Everyone trying to rank their website always asks this question and you have to be careful building links nowadays especially after the Panda and Penguin updates. Whenever I research this question, I’ll get conflicting answers but after working with several clients on SEO, I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. I have my own link building philosophy based on “3” important things:
- Relevance
- Authority
- # of links
Consider if you have the first 2 in order, you’re pretty much good to start building links to your page. First, make sure you build links from the MOST relevant websites. Secondly, make sure you build links from the highest authority websites because this will add value to your website quickly. Not to mention, it’ll be every hard for your competition to outrank you if they don’t have links from the same value websites. Now that you have these two factors in place let’s look at the rate of links you should be building. Let’s get started looking at it from a month-to-month perspective.
Starting With Month 1
You’ve launched your website and now it’s time to start building links. During the first month, I recommend you build links to your homepage, which will help your website get indexed. Remember, you just went live and Google might NOT know about your main URL. Building links will definitely help your website get indexed and at this point, it’s important you start slow. I recommend to start building 5-10 high authority backlinks pointing to only your homepage.
Next, Month 2
In this step, you’re also building inbound links, which means external websites pointing to your website. I would recommend mixing up your links so there are URL, EXACT, and related keywords, which helps diversify your link profile. This month, you can build 10-15 links pointing to both your homepage and internal pages. It’s a good idea to point 3-4 to your homepage and the rest to high value internal pages. This method is known as deep-linking and works because you are adding value to your entire website.
Next, Month 3
You’ll be building links to home page and internal pages to structure a deeplinking pattern. It’s a good idea to have anywhere from 20-30 internal links and they should be mixed up. However, try and focus around 65% to be URL (www.example.com) as research has shown it’s a great way to add value to your domain. Focus on links from article directories and/or link directories. Bookmarking is a great way to build high quality links quickly and you can even hire someone from Fiverr.com to do it for you.
Next, Month 4
For “3” months, you’ve been building links to your homepage and now it’s time to focus entirely on your internal pages. Deeplinking, as mentioned, is a great way to spread value to all your pages. Build anywhere from 30-40 links, mixing up the keywords to match the internal pages. Spread this linking out through the month.
Finally, Month 5….
By now, you should have a solid amount of links to your homepage and internal pages. Your website should be completely indexed and internal pages should have value. I would recommend building links going forward at a rate of 10-12 per month, focusing on both home and internal pages. However, no matter when you’re building links, it’s important to focus on high quality links from authoritative links. Here’s why I emphasis building links to your internal pages more than your homepage after a certain point.
Neil Patel from QuickSprout.com is ranking for some of the MOST popular keywords on online marketing. He currently has 9,143 links pointing to his website and out of those, ONLY 19.7% are pointing to the homepage. Building links using this pattern is a great way to boost the entire value of your website, which is very important to Google.