Gameplan

Aside from great content, backlinks are the most important ranking used by Google and other search engines.

But of course, not all links are equal.

We take a more scientific approach to link building, which revolves around reverse-engineering the successful domains in your industry, and figuring out exactly why their backlink profile is elevating them to such great SEO success.

👉 Where we begin

• Analyzing the competitor landscape
• Understanding how people link to websites in your industry
• Investigating who’s linking to your top competitors (But not linking to you)

Selecting Assets

One of the most important pieces of link building is selecting exactly which pages we want to build links to.

This is always going to be evolving and changing over time, and we always look to get insights from our clients here as well.

🎯 Key Link Targets

• Homepage – Google loves established brands, so it’s always a good idea to build a ton of branded links to your homepage. It’s a key indicator to Google that your brand is trusted and referenced by 100s of people. Honestly, homepage link building is severely underrated. When we build links for our own website (this one you’re reading) we love to constantly build tons of fresh links to our homepage.
• Informational Pages – These are typically in-depth guides or resource style content. For example, a blog post titled “how do I start a new business?” would be an informational page, and it’s incredibly important to build backlinks to these pages. The reason is simply because that’s where most of the links on the internet go! Statistically speaking, people just link to informational pages way more than any other type of internal page.
• Commercial Pages – Some blog posts might fall under this category, like “the best marketing tools” where you’re trying to push your own product. But generally speaking, when we talk about commercial pages, we’re talking about service pages or landing pages where the goal is to convert visitors to customers. It’s important to build links to these pages as well, but it’s a mistake to focus too much on these links.

🤦‍♀️ The Biggest Mistake in Link Building

Honestly, the biggest mistake we see in link building is people building way too many links to commercial pages. Google has been around for 30 years, and its algorithm can detect when you’re building too many links to commercial pages, especially if they have highly keyword-rich anchor texts.

Of course, the temptation is to build links to these pages because they’re the money makers!

Most editors, content marketers, and website owners, in general, will see this approach as promotional in nature. Something with little or no value for their audience.

Now, this does not mean it’s impossible to build links to transactional pages. On the contrary, these pages, just like the rest, must be reviewed and compared with similar pages from the organic competitors. Doing so allows us to look for outreach ideas and potential angles for our link-building efforts. This is the best way to proceed, combined with a healthy dose of common sense.

Still, even when we may miss an opportunity to build links to commercial pages, they can still benefit from it through internal link building.

Anchor Texts

While there is no one-size-fits-all anchor strategy, we must avoid misguided tactics and practice sound principles daily. Our anchor texts should guide users, facilitate content navigation, provide context, and encourage clicks.

To achieve this, we will strive to use anchor texts that resonate with our target audience while maintaining high quality. This involves incorporating relevant keywords and variations. We will carefully analyse the keywords and queries for which Elithair and its organic competitors rank, considering these insights when making the final selection.

Considering the intent of each page, we should aim for a balanced combination of anchor text types, including branded, partial, natural, descriptive, title, and exact match anchors.

When creating content and building links to assist search engine crawlers in finding and understanding these pages, we must adopt a long-term strategy that avoids manipulative link practices. It becomes risky when anchors are deliberately manipulated or appear out of context within their respective topics. Context is paramount when inserting a link, as it can significantly impact the visibility of the linked page.

Please refer to our post on our interpretation of anchors and the selection process for a detailed explanation.