A correctly built link profile is a guarantee that search engines will perceive your website well.
This, in turn, will lead to high positions in Google SERP. In addition, a natural and diverse link profile leads to brand recognition.
In this text, we will look at the two strategies of link profile building: for new and old websites accordingly.
Link Building Strategy for a New Site
If we just registered a domain, it will not be the best decision to immediately buy links to this web resource.
We have to convince the search engine (whether it is Google, Bing, or another one) to like and rank us highly from day one.
How to Do This?
Register with numerous social networks, from Linkedin to Instagram; make a profile and put links to your domain in the bio. Then you can register your company on job search sites and directories.
It makes the most sense: we have created a company, and we want to hire some employees, as well as placing information in directories and mapping services to make it easier for employees to find us.
This is a basic link building, which is essential for any business website.
What’s Next?
Then you can continue to register the site in various directories and submits to build up the site’s link profile most naturally. Thus, we set up an airbag for further site promotion.
Essential information: at this step, you should place links without anchors (just the site address).
Lead them to the main page of your site and keep the dynamics of the links.
How Many References Do You Need to Form a Healthy Link Profile?
To define the approximate number of links to promote the site, you need to make a competitive analysis and take the average value as a benchmark.
To do this, you need to analyze the top Google search results for the highest priority categories, goods, services and make a comparative table. Use the Google Trends service.
Once we have a benchmark for the number of links, we need to analyze the quality and sources of links on the competitor’s site.
Data on the quality of donors and ways of getting links is also entered into the comparison table.
How to Choose the Donors for Your Web Resource?
When selecting a donor for the site, rely on the following three parameters:
- Trust;
- Traffic;
- Subject matter.
What does a site’s trust level consist of?
- The age of the site (indexing pages of the site);
- Traffic to the site (traffic);
- Link weight (link juice).
To determine when a domain was first registered, you can use the Whois service. Also, it would be useful to check the history of the site via the WebArchive service.
For your own website, traffic can be determined using search engine analytics services such as Google Analytics. For resources that do not belong to us, you may try the SimilarWeb service.
The most popular metrics to determine the trustworthiness of the site:
- Alexa Rank: the smaller, the better, trust sites from 500,000 and above;
- Ahrefs Rank: the less, the better, trusted sites from 500 000;
- Ahrefs DR: from 0 to 100, the more, the better, trust sites from 50. It is used as a primary metric because it is easily achieved;
- Number of links on Ahrefs;
- Majestic TF (the more, the better – trust sites from 30);
- Majestic CF (the more, the better – trust sites from 40);
- Majestic Trust Ratio (the more, the better – minimum from 1.5);
Suppose you do not manage to find donors for basic link building and cushion formation on your own.
In that case, a professional links service can make a big benefit to you because the knowledge, background, and full involvement of their specialists will guide them.
Next, you need to get anchor links from trusted article sites.
How to do this? The best approach for this is content marketing. What does this mean? You need to prepare several expert articles to be placed on profile resources, media, industry magazines.
These links are placed in guest posts and called outreach links.
In this case, you must put anchor links. As an anchor, you can use the name of the product, service, category, link to the thematic page of your site.
Links from Forums and Directories
A tool that many know under the name of crowd marketing. To carry it out competently, you need to give a relevant answer to the questions discussed on the forum.
If a person is searching for your product or service, you can recommend it on the forum.
It makes sense that this platform should be in the same niche with the product or service for sale. Then, such links will not only give you clicks but also sales.
Also, the forums can be opinion leaders, and people will turn to you, asking for help choosing a product or service.
In this case, links should be placed without anchors (link to the product or category) and lead users to your site’s relevant page.
How will these mentions be useful for SEO? Some of them can transfer link weight, but most of them will work just to dilute the link profile.
Link Building Strategy for the Current Site
If your site’s domain has long been registered, it is recommended that you start with a link audit site.
What should be analyzed as a result of this audit?
- Overall domain trust;
- Number of incoming domains/links;
- Link dynamics;
- Anchor list of the domain;
- Locations of links;
- Link ranking;
- Acceptors (pages linked to);
- Links from trust resources.
For each of the items, you should write the current state and the work to be done. It can be receiving links from the country you are promoting, raising the number of incoming links, or boosting the total site traffic.
If your site is stagnating or falling in prominence, you should pay attention to the dynamics of links. It often happens that the links that were on your resource dropped away, and it began to sag in search.
The easiest solution in this situation is the production of unlinked links in submits and directories. Also, a good solution would be to get guest links to the pages that have sunk.
Conclusion
The main thing you have to comprehend about forming a link profile is the outstanding value of the credibility of those sites that post mentions of you.
A small number of quality links can get you off to a good start. But a lot of questionable references will only lead to penalties from Google.
