Timothy Carter

Chief Revenue Officer at SEO Company

Industry veteran Timothy Carter is SEO.co’s Chief Revenue Officer. Tim leads all revenue for the company and oversees all customer-facing teams for SEO (search engine optimization) – including sales, marketing & customer success.

He has spent more than 20 years in the world of SEO & Digital Marketing leading, building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.

When he’s not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach…preferably in Hawaii.

Over the years he’s written for publications like ForbesEntrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.

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Natural vs. Unnatural Links: What's the Difference? How to Build a Natural Backlink Profile
Timothy Carter

Natural Backlinks vs. Unnatural Backlinks: How to Build a Natural Link Profile

Natural quality backlinks are a major factor in calculating a domain’s overall authority, which in turn influences its rankings for various keywords. Semantic search–including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing–help to determine whether a link was acquired naturally or unnaturally. Unnatural backlinks earn penalties from Google (both manual and algorithmic) and harm domain authority and trust. While natural backlinks help you grow your rankings and overall web traffic. To get around this, many search marketers simply adjusted their link building tactics to make their links appear to be more natural, rather than relying on the proper cultivation of purely natural links. Let’s dig in! Natural Backlinks vs. Unnatural Backlinks Google’s ability to detect natural links is more advanced than ever, and with some Google employees insisting that link building for SEO should be avoided altogether, it pays to know the real differences between unnatural and natural links and why you should be working to build backlinks naturally. It’s only one of the reasons we encourage all of our clients to perform a backlink audit as part of our holistic and regular SEO audit services. When comparing your backlink profile, we’ll be discussing a number of critical components to ensure your links are natural. In doing so, you will be better able to find the “website equivalent” of the following: The Strict Definition of a Natural Backlink In the truest sense of the definition, and the one Google uses as the basis for its algorithm development, natural links are ones that you had no part in creating. Some neutral third party decided that your domain was worth linking to, so they posted a link somewhere to prove a point or offer a resource. Unnatural links, on the other hand, are any links that you put into place yourself. That means even your most carefully-placed, intelligently created, authoritatively sourced links are considered unnatural if you placed them with the intention of increasing your rank. That being said, Google still isn’t all-knowing (though it gets a little closer every day). Its algorithm can only use certain indicators to judge whether or not a link is natural, and as long as your link passes those tests, you won’t be penalized. Learning these indicators can help you understand what types of links are considered natural, and how to structure your own links so they appear to be natural in Google’s eyes throughout the course of your link building campaign. Types of Backlink Sources First, Google takes a look at the type of source being used to host the link. If the link is pointing to a domain in an industry wholly unrelated to that of the source, it will be considered unnatural. As a result, keeping your links to only the most relevant sources of your industry or business is a wise strategy. On a related note, higher authority sources tend to pass more authority than lower authority sources, so getting a link featured on a major publisher or .edu site is much more natural and much more powerful than stuffing one into an article directory. Natural Anchor Text There was a time when anchoring your links with keywords or words related to your industry was a good idea. That time has passed. If Google notices too many of your links using the same keyword or keyword phrase, it will become wise to your tactics and judge your links to be unnatural. Instead, try to anchor your links with words that actually describe what your page has to offer, or better yet, let your link sit naturally in a bed of text. We recommend tools like SEOJet for helping to gauge proper anchor text variability among differing pages of your website. For instance, the anchor text variation for your homepage will look much different than the anchor text variation of internal service pages and blog posts: mepage should look much different than your services pages and your blog posts: versus Source Diversity Google also looks for patterns in how and where you’re posting links. Essentially, it can tell if a particular series of links have been placed by the hands of a single individual or company. For example, if all your links are confined to only two or three different sources, Google will conclude that you’re either spamming the links or you’ve engaged in some kind of mutual link scheme with those other sources. Either way, your links will appear unnatural—so make sure you’re using a wide variety of different sources. One of the main methods for tracking link diversity is by using third-party link building tools like Moz or Ahrefs. For instance, take a look at the Domain Authority (DA) diversity of a client who came to us wanting to build more backlinks from high authority websites: Contrast this with a popular industry SEO blog: Granted, the data is a bit skewed as our client had not yet reached scale. As the scale of one’s sitelinks expands, the backlink profile should begin to appear and more “natural.” But link builders need to be aware of where they are procuring their links and at what scale. Link Destination If all the links pointing back to your domain point to the same page, Google will deem them to be unnatural. For example, if you use your homepage as your primary URL when posting external links, eventually Google will pick up on your habits and penalize you. Instead, use a variety of different link destinations, getting to the deepest pages of your site whenever possible. Link Context The contextual placement of your link also matters. For example, if you post a link by itself with no explanation as the only comment on an external blog, your link will definitely appear unnatural. If, however, you introduce your link with a thoughtful explanation of why it’s helpful in response to another member’s comment, your link will appear to be natural—even more, it will be natural. Work to frame your links in a real, natural context

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Guide to Anchor Text in Link Building
Timothy Carter

SEO Anchor Text: Variability & Diversity Best Practices for Link Building

When it comes to content marketing, SEO, and link building, there are dozens of important elements in play. But some are more critical than others. Anchor text certainly falls into the critical category. But do you know how to leverage on-site and off-site anchor text to your advantage in SEO? The anchor text variations that you use when linking to your web page are a crucial component of any SEO strategy. This is because search engines will use the anchor text variation as one ranking factor in determining how relevant a link is to the content on your site. In this article, we’ll discuss everything there is to know about proper anchor text variation, including exact match anchor text and how it can impact the SEO of your website. What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text can either be descriptive or generic, but it should always accurately reflect what the page being linked to contains. For example: “our company” vs. “click here”. Your website’s ranking on Google will depend largely upon how many links your site has and how relevant those links are when it comes to incoming traffic (i.e., whether they contain quality keyword phrases). The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher likelihood that search engine rankings for your site content will improve over time – this is known as building an SEO foundation with link equity! On the HTML code side of things, it looks like this: On the user-facing side of things, it looks like this: Best SEO agency If it weren’t for anchor text, you’d have to write out the exact web address each time you wanted to link users to another linked page or resource. They would then need to copy and paste that link into their web browser. Anchor text provides a clickable shortcut that’s both aesthetically pleasing and convenient. But it goes far beyond looks. Anchor text is ultimately one of the top factors in the link building process. Why is Anchor Text Important for SEO? Anchor text is vitally important for SEO because it tells search engines what your website’s content is about. This ensures that your web pages will rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages) as a result of the keywords you optimize them with and help provide more clarity to any potential visitor who lands on one of these web pages through organic or paid traffic channels. Ultimately, this all comes back to high-quality links. Higher quality anchors mean better rankings from authoritative sites – which means an ideal situation like higher click-through rates and conversion rates over time. Anchor text serves a variety of purposes and can be utilized in numerous ways, but the two biggest benefits – in terms of link building – are as follows: More link juice Google uses anchor text to help determine the relevancy of a link. So, while overly optimized keyword strings are no longer a best practice, keywords still matter to an extent – so long as they’re natural. The right anchor text can feed more link juice to the page being linked to. Some would even say it’s the single most important factor for backlinks (outside of the domain authority of the referring domain). Better clickability It’s not all about technical SEO. There’s also a practical aspect of anchor text. The right anchor text makes a link more attractive to human users and, as a result, more clickable. This drives traffic and engagement. (The benefits of which may include direct sales, but also enhanced SEO signals.) The Evolution of Anchor Text Anchor text has played a valuable role in SEO since, well, the origins of search engines. But that’s not to say things have stayed the same over the last couple of decades. Anchor text, much like every element of SEO, has undergone significant shifts over the past few years. Prior to 2011, keyword-rich anchor text was considered a best practice. If your keyword was “yummy chocolate brownies,” you were instructed to use anchor text like: Yummy chocolate brownies Buy yummy chocolate brownies Yummy chocolate brownies buy Buy yummy chocolate brownies online For more info on yummy chocolate brownies visit: yummychocolatebrownies.com Yummy chocolate brownies: yummychoclatebrownies.com Image link alt=yummychocolatebrownies The entire goal was to exploit the Google algorithm. There was nothing dishonest about this – it’s just the way the game worked back in those days. Some savvy SEO experts would find out what made the algorithm tick, and everyone would jump on. SEO was about manipulating the algorithm. Unfortunately, this came at the expense of user experience. It was possible to over-optimize with exact match anchor text and achieve impressive SERP rankings, yet have links that looked obnoxious, spammy, and out of place. Google saw webmasters manipulating anchor text and decided to make some major changes. In April 2012, the first Penguin update was released. And for anyone using the same keyword rich anchor text, rankings plummeted. And when rankings began to fall, so did traffic, and revenue. The whole cookie crumbled overnight. Ever since that first Penguin update, Google has continued to emphasize user experience, while implementing requirements that dissuade spammers from gaming the system. Anchor text is just as important today as it’s ever been – especially from an SEO perspective. It just looks a little different than it did 10 years ago. It includes ratios that are natural, including the surrounding text around the backlink and not just the anchor text in the link itself. What is Anchor Text Ratio? Anchor text ratio is the proportion of links on a website that uses any given keyword. This metric can be used to understand how prevalent keywords are in your SEO strategy and whether or not you need more content relating to those terms. The goal should always be an average anchor text ratio of about 20%. This means that for every 100 optimized pages, there will typically be about 20% with

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Link Building for SaaS: The SaaS Company Guide to Backlinks & Off-Site SEO
Timothy Carter

Link Building for SaaS: The SaaS Company Guide to Backlinks & Off-Site SEO

You’re a SaaS company (or a startup on an SEO budget) and you’ve either decided to start a managed SEO campaign, or yours is in trouble and you need to whip it back into shape. You know all about the onsite portion of SEO — improving your SEO with the proper technical structure, ongoing content strategy, and meta data—but you’re struggling to find your place when it comes to offsite strategies. This guide is also broken down into a few main sections, so feel free to skip to the ones you feel are most relevant to your needs: Unique challenges, to elaborate on the main obstacles and priorities a SaaS company should focus on Guest posting and manual link building, to cover best practices for a manual link building services Link cultivation, to explain the mechanisms of earning links naturally through content Ongoing considerations, to maximize the long-term returns of your campaign Necessary Evil of Link Building for SaaS: Pros, Cons and Risks Offsite SEO is a culmination of all the ranking factors Google and other search engines consider that aren’t directly on your site. Because these aren’t on your site, they’re more difficult to control, but they also offer more credibility, as these factors serve as third-party indicators to your domain’s authoritative strength. Take a look at Moz’s breakdown of ranking factor clusters (which is an approximation, but still relevant): (Image Source: Moz) Link building features alone account for a cumulative 40 percent of total rank potential, compared to only 15 percent for on-page keyword and content features. Along with social metrics, offsite SEO accounts for 47 percent of your total propensity to rank—meaning if you ignore offsite SEO, you’ll be sacrificing 47 percent of your search visibility potential (more on that later). After hitting a critical threshold of 20 percent investment, there’s a major turn in the growth of monthly revenue. This is because SaaS companies are dependent on visibility to new customers in order to make new sales. Since most SaaS companies operate exclusively online, the only options for increased visibility are advertising and organic improvements, the former of which is ridiculously expensive at higher volumes, and the latter of which is most successfully executed with a content and SEO strategy. SEO also offers compounding returns, compared to advertising, which offers reasonable, yet linear growth patterns. Long story short? SEO is the best tool you have to sustain long-term revenue growth. Off-site SEO is a complex web of habits and exchanges more akin to relationship management than construction. Battling SaaS churn with link building and content marketing But offsite SEO is about more than just increasing your visibility and organic traffic in search engines. If done correctly, you’ll increase referral traffic from whichever sources you build links on, your brand reputation will improve, and you’ll earn more customer loyalty as a result. As a SaaS company, customer loyalty is vital if you want to stay alive. Take a look at this customer churn graph: (Image Source: Totango) The fastest-growing SaaS companies are the ones with the highest rates of customer retention, and offsite SEO link building can help you achieve them in addition to all its other benefits. Link Building for SaaS Companies: Unique Challenges Hopefully, you now see why offsite SEO and link building is so critical for SaaS companies. I’ll get to the “how” in a minute, but first, I want to address some key, unique challenges that SaaS companies face while pursuing a content marketing strategy. Differentiation. The SaaS model has potential for huge revenue growth, but because this is common knowledge, the market’s been flooded with competitors in recent years. If you want to be featured as a thought leader, you need a solid way to differentiate yourself. If your niche is especially competitive, this can be hard to find; think about how to angle your brand to a specific demographic, or what information you can gather that no one else can. User trust. You can gain ranks pretty easily with a consistent offsite content strategy, but users’ impressions of your brand are an independent concern; just because you successfully earned a link doesn’t mean you’ll generate additional user trust with its placement. Finding a way to build and improve this trust is essential if you want to attract more loyal customers; this generally requires an even greater focus on the quality and value of your content. Building authority from scratch. All SaaS companies are relatively young, since it’s a relatively new concept. Building authority is easy when you have lots of history and data to support your brand: If you’re starting from scratch, however, you’ll find it’s notoriously difficult to get your foot in the door anywhere. The most critical period for offsite SEO development is your first few months—you’ll see the lowest returns on your investment, but you have to keep going if you want to scale. Scaling to new sources. After your early momentum starts to subside, you’re going to find it difficult to keep scaling upward. SaaS companies have a huge potential for future returns, especially compared to SaaP companies: (Image Source: Cloud Strategies) However, to sustain this exponential growth model, you also need to exponentially scale your offsite strategy. This is certainly possible, but it requires a steady increase in your time, effort, and quality. Keep these challenges in the back of your mind as you read the next few sections and start planning your strategic approach. Understanding and compensating for these weaknesses is critical if you want to be effective. Guest posting & link building for SaaS Guest posting and link building should constitute the bulk of your ongoing strategy, as it’s the most reliable way to build a reputation and guarantee high-profile links. In this strategy, you’ll be producing high-quality content that other sites host for their users. Many of these posts will contain links that point back to your domain, which in turn pass authority to your site to support your ranking efforts. These

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How to Move Your Business Without Disrupting Local SEO Rankings
Timothy Carter

How to Move Your Business Without Disrupting Local SEO Rankings

In most scenarios, preparing your business for a move to a new location is a sign of success. Maybe you’ve outgrown your old location, maybe you’re moving to a swankier place, or maybe you’re heading downtown to be closer to your clients. Whatever the case, moving is an exciting time for local businesses much in the same way it is for individuals—it’s a new opportunity and the beginning of a new era. Unfortunately, moving your business has a few downsides. Even if you spend the days and weeks leading up to the move updating your clients and partners about the change, there’s still one major hiccup that can damage your business as a result of switching business addresses: your local SEO could suffer. If you’re proactive and dutiful, you can avoid the worst and make the transition to your new business locations without any major interruptions in the progress of your local SEO campaign. This article will show you how to get it done. The Problem With Moving Usually, when we talk about seeing a ranking drop or a decrease in domain authority, it’s because Google is mad at you. Posting spammy links or bad content is a violation of Google’s official policies, and doing so will make them penalize you. Moving to a new location isn’t going to make Google mad—but at the same time, if you handle it improperly, it can cause your rankings to plummet. Here’s the root of the problem: your NAP. “NAP” is shorthand for name, address, and phone number—the three critical pieces of information Google uses to categorize and understand your business. Because this information is vital to producing accurate, reliable local search results, Google takes it very seriously. But rather than relying on local businesses to present this information on their own, Google tries to fact-check by aggregating information from all over the web. It might take the NAP information on your site and compare it against your NAP as it exists on Yelp, TripAdvisor, and a thousand other third-party local directories. If it finds that your NAP is inconsistent, it serves as a blow against you, and two things might happen—your domain authority might drop, and your address might populate incorrectly for any relevant inbound queries. Neither is good for your search visibility. Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix to this. Google’s aggregation of data makes its search results far more accurate, but it also means it takes a longer time for your information to update throughout the web. If you update your NAP information on your own site, it might take months or even years for those independent local directories to catch on and update their databases, and even more time for Google’s data refreshes to catch up to the change. In the meantime, you’ll be losing tons of potential visibility and traffic. How to Prepare for the Change Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do in advance of your move. You can’t write a letter to Google explaining the address transition or schedule your address change the way you can with the United States Postal Service. Plus, changing your business address too early can be just as problematic as changing your address too late. Instead, all you can do is proactively prepare for the transition period and be ready to take action the minute your address officially changes. Making the Switch When you finally make the move to your new physical location, you’ll have to take several steps to ensure your new local business listings data is incorporated throughout the web as thoroughly, as accurately, and of course, as quickly as possible. Your Website First and foremost, update your website—and update it everywhere. It’s the first place Google checks when evaluating your NAP information. Include your full information in the footer, with a phone number in the header, and be sure all your internal pages—especially a business page—are updated as well. If you have any location-specific internal pages, make a note to update them with the new location. Social Media Profiles Next, you’ll want to update your social media profiles. These are easy to miss, especially if you don’t regularly audit your content and social profile information as part of an on-going SEO audit process. Make it a point to not only update your basic profile information on every platform you use, but also to post an announcement to your audience addressing the change. Local Directories and Databases This is the tough part. There are literally thousands of different local directories and databases that have your information on file, and they’re all perused by Google’s search crawlers as a potential source of valuable information. If you want to be thorough, you’ll need to update as many of them as possible. There are services out there that will clean up your local profile for free—for a few hundred dollars, they’ll track down every instance of your business’s information on the web, and they’ll manually update it to reflect your current location. For the time-strapped business with a bit of extra money to spare, this service is definitely worth it. Otherwise, you can manually track down these instances and update them one by one. Generally, you can find them by searching for your own business name. Then, you can claim your Google my Business profile and update your information in the back end of the system, or write to the webmaster to inform them of the change. If you’re doing this, it will be impossible to update every single instance of your business on the web—for now, stick to the major players like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and UrbanSpoon. No matter what approach you use in updating your address throughout the web or how quickly you act after the initial move takes place, remember that the transition is going to take some time. You could spend a few weeks or even a few months with your address in a transition state, but as long as you act quickly and thoroughly, you should have no trouble minimizing the SEO fallout

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Timothy Carter

How to Tune Your Content for SEO

You already know that content is important for search engine optimization (SEO). It’s an opportunity to create new pages, optimize for specific keyword terms, and cater to your users. Creating new, better optimized pieces of content can help you achieve higher rankings and take advantage of new ranking opportunities. Unfortunately, many optimizers take this as a reason to exclusively focus on new content creation. They want to create as many onsite blog posts as possible, viewing each one as a new opportunity and a way to reach new people. There’s certainly nothing wrong with creating new content, and you should do it on a regular basis. But if you want to see better SEO results, you also need to focus on improving, updating – or tuning – the content you already have. How exactly do you “tune” your content for SEO? And why is it so valuable? What Is Content Tuning? There are many different ways to think about optimization of content for search engines. During the content development and on-page SEO process, you’ll likely choose one or more keywords to serve as the target for the new content you create; this is a form of optimization. You may also optimize your content by including certain sections, peppering in semantic variations of your target keyword phrase, adding more descriptive sections, and including links to authoritative sources. But content tuning is a bit different. Think of it this way. If you pluck a guitar string on a guitar that hasn’t been properly tuned, it will probably ring out with a note that isn’t in tune, but it’s close to the note it’s supposed to be. On a tuner, it might register as E, but it might be so flat that any song you attempted to play on the instrument will sound horrible. To correct this issue, we have to tune the string. If it’s flat, we must tighten the string gradually, checking the note with each incremental change. And if we tune it too far in one direction, we might end up with a sharp string that we then need to tune back down. Content tuning is similar. We already have a piece of content in place. It’s already close to performing as we need it to perform. We just need to make small, incremental adjustments until it falls in line with our vision for the content. When we practice content tuning, we’re interested in improving the overall performance of a piece of content. That means we need to think about how the piece of content is ranking, what types of users it’s attracting, the organic traffic it generates, and even the behavior of users who visit the page. Ultimately, even a few small changes could be enough to take a mediocre page seated deeply in your blog and make it a total star on the SERPs. The Core Principles of Content Tuning for SEO If we want a piece of content to be successful in an SEO campaign, we need to tune it with the following core principles in mind: Optimize for user intent. User intent is a way to determine the goals and mindset of an individual user searching for a specific keyword term. For example, a person searching for “bike tune-up near me” is probably searching for a bike shop where they can take their bicycle for a seasonal tune-up. In contrast, a person searching for “bike tune-up tutorial” is probably more interested in learning how to do a bike tune-up by themselves. These are simple and easily understood examples, but user intent gets far more complicated. One of your goals in content tuning is optimizing for user intent. Instead of optimizing for one or a handful of specific keyword phrases, you’ll be optimizing your piece of content to fulfill user desires, according to their intent when searching. This is valuable for several reasons. For starters, user intent is arguably Google’s biggest priority; if you can satisfy user intentions with your content, it’s likely to rank higher. Additionally, optimizing for user intent increases dwell time on your page, while increasing the likelihood that each user will take action on your website. Develop content with users in mind. Next, we need to develop our content with users in mind – and that means human users, not search bots. Too often, content developers and search engine optimizers develop their content with algorithms in mind. They try to include just the right number of keywords, just the right structure, and just the right semantic patterns to trick search engines into ranking their content favorably. Ironically, this is usually counterproductive. It’s usually much better to write for human beings, serve them well, and capitalize on the benefits of providing a good user experience. Increase page relevancy. Another goal of content tuning is to increase page relevancy. In other words, we want to make our existing piece of content more relevant for more queries. Historically, SEO professionals have recommended creating content with a singular keyword focus; you create one piece of content (and one page) for each target keyword or phrase in your strategy. But in today’s era of semantic complexity and advanced machine learning algorithms, such a narrow focus is problematic. Instead, it’s often better to have monumental pieces of content that can address many different keywords and many different user intents simultaneously. Revisit ranking factors. This is also an opportunity to revisit ranking factors as they apply to this individual page. As you add new content sections, delete sections of content that aren’t working for your strategy, and optimize for conversions, see if there are any technical tweaks you can make to increase the likelihood of this page ranking in SERPs. With those core principles in mind, what steps do you need to take to tune your content for SEO? Step One: Look for Opportunities to Tune Your Content for SEO First, you need to decide which pieces of content or pages of your website you want to tune for

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77 Link Building Strategies for SEO
Timothy Carter

77 Link Building Strategies for SEO in 2024

It’s nearly impossible to achieve any measurable search engine optimization (SEO) results without at least some link building. The high-level view of link building strategies is simple enough; place or earn more links pointing back to your domain so your domain-level and page-level authority grow, at which point you’ll naturally rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The truth is this exhaustive list of link building strategies should only be used to give your ideas. It can all be intimidating and difficult for a link building newcomer, and frustrating to a seasoned veteran who just can’t break past their most recent traffic plateau. These link building strategies include some of the best ways to get free backlinks. We’ll also answer the following questions: What tactics should I focus on for my niche? What tactics should I avoid, or which are too costly or time-consuming to be worth my time? SEO pricing can be expensive, but repairing poor SEO is worse. What are the easiest ways to acquire quality backlinks? How do you make your blog posts and other on-site content irresistibly link worthy? How do you avoid spammy link building strategies? What are the best link building strategies for new websites? How long does it take for even the best link building strategies to work? Once you get a good system in place for link building, how do you scale it up? How many of of my backlink strategies should involve guest blogging or guest post outreach? Should I manually acquire high quality links or rely on passive link acquisition strategies? How do I effectively outsource my link building? In this post, we delve into 77 link building strategies most likely to help you boost the visibility of your own site in the SERPs. In the rest of this article, we’ll be exploring link building strategies in different categories, from earning backlinks naturally with attractive content to best practices for managing publisher relationships. Curious about your site’s existing backlinks compared to your competitors? Use our backlink checker to view your profile and get information about how you can improve. These backlink strategies will help you ensure that the links you build are the highest possible quality: 1. Quality > Quantity. And quality is typically time-consuming and more expensive. This first strategy is more about what you shouldn’t do. Newcomers are often tempted to build as many links as possible, without putting much thought into which types of links they build or how they build them. Before you even start link building, make sure you have a clear vision. What are you trying to accomplish? Which links will help you the most? What links could hurt? Based on technical keyword research, what phrases do you want to rank for? Have you developed an anchor text strategy for your outreach? It’s much better to build a small number of extremely helpful links than a large number of links that might hurt you in the long run. Be VERY picky about the links you work to acquire manually: Work to be that guy or gal in your organization that won’t take or stand for acquiring garbage backlinks! 2. Relevance > Authority. Good links exist in context. A lengthy URL existing by itself in a forum comment isn’t going to get much positive attention; it isn’t helpful, valuable, or even natural. But a link embedded as a citation to a resource page, or a solidly written article is a different story. When building links, your first priority should be the content housing your link, and the context that justifies its existence. Focus on: Links from quality sites Links embedded in quality content Links using appropriate anchor text (depending on your existing profile) Links that point to a relevant page to the content topic AND the referring domain Without good content as a backbone, your link building strategy won’t get far. 3. High DA > Low DA (duh). Google judges not just the number of linking domains to your site, but also the quality of those linking domains. Domain authority (DA) is a relative measure of the trustworthiness of a given site. Source: Moz The higher the DA of a domain is, the more authority its links will pass. Your rankings will increase with 1) enough high DA mixed with low DA sites and 2) enough time for those links to vest. Accordingly, getting a link on a high-DA site is better than a comparable link on a low-DA site. As an added bonus, high-DA sites tend to get more traffic on their own, which means they’ll have a higher likelihood of passing referral traffic your way. 4. Favor new domains and IP addresses over already-linked domains. Links pass authority from one site to another, but there are diminishing returns for links on the same domain. In other words, the first link you build on a 78 DA website will pass significant authority to your site, but the second link you build there will pass much, much less. As a general rule, getting a link on a new domain is a better use of your time, even if its DA is slightly lower. In this example, a link on a new 55 DA site will be superior to a second link on the 78 DA site. Of course, this isn’t written in stone; even if you aren’t getting as much authority, new links on already-link domains will still increase your brand visibility and may forward additional referral traffic your way. 5. Link to a high-quality, internal page onsite. You can technically link any page of your site, but it’s a good strategy to link to the best-written blog posts or otherwise most valuable content pages of your site. This is useful for a few reasons. First, it strengthens the value of your link, meaning it’s more likely to be accepted by publishers and clicked by readers. Second, it passes page-specific page authority (PA) to this page, increasing its ranking potential disproportionately to the other pages

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