What is a link building strategy?
A linkbuilding strategy is a plan for tackling link building. With a good link building strategy you build a natural link profile. You can do this by approaching customers and asking them if they want to put something about you on their website, with a link of course. Another option is to post and share content on social media. Finally, you can also create content yourself and share it with other websites, so that the websites that have shared the content immediately link to your website.
Why a link building strategy?
Having a good link building strategy is very important. When you start without a plan, the chances are pretty big that you will not achieve the best results. In fact, just randomly swapping links or buying links can even backfire. This will not have a positive effect on your ranking and can even cause you to be penalised by Google. So pay attention to link building and make sure you know what you are doing. Therefore, having a clear link building strategy is very important.
Important steps for a link building strategy
A good link building strategy is not easy. To give you some guidance, it is useful to follow the step-by-step plan below. This roadmap consists of five steps to get you started. I will explain these steps below.
- First of all, it is important to get to know your target group. You must know on whom you focus your link building strategy. You can make your target group as small or large as you want, as long as you have in mind who you want to reach.
- Then you start looking for websites and make a list of websites that appeal to your target group. These are websites with subjects your target group will probably be interested in. A good tip is to choose websites that have already referred to your target group by means of backlinks.
- Once you have made a selection of websites that appeal to your target group, it is time to create content. This should be attractive and interesting content about your business. The most important thing is that it is link worthy. Other websites have to want to link to your content.
- Next, it is time to link your content to the list of websites you have found. Look for websites that really match your topics and written content. Then you can be sure that the visitors of that website are really interested in your content and website.
- Finally, there is only one thing left to do and that is to contact the websites and ask them if they would like to place a link to your content on their website. It is fine to just email or call them and ask if this is possible. As long as your content fits the tone-of-voice of the website, most website owners will be happy to place your links.
How to create a successful link building strategy?
When drawing up a successful link building strategy, there are a number of things you need to take into account.
Determine keywords
The best way to get your target audience to your website is by finding out what words they use to find your website. What do they type into Google when they are looking for your product or service? These are your keywords. Finding the right keywords is, however, quite difficult. You not only have to look at which keywords are used the most, but also at the degree of competition between these words. Of course, it does not make much sense to use certain keywords if thousands of competitors have already actively invested in them. In that case, it is better to go for a slightly less popular word with a lower degree of competition.
Structure of your website/internal link building
Without taking external websites into account, you must also ensure that the structure of your own website is in good order. Visitors to your website must be able to find what they need on your website. You can do this by internal link building. Internal link building means that you link on your own website to other pages on your website. For example, you can link a blog to another blog, or perhaps your appointment page can link to your contact page. This makes your site more user-friendly. This will also be appreciated by Google.
External link building
Of course, it is also important to build up your external link profile. This is called external link building. External link building means that you collect links to your website from external websites. In other words, external websites link to your website. These links are seen as votes by Google. The more quality votes, the more valuable Google finds your website. Please note! This is really about quality votes. It makes no sense to just place as many links as possible on websites that are actually nothing. Google will see this and will not appreciate it. So make sure you have a reasonable amount of links, but always choose quality over quantity.
Optimising anchor texts
It is also very useful to optimise your anchor texts. It's easy to choose random anchor texts, but it's better to choose relevant anchor texts. For example, you can use the keyword as anchor text.
Spamscore
Finally, it is good to take into account your spam score. This again has to do with external link building. The spam score was introduced by Moz in 2015 and is still widely used when checking the quality of websites. The spam score is a score of 0-17. The higher this score is, the higher the chance that there is spam. This means that if the score is high, there is a big chance that link building has not been handled carefully. It is better to stay away from these kind of websites during link building because there is a big chance that these websites will get a penalty from Google.