Website Review Survey: Will Link Building Help My SEO?

Website Review Survey

Link building – it’s long been one of the pillars of SEO and online marketing, but is it really an effective technique? Have you had a website review survey that indicated you needed to put a little more effort into your ranking? If so, can linking help?

As all marketers know, the perfect formula for SEO is quite complex. Yet there are some factors that have remained constant through the changes in the industry. Great content is still vital to your ranking, and link building still works. You just have to be strategic and careful with your link building for it to be an effective technique. Here are some tips to help you develop a link building technique that works.

Content Leads the Process

Link building is directly related to content. You have to have content to link to, and that content needs to be something other website owners want to link to. Here are some types of content that can be excellent for linking:

• Authoritative infographics
• Resource pages
• Biographies or interviews with thought leaders
• Useful, interesting and unique content
• Online tools (like calculators)
• Interactive data pages

Find the Best and Create Something Better

Are you working to create linkable assets? One strategy to use is to find the best content on your topic, and make something better. Using tools like Open Site Explorer or Topsy, you can find articles that are highly shared in your niche. See what they offer, and write or create something that is even better and more effective. Then, use your linking strategies to start linking to the content, and watch as it becomes even more widely shared by leaders in your industry.

Guest-Blogging on Relevant Niche Sites Improves Your Rank

Find a high-ranking site in your niche, and ask if you can contribute a guest blog post. You can add links to your page into the guest blog or in your bio at the end. To make this an effective technique, make sure you write for relevant sites, and avoid writing too many blog posts at a time. Finally, make sure the posts you provide are relevant and helpful to the site owner, so you will be asked back to guest blog later.

Know What Hurts Links

Not all links are created equal, however. Poor quality links can actually damage your ranking. Here are some factors that can hurt the quality of a link:

• Too many other links on the page
• Linking on a page with a low page rank or domain authority
• Anchor text not related to the content
• Linking on pages not related to your keywords

Examples of Quality Links

MOZ is a SEO authority, and they regularly incorporate both internal and external links in an effective way. In their article “Growing Popularity and Links,” you can see excellent examples of quality links. Strong anchor text is a good ratio between linked and non-linked content, and an authoritative site all combined make strong links.

Wordtracker shows an example of how guest blogging or thought leader interviews can help you earn quality links. In this article on Link Building Strategies, Wordtracker interviewed 33 SEO experts. Each one including a link back to his or her page after contributing some information to the blog.

How strong are your links? If you are not sure, a website review survey can help. Contact Marketing Matters Inbound today for a website review survey. Our website review survey will show the gaps in your digital marketing plan, including linking, that you can fix to improve your marketing efforts.