With over 1.5 billion websites on the internet today, how can you make sure that yours stands out from the crowd?
We know that good quality content can work wonders for your site’s ranking in the SERPs, but it’s just one part of the search domination equation. So instead, it would be best to have a mix of strategies to help you take your website to the next level.
Link building is one such strategy that can help you dominate search results and get traffic flowing to your website. The more quality links your website has, the better your chances of securing good search rankings and potentially generating more revenue.
The flywheel method of building external links is a great way to create a natural backlink profile that delivers results.
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The Flywheel Method
When you work actively towards delivering a great customer experience, you need to bring your entire firm together to achieve your goal. The flywheel model helps you set the pace and get the momentum required to do so.
In real life, the wheel’s energy-storing capacity depends on its size, its spinning speed, and how much friction it experiences. Similarly, your customers drive your businesses’ growth, and this energy wheel helps carry on the momentum.
The basic idea in business is that firms struggle over time with strategies and gradually gain momentum to become great. However, you have to remember that it is an intensive process that doesn’t happen overnight.
Providing Value With Link Building
To understand how much you should pay for link building, you have to determine what the digital world values and offer it.
It’s simple. Links.
Online partnerships are based on backlinks where your websites link to your page to give good links to them in return. This makes the entire process a value exchange rather than a one-sided generous act.
Links are a game-changer in the digital world because they help boost SEO and improve an article’s quality. However, it is not very straightforward to determine their value because several factors like a site’s niche, domain rating, brand equity, traffic, etc., affect it.
According to Ahref’s study on backlink value, the average to buy a link in 2018 was $352.92.
Factors To Determine Link Value
Link building requires careful thinking and inspection since not all of them are equal. Here are some of the main factors that you need to consider:
Linking Website’s Domain Rating
A high domain rating (DR) or domain authority (DA) website provides a more valuable link than a low DR website. However, a lower DR site link can be more beneficial in rare cases if there are fewer total internal links, and yours is one of them.
Linking Page’s URL Rating
URL Rating is an essential metric for link building which builds a single web page’s authority rather than the entire website.
A new blog usually has a URL Rating of 10, but it grows when you build links to this single post. So even though DRs of 70 and 80 are labeled high, ratings of 30 and 40 are high for URLs.
“Nofollow” Or “Dofollow”
Website links give either “nofollow” or “dofollow” links. All links are “dofollow” ones unless shown otherwise. “Dofollow” links make Google search crawlers follow links to their external pages and indicate SEO value through them.
You can manually mark backlinks as “nofollow” with an HTML tag that instructs Google not to follow the link and pass the SEO value.
Dofollow links usually include images, statistics, or other cited resources, while nofollow links include promotional sponsored and affiliate links. Try to incorporate a mix of these links throughout your content naturally.
Linking Page’s External Links
The number of links to the linking page matters, as it affects how much link authority your page gets. For instance, if a linking page has five links on it, your link equity will be 20%, but your equity will reduce to 10% if it has ten links.
Relevancy To Niche
When you create backlinks, make sure they are relevant to your website and niche to add value to them. For instance, Mailchimp’s backlink to your blog about email marketing would be more relevant and valuable than something from a completely unrelated blog.
Anchor Text
Another major player in link building is the hyperlinked word or anchor text that links to your website. However, this factor is becoming slightly less critical with Google’s PageRank and algorithm that can read and consider the contextual words near the anchor text.
As a result, make sure your anchor text is natural yet relevant. Then, use a mix of the different anchor text types to create the perfect one for you:
- Partial Match: A partially matching anchor text to your target keyword, which is a strong type due to its natural and relevant nature
- Exact Match: A perfectly matching anchor text to your keyword. Try to use a limited number of these because they aren’t natural and require you to input them into the text
- Non-Match: An utterly unrelated anchor text to your keyword that can be used frequently as it is natural-looking
- Branded: An anchor text aligning with your brand that helps to improve brand authority with their natural look
- Branded + Keyword: An anchor text that includes your target keyword and brand creates a link between the two
Link Placement
A linking article has several links in it, and the position of your website’s link makes a difference to link equity. If your link is placed higher, you’ll get more link equity than if it were placed further below in the article.
It is also essential to incorporate your website’s link higher in guest posts instead of a hyperlink to the homepage in the author bio, which wouldn’t have as much value.
Link Building With Leverage-Based Strategies
You can use several of the leverage-based strategies for link building:
Guest Post
One of the best ways bloggers use to get free backlinks is through guest blogging. This helps boost your domain rating to improve your content’s rank and not merely get referral traffic.
You have to contact other bloggers from your niche, write a guest article for them, and provide a link back to your website.
However, guest blog links can also seem unnatural, so just writing these won’t help you attain your goal. Instead, Google might get alerted that all of your backlinks are from a guest blog, making it believe that you don’t have many natural mentions.
The last thing you want to do is look spammy to Google!
You have to get more backlinks and use your guest post as a resource for it. Post blogs on several websites from your niche and optimize them with a few links to your site, some internal links for the blog you write for, and of course, relevant statistics to add credibility.
However, you don’t have to stop there. Following the Ahref study, a link has an average worth of $352; you can add more links and add more to your blog as well with that leverage.
Guest post link trading involves you finding bloggers from your niche who actively do guest posts on more authoritative sites and trading backlinks with one another between the guest posts.
Since you can add more links to your guest post, you can add theirs, and in return, they add your link into posts. So instead of writing guest posts for various websites and getting backlinks from there, you can use this partnership to exchange backlinks and build more credibility.
Once again, make sure you don’t overdo it and check that these backlinks are of high-quality and not some link scheme and there is real value exchange in the link with other bloggers.
Pre-Linking
Linking to other bloggers’ websites in your guest posts is a great way to grab their attention and work with them, as you provide value to them before even reaching out to them.
This strategy helps to collaborate with them and highlight your valuable contribution to their website through backlinks in your guest post outreach email.
For instance, if you want to do a podcast interview of some significant social media influencer from your niche, you can improve your chances of landing that interview by sending some backlinks their way through your guest posts.
This pre-linking strategy allows your target partner to see the value you have provided them and encourages them to work with you, providing backlinks for your page. The value exchange here is an upfront link provision for future backlinks.
While this is a great strategy, it is also tough to master. It is best to have a good number of guest posts going before you get in touch with a harder-to-score website.
Conclusion
Link building is a great strategy to help your website reach more people. Since everyone thinks of themselves first and how a deal can help them and their business, backlinks work best in this situation to create fair trade between two parties.
Since links are like currency in the digital world, you can use that leverage to provide value to others instead of focusing on personal link-building strategies. For example, instead of asking for links right away, give links to others and show your value, so they are encouraged to do the same.
Build partnerships based on trust with other bloggers from your niche to establish your authority in link building.
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