How Link-building helps improve SEO for E-commerce online businesses

 
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Rolling out a successful SEO campaign consistently and sustainably requires what is known as the art of Link-building. This is an enormous undertaking activity that requires equally both time and effort, which can’t be avoided. However, the pursuant rewards are equally dynamic and when done correctly, Link-building will help your website rank higher organically. In an earlier blog on how to create an online brand, we explained the many utilities of a well-done Search Engine Optimization campaign. With this blog, we explore a little deeper into the technicalities of SEO further, which includes Link-building as a fundamental component.

 

Why Link-Building is worth the effort

The primary factors that warrant a considerable proportion of your SEO time and effort for Link-building include:

1.      A higher rank on Google and other search engines, hence higher visibility.

2.      Making Google find newer pages on your website faster.

3.      An increased sense of credibility and trustworthiness for your website and subsequently your business

4.      A much-needed benefit from targeted referral traffic helping you make the most of your networking

Link-building is not an easy task for beginners because it comes with many risks and takes both time and expertise to produce measurable results. Nevertheless, when employed correctly in a respective industry, it increases search engine visibility significantly, resulting in higher organic traffic and revenue.

Ignoring Link-building is like ignoring one of the most profitable components of creating and executing a successful SEO campaign. It’s just one of those things that you have to get done correctly no matter the time and resources deployed and needed to get it done.

 

What is Link-building in SEO

Before we go on to show you what the components are and how to use them in a successful link-building strategy let us first take some time out to understand what Link-building is.

As mentioned before, Link-building is an integral part of a successful SEO strategy and this part entails the linking of other high-ranking websites to your webpage. How does this work? And why is it so complex then? We’ll tell you!

Imagine website A links to website B successfully. When this linking happens, it gives Google and other search engines a strong indication that your website deserves to rank higher within its algorithms ensuring better visibility, better leads, and higher footfall. All of these three factors lead to…you guessed it… a better bottom line. Link-building goes by several different names in the industry however, the functions are all the same. It can be referred to as inbound links, backlinks, external links, and even just links.

Think of Link-building almost as a way of getting votes for the quality of your webpage. The more high-performing links you can have backlinked to your website, the higher your website will rank on search engines, especially Google’s. The important thing is for these other website links to form a part of your backlink profile. 

Now the not so simple part. No two links are ever the same, which means that their value is never the same. If not monitored consistently you could end up linking some rogue links to your website which would affect it significantly and end up dropping its overall rating with Google and other search engines as well.

Link-building entails several different tactics and some of these are easier to execute than others. Due to its complex nature, getting started can be challenging, especially since it can negatively affect your website if you get it wrong. Well, don’t worry because the next section will help you get it right.

 

Link-building – Key Elements to getting it right

The effort that you put into searching and finding the right links for your website also doubles up as a reward. More effort and better gains and lesser time spent leave you more exposed to a possibly poor rating. We would always suggest getting an SEO expert to do this step for you. However, to enhance knowledge in general there are a few specific components that one must keep into account when commencing link-building activities for your webpage.

Contextual Links

We’ll start with something simple. Contextual links are those links which even to the untrained eye seem more likely to be clicked. A larger font, brighter more distinguishable colors, more important information, cooler looking pictures all can count as contextual links. These links obviously and immediately hold more value and can have a huge impact on your rankings because as we learned earlier, Google and other search engines measure the value of a link with how high it ranks as a page.

When a contextual link is placed in the body of a particular web page's content and not in the sidebar or the footer it will always rank higher, making them a higher quality link and hence more valuable. Finding these links consistently is imperative to a successful SEO strategy.

Follow those Followed Links

It is important to note that not all website links pass muster with Google’s Page Rank and hence not all of them will have a positive effect on your ranking. For example, there are two types of links, sponsored links and UGC links that don’t typically help your rankings. Links that have a rel="nofollow" tag tell Google not to crawl them. This means that Google will not associate with either website from a ranking perspective spelling doomsday for your SEO strategy.

A rel="sponsored" marking indicates that this link has been paid for and will automatically not pass PageRank. A rel="UGC" on the other hand also showcases links that are created from user-generated content. This could be from places like forums and the comments section of websites. This also shows that these links are not editorially placed and could be malicious and manipulative.

This brings us to our favorite kind of link, the followed link. A followed link is typically one which has no malicious or paid attribute attached to it which makes it a darling for PageRank and other search engine algorithms. A good link profile needs to contain several of these kinds of followed links while also ensuring that they only come from quality sources.

Editorially Placed Links

Google values this kind of link and goes even to the extent to term any other kind of link unnaturally placed. An editorially placed link is nothing but a link that exists because a third party has taken the initiative and decision to add it from their existing webpage to your website. It hasn’t been put there because any kind of payment is involved, neither is there a question of any other kind of quid pro quo or incentive. Basically, according to Google, it should not look like these links have been placed with the sole purpose of increasing your page ranking.

Links from Unique Referring Domains

It is also important to harness links from several unique referring domains to generate a good-looking link profile. Google frowns upon the fact that links keep coming from the same few places and encourages you to be on the lookout for unique referring domains, if you want to make your website more interesting.

This is the foundation of a successful SEO strategy and also an area where maximum resources and focus should be placed. A good link-building campaign usually earns links from new domains which have never been linked to your website before. This increases the count of unique linking domains.

Nick Eubanks comments that "Often times when I see sites ranking with much lower authority, they tend to have a much stronger ratio of linking root domains versus their competitors.” Collecting links from a higher number of unique domains will help your website and SEO strategy rank higher and in prominent positions during a web search on Google and other search engines.

Strong Topical Relevance

When we began our little guide for Link-building, we used an example of linking Link A to link B. This makes a whole lot of sense to Google too. Why? Because it insists that when you backlink to your website, the link should ideally come from another website that shares some kind of clear relevance to yours. Backlinking a link from a website about toys to a website about structural engineering may not be the smartest idea in the world and PageRank will be there or just about to catch you in the act of Link-building just for the sake of it.

A good way to find prospective links during the process of Link-building is to ask yourself if link A matches with Link B and if it does would you peruse it even if Google was not existing or if it did not prompt you to do the same. If the answer to this little conundrum is “Yes” then you have a winner which will add value to your link portfolio. If the answer is “No” then both we and Google suggest that you keep filtering the internet for more relevant links instead. 

Mixing up Natural Anchor Text

Before we tell you why you need to mix up your anchor text, lets also first explain what anchor text is so that you understand the concept easily. Anchor text is nothing but the text that is used to link from a prospective high-ranking website with your website. During the process of linking a website, text elements such as brand names, article titles, and even text such as “click here” or similar terminology are used often. Google utilizes anchor text as an indicator of what the actual page is about and subsequently uses this information to influence the eventual page rankings of that particular web page. Google's guidelines but also clearly state that using your primary keywords is however, a violation of their guidelines. Excessive use of these keywords is a definite contributor towards both penalty and action from Google as well as the use of algorithmic filters being applied to your website. This is why it remains important that a good link profile contains a natural mix, without and clear link spikes from optimized anchor text.

 

White Hat vs. Black Hat vs. Grey Hat Link-building

If you have just begin your SEO journey or even if you are a regular SEO advocate, you will often come across terms like White Hat, Black Hat, and Grey Hat building. Remember that this, too, has inference from basic and easy-to-understand English language words like white area, black area, and grey area when we begin to go a little more into the technical.

As you may have already understood, white hat SEO quite simply is the use of tactics that are strictly following the terms, policies, and tactics under the ambit of what Google allows you to do in the process of Link-building. White hat SEO takes an ethical approach only to earn high-ranking positions. There is a strong and relevant focus on optimizing for a human audience and is pretty much seen as a long-term approach to correctly earn sustained visibility across search engines.

Having understood this black hat SEO quite simply means the opposite of its cleaner, fairer, and more by-rules counterpart. A black hat SEO user has no reservation to constantly avoid and violate guidelines from Google to rank a site higher. They do not feel shy to use manipulative tactics, usually looking to gain easy and quick wins in the process. A strict no-no from Google and yet something that scores of untrained or incapable SEO developers are happy to try risking the integrity of your website in the process. Google employs a webspam team whose primary KRA is to monitor websites using black hat tactics and ensure that they do not rank.

And in keeping with our color analogy, grey hat SEO sits happily on the proverbial fence using tactics that could be seen as manipulative and are riskier than white hat tactics, yet aren’t as obvious a violation of Google’s terms as Black Hat.

 

Toxic Links and their Negative Impact

When we uncovered this piece, we let you know that not Link-building properly can harm your SEO strategy and the overall positioning of your website. And while we have broadly explained to you all the right things to do, let's also take you through toxic links and help you understand what you should not be doing and why.

Building wrong links or using one too many black hat SEO tactics leaves you at risk of developing toxic links in your backlink profile. And these would most definitely negatively affect your page rankings and organic traffic. Whenever a backlink analysis to find toxic backlinks is run, this comes as a highly recommended finding. The wrong tactics deployed to build backlinks will have disastrous consequences.

 

1.      If Google catches you building links that violate properly formulated Webmaster Guidelines, the site can be impacted with manual sanctions and algorithmic filters from Google and Penguin.

2.      This negative impact is not short-lived. It could take months or even years to recover from this setback.

3.      This recovery time is a key factor even when taking calculated risks. Deploying fair tactics is time-consuming but the rewards are assured and long-term. Subsequently cheating your way through may nor may not be rewarding immediately but will have disastrous long-term implications.

4.      Successful strategies are those that deliver assured success for a long sustainable period. Trying to take a quick way out also requires a lot of hard work which may be impacted by webmaster guidelines anyway which does not make sense to indulge in.

Link-building is a key part of the SEO process and needs to be done both intelligently and professionally by an expert. The best way to getting it right is to outsource it to experts who understand the many nuances. AmareSol Global is a digital business consultancy creating innovative change through a team of talented designers, developers, and strategists creating digital experiences for brands and companies around the world. We are continuously fuelling growth across constantly changing and advancing digital landscapes, by seeking and formulating newer and better ways to service clientele on a global scale across industries. Look up more about us at www.amaresolglobal.com.

 
 
 
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