Informative content that answers users’ queries and has perfect readability isn’t enough to ensure successful ranking on the SERPs. For that, you have to establish authority and outrank your competitors. You have to gain backlinks and need a sound SEO strategy to achieve that.
Link building from authoritative sources helps you get noticed as a trusted source by Google. It is an integral part of search engine optimization. SEO has heavily relied on link building from the early days to get traffic. However, the strategies keep evolving with new metrics and updates.
What Is Link Building, and Why Does It Matter?
Link Building is an essential part of SEO. It involves promoting a site by linking a third-party source to your website. Link building can help develop an authentic link and has a long-term effect on the SEO of a domain.
The initial phase of link building is to approach high authority domains and convince them to backlink. These sites should be making sales or conversions and have a ranking history on SERPs. When such sites mention your domain in their content, it increases the popularity and traffic toward your website. Organic link building is a time taking process, but it will pay back all the effort with added value in the long run.
Finding the right sites for link building is challenging. SEO experts use certain metrics to judge them, and DA (Domain Authority) is one of them. This blog explores metrics and criteria you can use to build your SEO strategy using link building.
Link Building Metrics for SEO
A High DA Score
Websites with a high DA score have a strong domain because many links point toward them. Furthermore, getting backlinks from a high DA website can also help you raise your Domain Authority Score.
The DA metric for link building is a 100-point log scale that predicts a website’s ranking on SERP. Getting backlinks from high authority sites can also help elevate the score. A website should have a DA score above 30 to be considered functional. At the same time, the 60 above score signals an excellent, authoritative site. Many SEO tools measure the DA scores using the number of links and the source of root domains linking to a website.
It also tells the quality of a website based on its potential to pass on link juices to other sites. A 1-100 scale indicates that a higher score refers to a higher domain rating.
Page Strength of Your Website
Besides domain authority, individual page rankings also matter. Page strengths are similar to the DA score but are measured on your website’s page levels. Google also uses it to rank a page based on a 10-point scale, where 10 indicates the highest page strength on a website. Your page strength should be highest on your home page and gradually decline as it filters down to other pages.
Generally, old web pages with the highest traffic have the second-best score. Meanwhile, new pages have the lowest ranks. You can determine your page authority metric and position using free tools like Prchecker or Moz.
Anchor Texts to Promote Your Campaign
You can also use contextual links that relate to your niche. Anchor texts are a great source of establishing backlinks. It refers to unique hyperlinked texts containing URLs of your website. Anchor text helps search bots understand the context of your topic or webpage. It has a similar objective to keywords for a website’s SEO.
For instance, if you own a skincare brand and another website wants to link to your page, then it’s better to customize the backlink according to your page. Include your primary keyword, related product, service, brand name, and city.
As a part of SEO best practices, a website should add various anchor texts containing keywords relevant to your venture. Uninformative anchor texts like numbers or “click here” are deemed ineffective for SEO by Google.
High Linking Population
It is a self-explanatory metric that determines your website’s total number of backlinks. However, it does not guarantee success for SEO campaigns since not all links may have a high authority score. However, it does make tracking your SEO performance easier. Linking masses can help you identify whether you are gaining or losing active links. Or which websites frequently link to your content? It also helps to compare the domain strength and ranks with your competitor.
Backlinks Must Be Relevant
It is a qualitative metric to analyze whether a website has gained backlinks naturally or has used other means. Gaining a mass amount of backlinks is great, but focusing more on gaining relevant links is preferable.
Gaining a relevant link showcases the credibility of a website. Would it look good for a jewelry website to get links from a food business? It won’t make sense to Google, and your web page will not be ranked. Relevant links attract potential buyers and website traffic. A person visiting the jewelry website will be more interested in seeing a shoe store than a food store. Relevant backlinks also increase the SEO value of the website. Google’s algorithm puts a lot of weightage on relevance.
Backlink Locations
Link quality also depends on the location. The trust and location of high-quality backlinks convince Google to rank your website. Important and high authority links should be placed on the front, top, and center of the web page. Link placement must showcase that a website trusts a domain for its information, product, or service. On the other hand, obscure or less prominent link locations convey less trust or influence of the linked website.
Google will look into your URL locations on other websites and their density to track your website’s authority. If your linked positions are central and prominent, then you will get good SEO value from them. Meanwhile, hidden locations will give less weight to your domain. Therefore, gaining other websites’ trust can also help you achieve a high rank on the SERPs.
Where Can You Get Backlinks?
You can use different platforms to procure authoritative resources.
- Social Media: It is the easiest way to get conversions and click-overs. You can post internal links on comments, community groups, personal pages, and publications to get traffic.
- Blog Posts: Start a series of blog posts to discuss your service or a topic related to your venture. You can give your domain’s reference there.
- Forums: Utilize thematic forums to start business discussions and post your site URL in the comments section for consideration.
- Videos: Put your website links in video descriptions to get conversions.
- Third-party Platforms: You can boost your SEO using an external publishing platform with a DA score above 80.
- News-Feeds: There’s no better way to catch a user’s eye than placing your website URL on a News feed. If your domain has enough strength to compete with other sources, you can gain customers through it.
Original Link Building Is the Gateway to Success!
Although gaining authoritative links takes time and labor, it also helps promote your brand and make sales. When a user types a keyword in its search bar, Google’s crawlers look for web pages with maximum inbound links and high domain authority to display them in the SERPs. As technology progresses, Google’s algorithm has become intelligent enough to identify credible resources and toss out unnatural backlinks for its users. Therefore, authentic backlinking is the only way to ace your SEO campaign. If you want a surefire way to increase your brand rankings on Google, Lincoln SEO has got your back. Contact us today and get your free quote.