How to Do Link Building? Keys to Designing a Successful Strategy

Before Starting with Link Building

Now that you know the importance of quality links for improving positioning, you should be clear on some keys before you start designing your strategy:

When to Invest in Links

You should consider whether it is the right time to invest in links by evaluating the overall state of the website (growth, consolidation…) and the budget you have available. 

On-Page Audit

It is important to conduct an on-page audit to determine if your website is ready to start investing in link building. For this, you should analyze criteria such as usability, design, content, or EEAT, as well as internal architecture, to make the most of it. It may also be interesting to check how many outgoing links the URLs have (internal and external).

Off-Page Audit

You should analyze the total number of links to your site and their distribution considering the origin of the domains (countries, IPs…), the types of domains (thematic, generalist, forums…), the anchor texts used, or their distributions (nofollow, follow, images…). This can help you identify possible links that may penalize your project and detect if it is necessary to clean up before starting your link building strategy. You should avoid any association of the site with possible suspicious practices that Google may penalize.

Competitor Analysis

You should analyze whether your competitors are doing link building, if they buy links, what keywords they are trying to rank for, or the types of links and domains pointing to their websites. This can help you identify which links are working for them and whether they bring more traffic or not. You should not replicate your competitors out of habit, but it is interesting to analyze where you stand: what they do well, what gives them results, what they do poorly…

Objectives

It is important that you are clear about your objectives with link building: enhancing brand image, improving authority through indexing, or ranking certain keywords for your business are some of the most common objectives. Depending on what yours are, you will need to design one strategy or another.

How to Get Links?

You can get links through many different methods, among which the following stand out:

• Networking: exchanging links with other websites and collaborating with them
• Sponsorships: sponsoring content related to your activity on a specialized website in the sector
• Forums
• Press releases in relevant and related media, as we offer at Unancor.
•  Prospecting and contacting (paying, offering your products…)
• Guest posting
• Signatures (designed by, widgets…)
• Gaining authority as an author so that other sites and media cite your website or your content as a source of information or authority.
• Image banks
• Social networks
• Professional blogs
• Link Baiting (content, resources…)

How to Choose Links

When choosing where to place links, it is essential to consider the following criteria:

Theme or Affinity

You need to analyze whether the website is related to yours, what themes it addresses in its content, what it talks about, or what keywords it is ranking for. It makes little sense to place a link on a DIY website if your business is a sex shop, for example.

Audience

You should ask yourself if the website where you plan to insert the link is a place where you will find your target audience and thus generate more visits and/or business directly. It is important to know the average profile of the user who uses the medium or website. For example: if you have an online home textile store, you should not focus your efforts on media whose main audience is teenagers.

Quality 

Conduct a small off-page audit of the site to know its vitality (frequency of publication, use of social media…), its evolution over time, the permanence of the link (how long it will be there), if it requires putting “sponsored content” tags, or the number of users and average visits it receives in recent months. Also, other more technical elements like OBL and the ratio with linking domains

Budget

Depending on the website you choose, placing a link in content can have notable differences in cost. Analyze the budget you have to know which media to include in your radar and which to discard because they do not fit your availability to invest in links. 

In addition to all the above, you can consider other recommendations:

• Same language/country (in general) (*country can change by business, but it was previously more permissive)
• Diversity of IPs and registrations
•  Progressive growth of the site
• Variety (anchors, texts, situation, type of website…) – Do not abuse anything but try to diversify your links with different anchors, texts, or types of websites.

What Should You Avoid When Choosing Links?

You should be especially careful with:

•  Replicable links
• Copying exactly what the competition does
•  Placing links only for the DR/DA of the site
•  Placing links only for price and ease (going to a platform without a strategy behind it makes no sense. That’s why Unancor is a great tool, as we help you create that strategy)

Committing these types of errors can pose a danger: wasting time and money on a failed strategy that may also lead to a possible penalty on your website and a depletion of the niche.

Recommendations for Link Building

If you are starting from scratch and want to create a link building strategy for your online project, it is essential to keep some points in mind before you begin:

• Home + Brand: both concepts should be linked to favor both the indexing of the site and the recognition of the brand.
• Be attentive to URLs that may have quick traction (by business, to be able to invest more, give more context. Google gives us hints about where it finds us relevant)
• Check Indexing: Studying the rate at which Google indexes URLs will help us know if we need to work to improve crawling.
• Study the Competition: Looking at how better-positioned competitors act will give you clues on where to start.
• Identify facilities and difficulties: what is more competitive, where we will have more problems, where we will need more investment, what we have wrong or need to correct. The idea is to give Google hints about what we offer, what need we can meet for its users, and see where we fall.

Google uses links to access information on the Internet, so if your website needs to improve its authority, target business keywords, or give a boost in the initial phases of the project, you should get to work with link building. You can start by noting the following recommendations:

Linking Recommendations

You should keep some recommendations in mind when linking. We can highlight some:

•  Do not add two links to the same URL on the same page, although we can link to different parts (with an identifier) or different URLs of the same site.
• Be careful with http/https and www. 
• Do not always link to the same URLs: diversify the destination.
• Take advantage of the website architecture (inbound) and optimize your internal linking.
• Find linking opportunities: Opportunity keywords, URLs with traffic and few links, more linkable URLs (inbound)
•  Consider monetization of keywords (and URLs)
• Measure your campaigns and monitor results: set clear objectives, analyze if they can be achieved, follow up with a control document, and adapt the strategy if necessary.
• Create a list of options for linking: sites by theme (blog + theme, magazine + theme, etc.). Use Google operators like Allintitle: blog + theme or search for keywords related to questions.

Recommendations in Articles

• Look for a topic related to your website and the destination URL
• Texts written by specialized editors and writers
• Search for long-tail KW related to their best clusters to rank and bring organic traffic
• Option to link in already published articles (not recommended to abuse), although you can take advantage of the freshness factor and improve the already ranked article by updating and enhancing it.
• Ongoing campaigns, not one-off
•  Allocate a link building budget to the project (it can be done as a percentage and invest as you grow)
•  Do not be guided by maxims: neither % of anchors, nor % of dofollow, nor metrics… 
• Take advantage of promoting EEAT with authors in articles (citations, nofollow…)

Recommendations for the choice of anchor text

• Provide semantic value: both in the anchor text and in the context. 
• Avoid using the same anchor always: It is evident that we cannot be repetitive; we must use synonyms and provide context beyond the keyword.
•  If the anchor text is not descriptive, we can use the text around it: Context + generic or context + brand. Previously, the anchor text carried much more weight because Google had a harder time understanding the context, but this is no longer the case.
• Be careful with punctuation marks: periods, questions, exclamations, quotes…
• Make the anchor stand out: give it a different color, bold, link position, ensure it is visible and accessible.
• URL as link text, something that is seen more in forums. It does not provide semantic context.
• Do not be lengthy.
• Check the anchors of the site (to filter and give you ideas of their “naturalness”) Sometimes you can even not give them the anchor and let the editor or website choose.
•  Choose the anchor according to the origin of the link: use a generic anchor on a generic site, but with thematic context; or a thematic anchor on a thematic site with keyword, long tail, or even the brand. The context of the link is becoming more important than the anchor itself.
• Naturalness: It is the best recommendation we can give you. Do not try to force links. Always try to make it as natural as possible. 

Here is a video from A vista de Click about Anchor Text by David Carrasco and Rocío Santamaría: