Building a Link Building Strategy

We’ve established why small businesses need a blog and how different types of links can help your SEO efforts, but making sure these items are working together can ensure your efforts are noticed by Google and you are getting the most value possible.

THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR STRATEGY

Auditing and understanding which keywords you have the potential to rank for is the first step for any SEO campaign. Once you have established the keywords you desire rankings for, your link-building strategy starts to take shape. Take Firestarter, for example. If we are looking to rank for “Denver SEO”, we would want to conduct link-building outreach to industry-relevant websites and blogs and build directory and citation links to our website as well. Once you understand the keywords you would like to target, it is time to look at anchor text distribution to see which kinds of links you need to build.

ANCHOR TEXT & LINK BUILDING

Anchor text is the words contained within a link. At the end of the paragraph above, I have a link to an article discussing anchor text distribution. The anchor text of that link is “anchor text distribution”. These live in the code of your website, looking something like the following:

Our <a href=”https://firestarterseo.com/denver-seo/“>Denver SEO</a> services.

This example would look like this on the page:

Our Denver SEO services.

These links default to blue links, and most links you find will be blue. If you have a custom-built website, you may have different rules set up for the ways your links display. In most cases, they will stand out from the rest of the content to make links obvious for your users. Here are a few specific ways you can utilize anchor text in your links:

• Naked Anchor Text
• Branded Anchor Text
• Generic Anchor Text
• Partial Match Anchor Text
• Long Tail Anchor Text
• Exact Match Anchor Text
• LSI Anchor Text
• No Anchor
• Image Anchors

While there are some specific numbers to try to hit for anchor text distribution, the list above goes from those which should be the largest share to those which should have the smallest share from top to bottom.

BUILDING LINKS

Once you have a snapshot of the current links pointing to your site, you know which areas you need to improve your numbers. If 90% of your links are long tail, you know you need to get on some naked anchor text link building. If most of your links are branded, you should try to build other types of links, and so on. Continuing to iterate through your links and adding new links to your anchor text distribution metrics can ensure you are building the most valuable types of links from the start. Being cognizant of your link profile can ensure your links are not spammy and your link profile looks healthy overall. If you would like to learn more about link building and how it can improve your rankings with Google, give us a call or leave a comment today!