When building links to your blog, I encourage focusing on quality. We know how Google has been making several changes to the search results and how they have shifted their focus to quality. The change comes from understanding the user search pattern and how it’s changed in recent years. For example, you’ll notice people are much more precise, using both long tail and LSI keywords to find what they are looking for. Having a better understanding of this pattern will allow you to build the right type of links to your pages going forward. Whenever I write about link building and quality, people still have a hard time understanding what I mean. I’ve decided to put this post together, dividing the quality elements into “4” section, which will help you understand link building in more depth. For example, you’ll learn below how quality can be defined using the following:
- Relevant
- Natural
- Useful
- Editorial
Below, I’ll go over each factor and if you can set your mind frame to think of these “4” elements each time you build links, you won’t have any problems going forward. Let’s jump into this a little further.
Relevant
Your links have to relevant and this has never been more evident than today. Relevance is what the web is all about and when people perform a search, it’s important they find “EXACTLY” what they’re looking for. The only way to be able to determine relevance is by building links from niche targeted websites. Google has put a lot of weight on relevant links because it restricts people from building links on websites that hold no equivalent value. Implementing this into your link building doesn’t have to be difficult, but only requires you to take your time and do some research before link building. Here are a few things you can do to check sites’ relevance…
- Skim through content to see what other type of content is published
- If it’s an article directory, then choose the right categories
- Use the right anchor text when building links
- Check social profiles
Natural
One of the worst ways to destroy your link building campaign is by randomly building bulk links at one time. Google has been well known to collect data on searches and link building patterns because it helps them increase performance going forward. It’s well known that 100 links per week is impossible, especially from quality websites so make sure you keep everything natural. I’ve done some testing and have learned building 3-4 links per week is very natural.
Using a natural link building pattern will also protect you from being penalized by Google during updates or frequent auditing.
Useful
When building these types of links, you have to keep your visitor in mind and what they’re looking for. The best type of link building is connecting to pages that add more value and with the right anchor text. Both of these elements are important for building user engagement and traffic. When you link to other useful content, you’ve increased the chances of your audience clicking-through and sharing content on their social profiles. However, for them to click-through, you want to ensure you provide the correct anchor text that is relevant and provides an additional resource to the content being read.
When building these links, keep your purpose and keyword in mind before building links going forward.
Editorial Link
Many people haven’t heard of this term, but I’m sure we all know what they are. These types of links are NOT purchased and/or built by the blog owner. Editorial links are attracted by the blog because of the high value content it produces, which is probably the best type of link anyone can ask for. To help better illustrate this point, it’s important to keep these things in mind. First, a link building campaign involves the blog owner going and building links by themselves. This involves buying or posting links on their own. However, an editorial link comes from others who know your blog write high value content because of your proven track record. This means people simply love to link to your content WITHOUT you requesting to do so. The best thing about editorial links is the following:
They automatically meet the quality guidelines without you doing any work. For example, they are:
- Relevant
- Useful
- Natural
- Editorial
In the end, we can see from this content, our objective should always be to write the best content that attracts links naturally.