s standing within the community.
Keyword-Rich Anchor Text
A link within the body of a website should display anchor text that relies on the target keywords. These don’t have to be the primary keywords but may be secondary or even tertiary level keywords.
A Source Domain Relevant To The Site’s Interests
When a site builds a backlink, the link should point to another website within the same industry or sector since it shows relevancy. Black hat SEO building usually focuses on getting links to as many sites as possible from all over, regardless of the relevance. However, with Google’s focus on “intent-oriented” search, the relevancy of the link’s site becomes more of a critical consideration.
Links Should Be Do-Follow
The “do-follow” tag in backlinks allows search engine bots to crawl and follow the links all the way to their source. Do-follow links drive traffic for the receiving website and are good practice for building SEO links that are reciprocal.
Unique Referring Domain
The referring domain for a backlink should be unique. While there’s nothing stopping one from linking to a single site multiple times, it’s bad form and may lead to lower quality authority scores because of it. A single, unique referring domain per backlink is desirable.
Finding The Perfect Strategy
We already covered how critical high-quality backlinks are, but how does a website get these high-quality links?From securing links for clients, increasing rankings, implementing reusable content campaigns for traffic and revenue, and everything in between, SEO is a complex industry that yields excellent online businesses’ benefits. Backlinking is a strategy within a strategy that allows for an increase in traffic, leads, and revenue. Here are a few top backlinking procedures to secure links:
- Outreaching: If you have run content campaigns, you must never stop outreaching if your campaign still has some power. Through campaigns, the process usually progresses from ideas to design to prospecting and finally to outreach. By continuing the outreach portion, you can build contacts and content, which will help obtain links consistently.
- Outreaching 2.0: Outreaching is key to acquiring top-notching backlinks for your site. Outreaching to 2nd-tier linking websites is another great strategy individuals will want to implement to secure more backlinks. One of the best things you can do to help your site rank is to run a content-driven link-building campaign. The end goal? To obtain links from high-authority domains that will pass their traffic to your site. If reaching top-notch linking sites has proven difficult, don’t be afraid to reach out to 2nd-tier linking websites; they can still drive more traffic to your site through quality backlinks.
- Keyword research: Using keyword research for more links is a great strategy that will boast excellent results. The purpose of conducting keyword research for more backlinks is to examine your content ideas and find keywords with volume and relate to your content. If you do happen to find keywords with good volume, it’s essential to implement them within your work–increasing traffic by ranking for those keywords.
- Create reusable content campaigns: A much more traditional approach to acquiring backlinks is running a reusable content campaign. Instead of creating a campaign, using it, getting everything you can out of it, and discarding it once you’re done, reusable content campaigns allow you to stay within budget and collect great backlinks for your site. The ability to use your already existing content campaign will provide you with the opportunity to relaunch with ease and efficiency.
With these strategies in mind, it’s essential to decide which one will yield the most benefits for your site’s and your business’sspecific needs. If you want to take a bolder approach, mix them together and see how each of them complement each other to provide you with the backlinks you need.
Author Bio:
Manny Janero, of Click Elements, has been in the online marketing industry since 2007. His experience derives from years of account management, data analysis and structuring of high-cost online marketing campaigns in all major search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo. He has successfully developed and managed large volumes of Pay Per Click campaigns for both local and national clients, in addition to managing local and national SEO campaigns. Having generated lead returns of over $15 million, Manny has acquired extensive knowledge of effective online marketing strategies within many different business verticals, including eCommerce businesses. He also has extensive experience in online advertising channels like Amazon, AdRoll, and Steelhouse. Manny is Google-certified with a passion for digital marketing and generating successful results for his clients.