The beginner’s guide to link-building
For improving your site’s search engine ranking.
How can you get people to stop what they’re doing and actually read the new article or download the new app you’ve just poured your heart and soul into? More generally, how do you even get your content in front of them in the first place? These are age-old questions as far as the Internet era is concerned. Improving your search ranking, however, largely falls back to what is called backlinking.
Backlinks refer to the number of links leading to a site and generally come in two forms: “quantity” and “quality” links. The more links leading to your page (quantity), and the more authoritative those sources are (quality), the more authority your site gains.
Among other things (site speed, site security, mobile-friendliness, text-embedded factors like keywords and keyword placement), it is content authority — dictated by the quantity and quality of links leading back to your content — that has been recently shown to be one of the largest factors for improving your ranking in Google’s search algorithm. Search engine optimization, SEO, is what helps you get to the all-important Page 1 of search results, and backlinks are a critical component.
The higher your spot in the ranking, the more likely that people will come across, and ultimately visit your page.
So how do you figure out where your page(s) stand with Google? You can do so through the tools below.
Knowing how you rank.
Who better to tell you where your site stands in Google than, well, Google! Using Google Search Console, previously known as Google Webmaster, you can get a detailed diagnosis of such things as how many people are coming to your page, how they’re getting there, and what keywords they are searching to get there, as well as overall suggestions related to improving your search presence.
While Google unfortunately removed official PageRank scores from the public last year, you can still get a useful estimation using Moz’s Domain Authority Score — a score from 0–100 which predicts how well your page will rank on search engines.
While the formula behind your Domain Authority Score consists of dozens of varying factors like MozRank (link popularity score) and MozTrust (link trust score), how this score is predicted is largely based on the quality of backlinks linking back to your content.
But are you at the mercy of the netizens to create backlinks? While waiting for a shoutout from professional bloggers, the good news is you can build some backlinks yourself first.
How we create backlinks to our website.
Submitting links
One easy task to check off is submitting your product to an aggregation site. By providing basic information about your product, like name, description, platform, and licence, these sites can help people looking for related services to find your app or site. Below are a few useful aggregation sites to start with:
Contacting key opinion leaders (KOLs)
Also think about the channels you can use to better reach your ideal audience. Think about your target users and where they find their information. For example, if you have a design product that helps prototyping, you might want to get featured on Smashing Magazine or Product Hunt. How would you do that? Reach out to the authority figures writing there or guest post on their website.
Steps to pitching a KOL:
- Develop a list of keywords associated with your website or product.
- Run them through Moz Keyword Explorer to get a sense of which relevant keywords are being searched for the most and have the highest potential of getting on the first page of Google, and which ones, according to their “Difficulty” score in respect to the size of your website, are worth pursuing.
- Search your keywords on Google and record the names and contact information (social media, email… the more personal, the better) of authors for the first two pages of results.
- Separate results into “quantity” contacts (websites/companies/blogs that are either the same size or smaller than you) and “quality” contacts (websites/companies/blogs that are larger and more popular than you).
- People are busy. Write pitches that answer the following questions: what value are you bringing, how it fits their existing content, and what credibility you have. Shorter pitches are better. They should also include embedded, relevant links. When contacting a KOL, ask yourself what would make you pay attention to a stranger.
Don’t send the exact same pitch to every KOL. You’re not spamming. You’re sharing something relevant.
It’s okay to use email templates, but try to at least personalize them a little bit. Try referencing a specific article they wrote or a video they made.
Here’s one of our e-mail samples:
If you’re having difficulty forming a template, use software like Yesware. As a bonus, it also helps you with accurate email tracking and easy follow-up.
Another way to catch a KOL’s attention is alerting them of a broken link with Broken Link Checker. It can also be useful in locating broken links on your own website.
If you’re still having trouble, check out this post on Quick Sprout for even more e-mail templates.
So there you have it.
These are some simple tactics that we have used for our in-house products, such as MakeAppIcon, which have gained over a million visitors. Take the information above, apply it to your own website, and you will be fetching quality backlinks and climbing the Google ranks in no time.
Of course, the mysterious art of backlinking is ever-expanding. If you happen to be a backlink Jedi yourself and are willing to share the ways of the Force, or simply want to say hi, please comment in the section below! 💚
