5-Stage Link Building Strategies that Can Improve Your Google PageRank
Some traditional methods of building backlinks still work. But in an increasingly competitive search engine landscape you need to go beyond the norms and excel in order to stay ahead of the rest. A lot of new blog-owners today hop in right away on the bandwagon of backlink building, notwithstanding the different stages one must go through in order to make the campaign more effective and relatively successful.
Although you can still attain success if you simply build links without having proper strategies and by just following what others are doing, you are better off if you follow a highly efficient plan with different link building strategies that come in various phases that can make your campaign not only seamless and systematic but effective as well.
5 Phases of Link Building
Phase 1: Planning Stage
Everything must start with a plan. This is the blueprint that will serve as your guide. The plan will help you track and monitor your progress, and lead you back on track whenever you go astray along the way.
Your plan should specifically pinpoint the different places where you are planning to build those links. Make sure to diversify your link sources to align with Google’s recommended link diversification strategy for better results.
Take note that there are two main types of backlinks; they are do follow backlinks and ‘no-follow’ backlinks. While you should concentrate more on building ‘do-follow’ backlinks, you must also include a few ‘no-follow’ links to make your link-profile look natural.
Another point of consideration is the high Google PageRank. Get more links from varied sources with high PageRank in Google. These sites will give you valuable link juices that can help improve the PageRank of your blog, as well.
However, even in this aspect, you must observe the diversification strategy. So don’t create all links from high PR networks, but you must have a well-balanced Google PR profile by having both high PR and low PR links. But majority of them should come from blogs with higher PageRank in Google.
Equally important for inclusion in your plan is the anchor text. As the name implies, this anchors the link to the content, thereby creating the connection between two different web pages. The best anchor texts to use are the target keywords, as well as other relevant terms. Diversification must also be observed when searching for the right anchor texts to use.
Phase 2: Content Creation
The quality of the link is measured, in part, by the quality of the web content where the link is anchored. But more importantly, most sites that let you build those links will also require not just ordinary post but articles with supreme quality. While you can create stand-alone links in some sources, you can improve the quality of your backlink by making your post superior in quality, as well.
Among the most common places to start your link building activities are the article directories such as Ezine, as well as web 2.0 properties like Hubpages and Squidoo. While these networks allow you to drop a link to your site, they are quite strict in their publishing rules and approval will only be given to you if your post meets their high publishing standards.
Each of these networks has different set of rules that you must conform to in order for your articles to be approved manually by human editors. Thus, you must tailor-fit each post according to the network where you are planning to publish them for backlink-building purposes. It is for this very reason why having a plan is important because it can greatly aid you in determining, beforehand, the required number of contents to produce for submission to Ezine, to Hubpages, and to Squidoo, among others.
Phase 3: Link Building Proper
The next phase is the link-building proper. This should be smooth and flawless if you have all the required articles along with the list of website to submit each article to, as well as the list of anchor texts to use.
Phase 4: Performance Tracking
Many webmasters stop at stage 3 of the process and failed to advance further to the next stage, which is performance monitoring that lets you find out if your creative backlinking strategies are effective or not. While this is optional, tracking your performance is important and this is what separates successful link-builders from those who failed.
There are many online resources and tools that you can use to track your progress. One of them is Google Analytics that lets you track where your web traffic came from. By knowing your traffic sources, you can improve the efficiency of your campaign by concentrating your activities on areas that not only give you priceless SEO juice but well-targeted web traffic, as well. There are also tools that let you find out which referrer sites that gave you more links.
Aside from that, it is also important to find out which keywords phrases are productive and which are not. You can then take out the non-productive ones and replace them with new set of keywords that you can add to your list of anchor texts.
Take note that performance tracking should not only be confined to links that you built, but it must also include those that are linking to you. Not all of them are good. There could be bad links that can potentially cause harm to the online reputation of your business, as well as to your backlink profile.
In this case, don’t just do nothing and leave those links connected to your blog. Instead, act immediately by taking them out from your profile using the link disavow tool of Google. This is a handy tool that can help you fight back against competitors doing negative SEO to your website.
Phase 5: Exploration and Expansion
The landscape in the search engines evolves over time, and so must your link strategies. Don’t confine your techniques to your original plan. Rather, explore other environments where you can expand your link presence. This is in line with your link diversification technique that can help you gain traction and achieve better mileage in your link building campaign.
