If you want to get into link-building, simply creating a quality resource and waiting for people to link to it is a mistake. You still need to promote your content in the digital space. It is best if other platforms notice you and mention your site. This increases the importance of your project in terms of search algorithms, which, in turn, leads to top positions in the SERP. However, creating a solid link-building strategy is not as easy as it seems at first glance.
If you master powerful techniques, you can quickly take your site to the top and get a flow of traffic. In addition, there is a backlink service you can try for free and get great outcomes. In this blog, we will analyze proven techniques and the best link building strategies that bring maximum results to web developers in 2023.
Why Links Are Essential
With the advent of Google and its consolidation as a search giant, new site-ranking rules have emerged. Now, not only content and internal optimization were taken into account, but also external (off-page) SEO began to matter. So, the links to your site from others also gained its value. This was a defining moment that changed the way we view SEO link building techniques forever.
Correlation Between Web Development and Link Building
SEO specialists and webmasters know that it is very important to prevent, for example, server errors from appearing on the site. But often, they forget about other dangerous mistakes, such as architecture and site navigation errors. In order for your site to rank high, you need to make it convenient not only for your users in terms of UI/UX but also for the search bots and crawlers.
Importance of Website Architecture
In fact, ranking for specific key queries in search engines greatly depends on the site's architecture. The point is that pages with links from many other pages will have much more link juice than those with fewer mentions. The link weight is one of the main factors the search engine considers to determine the quality and relevance of the page. In other words, pages that are easy to find and have lots of internal and external links will rank much higher for highly competitive keywords compared to those that have no or weak backlink profiles.
However, it is not at all necessary that each of your product pages is literally “bathing” in links. In most cases, one link from the category selection page might be enough because some pages don’t need much link weight. It will already rank well for nominal product queries located and described on it. In general terms, the site architecture should consist of several levels within the overall hierarchy:
- The first level is the home page of your site. It usually has the most link juice on the website, so it can be optimized to rank for general and highly competitive queries.
- The second level is pages and links placed in the site's general navigation menu. Usually, these are pages with top offers. Thus, you can optimize these pages for reasonably competitive keywords related to the product category.
- The third level is pages with individual goods and services. You should optimize them for nominal queries (specific names of the offered products or services).
Start generating ideas for an effective link building plan from internal structure optimization. Think carefully about how to seamlessly fit your products into the site's navigation and hierarchical structure. By the way, the logical organization of your content will appeal to both crawlers and your clients.
Link-Building Strategies for New Sites
If your site is recently published, most likely, you have already encountered certain difficulties. You don't have enough material or credibility yet to attract the attention of well-known websites. However, you can improve the situation with the help of universal tips that we have specially selected for newly created projects. Pay attention to the following areas of work:
- Create unique and valuable content
- Do guest posting
- Collaborate with bloggers and influencers
- Participate in communities and forums
- Build links using social networks
If you have a newly created site and need more information on the topic, you can get it here.
Working Tactics
You must ensure that users and search crawlers can easily find what they are looking for on the web page. Believe it or not, poor site architecture can lower search rankings, traffic, and even conversions. For example, if a robot cannot view some of the site's content because it is only available through a search on the resource, it will most likely stay unindexed.
Internal Linking Structure
Any analysis of internal links can have many overlapping and related goals. Use these general tips:
- identify effective organic pages you can link to, especially those with the best thematically relevant sources of backlinks and traffic. You can utilize Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to complete this task.
- You can determine the priority pages you want to link to using the same tools.
- Define the appropriate text for links, considering the pages' specifics, users' needs, the keywords you want to rank for these pages, and where the links are placed.
- You must ensure that the links you place do not have signs of spam, such as repetitive or keyword-rich text.
- After that, analyze crawl reports, focusing on finding and fixing issues such as "lost" pages, pages with insufficient links, and index bloat.
- Collect the data obtained in the table and draw up a work plan.
All of these methods will be more effective if you use the proper set of tools and know what to look for.
Fixing Broken Links and Redirects
The main danger that broken links entail is the loss of traffic. In addition, each link has a special “metric” (in the environment of optimizers, it is called weight). If we are talking about a broken link, it also turns out to be nullified. In other words, the link juice is simply not transferred. Another negative side of broken URLs is that search engines do not like domains with many links of this type. Such sites rank worse and are indexed more slowly. Why?
The fact is that each crawler (search robot) has its limit on the total number of requests that it can send within one domain (the number of requests per second, for example). If there are a lot of broken URLs, then the robot simply spends all the limit on empty pages, and truly useful content remains without its attention. Therefore, regular link checking is integral to backlink building and web development.
Conclusion
A site's backlink profile significantly impacts ranking in Google searches. That’s why link building is given worthy attention along with quality and unique content. The main benefit of link building is the ability to generate constant traffic to the site. That’s why you should keep track of all the links and periodically check them.
