3 factors which make a link extremely powerful for your business
3 factors which make a link extremely powerful for your business
If you want to build the absolutely most powerful links that you possibly can for your business — here’s what you need to prioritize.
These are the 3 things which your most effective links are going to have in common.
(1) Relevance
Of course, this goes without saying. The relevance is really important.
There are of course varying degrees of relevance. Some are going to be more relevant than others on the scale.
For example, if you’ve got a niche store which sells CrossFit trainers. Then a great one would be of course to get links from blogs which specifically discuss CrossFit.
But there is a limited pool of these. And of those, not all will want to link to you. But, we could then niche up to just general fitness blogs, or healthy lifestyle.
Even something kind of non-related like fashion could seem somewhat non-related. But if you could take an angle on it like “Looking fashionable while keeping fit” then you could make it relevant.
But, there’s a limit on what you can do. And you may not find any sensible way of making CrossFit trainers related to gardening.
And with all these degrees of relevance, this will affect how powerful the link is. The more relevant it is, the more affect it could have.
Even something like Geolocation can confer relevance. For example, if you have an event management which was based in Manchester and the city itself is something which plays a part in the website its content, and message. Then it is definitely worth building links from other businesses in Manchester, especially if they have some kind of industry relevance.
(2) Authority
Now, let’s clear this area up. There are a colossal amount of tools which claim to measure “authority”, whether it’s Moz, Ahrefs or something else.
But authority basically comes down to this — does the website you’re getting the link from, have its own solid link profile? If the answers yes, then that is a good authoritative link to have.
It’s the reason why you’re not going to get any long term results by just building loads of new blogs and linking to yourself from it (a lot of black/grey hats are doing this).
Google used to use an old system called PageRank for measuring this factor, however, that’s been removed now (since they didn’t want people focusing on the number) and the way they measure it now is probably a lot more complex and intertwined with various other factors now.
Of course, you also need to factor in that there could be some very valuable and relevant links, which meet all the right criteria, but the site itself isn’t very old (say it’s a blog that’s been around for less than a year). In this case, you could argue its got low authority. However, in this scenario it wouldn’t harm to have a link. And if it really is a valuable site — i.e. good content, good structure, etc. then in the near future it could easily start to become an authoritative site.
So, hence another reason why you don’t want to be using tools like Moz to swipe off lists of sites which are deemed “worthy”, while some newish (but great) websites get trashed from your list.
(3) Traffic & engagement
Not an easy one to determine before you have the link (since we don’t have access to the entire worlds Analytics account!). But is there traffic going to that site and will we get some actual direct traffic from it?
If that seems likely, then you definitely want a link from there. Good way to determine this is actually from the first 2 factors — relevance and authority.
If you can write just the right content with a link, or have a link very strategically placed on their site, then you can funnel some traffic to your site with best effect.
And better yet, traffic itself is a really important ranking factor.
If search engines like Google see that people are clicking on your link, its contextual, relevant — and they then click through to your site — and they stay on your site, engage and bounce rate is low… Then you’ve hit the jackpot!
Not only have you very successfully engaged with the traffic going to your site, but you’ve improved your authority in the eyes of Google, and by extension will improve your rankings. Which will increase organic search traffic, which will further engage on your site, etc. (you get the idea)
So really, those are the only useful metrics you want to be using. I’ve said it before (but I’ll say it again) don’t overuse metric systems like DA or TF and focus on these real world metrics, which perhaps don’t have an associated SEO tool — but require a bit of human thought and human intervention.
After all — that is the true essence of the internet, making human connection…
