Once on-site optimization has been completed it’s time to start building relevant links pointing to a website. The first step to link building is to conduct a link audit to see what kinds of links have already been established. Many website owners that are just getting started with SEO tend to think that they don’t have any links. This is highly doubtful. Even if a website owner has never taken part in any link building activities, if the website has good content it’s likely that links have been built naturally. This is especially true for websites that have aged. Many website owners have no idea what kind of links that they have. These links basically tell a story to the search engines, so it’s important to understand if the right story is being told.
There are numerous tools available to help conduct a website link audit. If you have a Google Webmaster account set up you can use the Webmaster Tools. There are also good free sites like Link Diagnosis and numerous paid tools on the market. The first part of a thorough link audit is to visit every webpage that is linking to your site. It’s very possible that there could be thousands, especially if the website has been around for awhile. It may seem overwhelming, but it’s still important to visit them all. If there are lots of them it’s OK to set aside a specific amount of time each day to chip away at it. It’s a good idea to categorize each link as you visit it in a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. Categories could include press releases, directories, business profiles, articles, social links, blog comments, blogs, news, video links, link exchanges, not appropriate, and other. Links that are considered to be not appropriate are links to porn or gambling sites or spam blogs and websites with lots of ads. A few bad links here or there isn’t anything to worry about too much, but if there are a lot of them it could be affecting your SERP ranking and you should contact the site owners to remove them and report the links to Google. Conducting a link audit of your own site gives you an inside peek as to how the search engines view your site.
The second part of a link audit is to conduct link audits on your top two or three competitors. It’s not necessary to visit all of their links, but you should take random samples of at least a few hundred. This will give you a sense of how they are viewed by the search engines and tells their link story. It also helps you uncover good sources of links for when you start your link building campaign.
Once you have this background information about what links you have, you can start to work on building links that you’d like to have. If you notice that you are lacking in some areas or have too many links in another area you can work to improve your link portfolio by building a strategic and diverse link building campaign that addresses these issues.
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Brick Marketing is a Boston SEO company. For more information please call 781-999-1222.
If you notice that you are lacking in some areas or have too many links in another area you can work to improve your link portfolio by building a strategic and diverse link building campaign that addresses these issues.