The Power Of Link Building

 

Whether you have a blog or an ecommerce store, one of the most powerful SEO strategies is link building.

Having a robust Link building strategy in place can be the difference between your website ranking on page 10 and page 1.

But before that, it is important to understand what links are and the different types of them.

Internal & External Links Explained

Both internal and external links are important for your website.

An internal link will take you from one page to another page on the same domain whereas an external link goes to an external page on a different domain.

Including internal links in your content will not only decrease your bounce rate but it will help Google recognize and rank new content.

If you have a lot of links pointing to a page, that will highlight to Google the importance of that page.

You can also use internal links to funnel your visitors to the important pages of your site. For example, if you have a certain page that generates you a good income, then ensure you are linking internally from every relevant page you can.

See an example of an internal link on my blog…

External Links pointing to your website are a great source of traffic, the more relevant links you have the more traffic you have.

When link building you should only spend time working towards placing links on sites with a good authority and that are relevant.

For example, if your website is about dieting tips you wouldn’t try building links from real estate blogs.

See an example of a relevant article with a link pointing to my blog…

The other big advantage of having external links pointing to your site is that it helps you rank higher in search engine results. We all want our website ranking on Page 1 right!

You also need to make sure you have a website worth linking to, so ensure the quality of your content is high and helpful and you will be much more attractive for potential collaboration opportunities.

Do Follow vs No Follow

When an external link is placed it is either a ‘do follow’ or it has a ‘no follow’ tag

I’m sure you have heard of ‘link juice’ well if you have do follow links pointing to your site they come with link juice. The higher the authority of the referring site the more ‘juice’ you get.

Think of it this way, search engines see a do follow link as a recommendation so if a high authority site is saying yes I approve of your site then so will Google.

Now no follow links still generate organic traffic to your site (which is not to be sniffed at) however they are not picked up by search engines so are less advantageous in terms of SEO. 

There is a really easy way to find out which type of link has been placed. Open up the page where your link has been placed and press Control U.

A new tab will open full of code, if you select Control F and search for part of the URL of the link to find it quickly.

Then you just need to look to see if it says (before or after) ‘rel=”nofollow” if it does, then it is a no follow link. If it doesn’t then it is a do follow link.

See an example of a no follow link….

Where possible you want to push for do follow links so don’t be afraid to ask for no follow tags to be removed but remember no follow links still drive you traffic and are better then no links at all.

My Favourite Link Building Strategy

Stealing Competitor Backlinks is my favourite link building strategy.

It’s very simple.  Actually this is on of my favourite ecommerce SEO strategies period.

Find out who is linking to your competitors and reach out to them.

Create a list of your competitors, then using Ahrefs site explorer enter each competitor in and then select ‘Backlinks’

Then you will get a list of referring sites, you can select ‘Link Type’ to filter the results and then export the data into Excel.

You can then work through the list looking for quality backlinks. You need to figure out how they got the link and reach out to the relevant contact for the site to start building a relationship.

Using this method you will also get a feel for what sort of content works for link building so when you create new content you can keep what you have learnt in mind.

Wrapping It Up

So we have covered the difference between internal and external links and why they are both important for your website.

We have looked at the power of do follow and no follow links and then looked at my favourite strategy for link building.

Remember, the more high quality links you have pointed at your website the higher levels of traffic and higher positioning you will have within the search engines.

Author: Jawad Alalawi

Information Technology Professional specialized in Financial Payment Services, Risk Management, Information Security, and Compliance. Experienced in solutions development and implementation, and technical writer. Email contact (sjawada5 at gmail.com)

Technology Specialist & Consultant

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