Demonstrating Authority and Building Relationships with Link Building Strategies

Any links from one website to another are considered a backlink, but not all backlinks are created equal. Getting high-quality links to your website from high authority websites takes work, but it’s worth it to propel your business into a higher position in the SERP. Whether you’re planning to implement strategies yourself or hire an SEO expert, link building is here to stay.

After analyzing 11.8 million Google search results, Backlinko found that the #1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than the other results on the first page. Interestingly, Buzzsumo found that 50% of all content on the web doesn’t have any backlinks at all. 

Considering how much emphasis the world of SEO and content marketing puts on creating quality content to satisfy increased user experience demands and please Google’s ever-evolving algorithm, not getting backlinks for your content is a huge loss of time and money.

In short, no backlinks mean no visibility. A link-building strategy is an essential part of search engine optimization in 2021. So why isn’t every marketer prioritizing link building? Simply put, it’s hard. According to research from Social Media Today, 41% of marketers consider link building the most challenging part of SEO. 

What is Backlinking?

When a web page links to your site, it’s almost like a vote for the validity of your content. Why wouldn’t you ensure that your high-quality content gets a vote? There are a number of different strategies to go about link building including:

• Contributing content to another website in your industry
• Getting contributing authors who wrote a piece of content on your site to promote it
• Asking for a mention from another company where relevant
• Offering working resources from your site where other links were broken

Google makes sense of the web through the strings that connect pages together. Connecting your content to other high-performing domains raises your authority as well. 

Key Linking Terminology

1. Internal links occur when you link from one page of your website to another. While this link does have SEO value, internal links are more for technical SEO purposes. Internal links should certainly make up part of your strategy, but they should not be the core focus.
2. External links are links that directly from your page to a different (but relevant) website.
3. Backlinks occur when an external website links back to your content (a mention in an article or something similar).

Determining High-Quality Links

In the same way, you should trust a certified medical professional with a medical degree and years of experience to provide health advice over a random website from someone you’ve never met, Google feels the same. 

This phenomenon is known as “Domain Authority.” Links from industry thought leaders or popular resource pages for your area of expertise carry more weight than random websites. 

Domain Authority Scores

Tools like Ahrefs provide Domain Authority scores. Put simply, they count the number of unique websites that are linking to the target website and take into account the score of those unique websites. They then use the magic of computing to turn this into a score between 1-100.

Typically, websites with scores under 30 are considered low authority and less helpful for link building, however, domain authority scores are not measures of quality. The target website may just be very new. 

Choosing the Best Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink to another webpage. These links can be to other pages on the same website domain or between websites and are usually a contrasting and noticeable color. Anchor text is an important signal for Google in its ranking algorithm.

When your long-tail keywords are used in anchor text, Google gets a better idea about the link’s relevance, value, and context. Generally speaking, the best practice is to use diverse and natural anchor texts. 

This can include:

• using your brand name
• a page/post title
• linking the words near your actual keyword
• something generic like “visit site”

Moving beyond general practices, the best way is to analyze the top 5-10 pages that you are competing with. Take all of the anchor texts they are using and break them into groups by type. Looks at what percentages are branded vs. long-tail keyword phrases vs. generic anchor texts.

This approach is more time-consuming, but it will also give you data to make an informed decision. 

Now, when it comes to getting links, you won’t always have input on how people link to your site. For this reason, it is equally important to look at what existing anchor text your page already has. If you find that the majority of people linking to you are using the same keyword, you would want to focus on branded or generic anchor texts for the ones you can control.

Taking the time to review your anchor text profile and that of the top competitors is going to be the most accurate approach.

Dofollow vs. Nofollow

Links can serve many purposes, such as sending referral traffic to your site, mentioning you in a manner that builds your brand credibility, or simply to improve rankings for a particular page on your site. 

• Follow links have an HTML attribute that allows Google’s crawlers to see connections between websites.
• No-Follow links have an important tag along the lines of ‘rel=“nofollow”’ in the URL of the link.

The SEO value of designated no-follow links has been scrutinized for years, except for when it comes to local SEO where GMB rankings can be improved with no-follow links. Outside of pure SEO value, no-follow links can still be extremely helpful in the right circumstances. 

Let’s say you are an injury law firm and you get interviewed by CNN about a major case you are working on, but the link is no-follow. That coverage is likely to make people aware of you that were not previously (brand awareness) and to send people (referral traffic) from CNN to your website, both of which are beneficial to you as a business.

When presented with the opportunity to acquire a no-follow link, you need to stop and ask yourself if there is a potential for non-SEO benefit from the link, if not skip it.

Domain Variety

Typically, domain authority comes from do-follow links from a variety of sources. The more unique domains that vote for your website as a resource, the better.