How to Start Link Building for SEO

Links (to your site from other sites) are hugely important in SEO. These links tell search engines that your website is credible and valuable – after all, these other sites found it useful enough to link to it – and the number of links to your site tells the search engine how popular your site is (and therefore how interested searchers will be in it). Overall, the more links there are to your site, the higher it’s going to rank in the search engines.

Link building sounds really difficult to a lot of people – and it is harder than on-page SEO and site structure optimization. And it does take some time. But here are a few different kinds of links you can get and tactics to start getting them.

Natural links

You have no control over these. Natural links happen when someone reads your post or page, thinks it has really good information, and links to it somewhere on their site. These are great for SEO, but pretty hard to get without already ranking pretty high in the search engines. The best way you can work towards these is to produce fantastic content and do other SEO work on it.

Outreach links

This strategy involves finding other sites that have relevant content that could link to you and reaching out to the owner of the site requesting they link to you. This usually includes a value proposition explaining why it’s a good thing for them and their readers to link to you. This type of link building has to be done manually and has a very low success rate.

Link trading

Some people will trade links with other sites – they link to a few of that site’s pages on their site, and that site links to a few of their pages. This can be very effective as long as the links are relevant. Search engines are smart, and a link to your clothing brand’s site on an organic food store’s site will actually hurt you more than help you.

Self-created

Self-created links are links that you create by interacting with other sites – they can be forum signatures, links from guest posting, or from comments on other sites’ posts. They offer the lowest value, but can be a good place to start, and can actually be really valuable if you get enough of them out there. (Don’t spam random sites with comments to get them, though!)

Site Structure for SEO

Site structure is a very important but often-overlooked element of search engine optimization. It’s also one of the least understood. In this post, we’re going to demystify the basics of site structure. If you don’t manage your own website, you may want to send this post to your webmaster, but even if you’re not up on the whole HTML thing, it isn’t hard to grasp the basics of site structure.

Why site structure is important

Good site structure help’s Google’s “spiders” – tiny bots that index websites and tell Google which pages are relevant for which keywords – find all your pages and posts and figure out which ones are the most important. It also prevents you from competing with yourself for search engine rankings – if you have multiple pages or posts about similar topics, good site structure will help search engines index them properly so your pages aren’t competing with each other for rankings (and therefore making both lower than they should be).

Site structure isn’t just important for SEO, though. Good site structure also provides a better user experience. When everything is properly structured and organized, it’s easier for visitors to your site to find the information they’re looking for and navigate the site in general.

Elements of good site structure

A balanced pyramid

A good site’s structure is pyramid-shaped. Your site is at the top; beneath that are your main pages (between 3-7 of them) like About, Products, and Contact. Beneath each of those are sub-pages (e.g. for About, the sub-pages may be Our Story, Our Mission, and Our Team). The best pyramid structure is balanced – if you have three sub-pages in your About category, aim to have 2-4 (but ideally 3) sub-pages for each of your main pages, as well.

URL structure

Try to have your pages’ URL structure mimic your site’s pyramid structure. Using the example from above, the URL for the Our Story page (which is under the About page) should be something like http://www.yoursite.com/about/our-story; similarly, the Seasonal Products page that’s a sub-page of your Products page should have a URL something like http://www.yoursite.com/products/seasonal-products.

Main menu

Your site probably already has a main menu at the top that links to different pages. The best main menu has links to each of your main pages, with dropdowns that link to each page’s sub-pages when the link is moused over or clicked on.

Internal links

Internal links basically means your pages link to each other. A good rule of thumb is to try to have a (relevant) link to at least one other page on each page. Often, people find it easiest to link to a page’s sub-pages or to its parent page (the page that it is a sub-page of).

Simplicity

Don’t overcomplicate it! Simplicity makes it easier for search engines to index your site and know how to rank it. And the more complicated your site’s structure is, the harder it will be for visitors to find things, which leads to frustrated visitors, a high bounce rate, and low sales for you.

Keyword Research: The Basics

When you’re doing on-page SEO, keywords are hugely important. They are one of the cornerstones of good SEO – you’re not going to rank in the search engines if the search engines don’t know what you should be ranking for! Sometimes it seems obvious what the keyword for your page or post should be, other times it’s more difficult. But either way, when selecting keywords, it’s good to do a little keyword research to make sure you’ve made the best choice.

Consider your site and audience

You can pick the best keyword in the world, but if it’s not relevant to your site and your audience, it’s going to be useless. Luckily, this consideration isn’t hard. If your business is a pet food company, “dog tooth care” is going to be a better keyword than “pizza restaurants in Dallas.” And if your audience is in their 20s and 30s, “how to care for a cat when you’re elderly” isn’t going to be relevant to them at all.

Short vs. long-tail

Short keywords – like “dog food” – have a very high search volume (number of searches per month). They also have thousands of other websites trying to rank for them and it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to rank. The best keywords are long-tail keywords, which are often phrases or entire sentences (such as “how to teach a cat tricks”). You want to strike a balance here – don’t get so long and specific that nobody searches for that exact keyword, but don’t go so short that you’re competing with thousands of other websites.

Google your keywords

Once you’ve decided on a keyword that you think will work, it’s time to start the real keyword research. The first step is to type your keyword into Google (or your search engine of choice) and see what comes up. How relevant are the results to your keyword? What kind of sites come up? How many ads are there (you’ll have to turn off your ad blocker if you use one)? If none of the results are really relevant to your keyword, that may indicate that your keyword has too low of a search volume to be useful. If there are ads, that means the keyword is a valuable one.

Use a keyword tool

Find a keyword tool to get a more in-depth analysis of your chosen keyword. I love Moz’s Keyword Explorer for this. A free account lets you examine 10 keywords per month, and it gives you a very in-depth report. You can see the search volume, how difficult they think it will be to rank for that keyword, the estimated click-through rate for sites ranking for that keyword, and more. Google AdWords Keyword Planner also has great tools – they try to help you set up a paid search marketing campaign, but you can also just use their keyword tools.

Repeat

Don’t just analyze one keyword and call it a day! Sometimes the first keyword you pick turns out to be not very good. Sometimes after four pretty good keywords, you find the perfect combination of high volume and low competition. Do keyword research on at least five keywords – that will give you the best chance of finding the keyword that’s going to help your website rank in the search engines.

On-Page SEO: The Basics

Often when people think of search engine optimization (SEO), on-page SEO is what comes to mind. On-page SEO is exactly what it sounds like – the elements of SEO that are actually on the page, like keywords and headings. There are other elements of SEO that are not “on-page” and have to do with things like metadata and site structure – we’ll talk about those later. Today, we’re focusing on the main elements of on-page SEO.

Content

This is obviously the first thing you have to have – you can’t have SEO on your page if there’s nothing at all on your page. Good content – useful information that is presented in an interesting or engaging way – is the cornerstone of SEO. SEO is for search engines, but search engines are for people, and if search engines figure out people don’t want to read your content, they won’t rank it very highly.

Keywords

Keywords are words and phrases that tell search engines what your content is about. For example, the keyword for this post is “on-page SEO.” Search engines read your page to see all the words on it – having a specific string of words that repeats a couple times tells the search engine that if people search for that phrase, your page is relevant. The ideal keyword density (how often the keyword appears in your content) is around 2%, so in a 300-word blog post, the keyword should appear 2-8 times.

Headings

Headings divide a post or page into different sections. Search engines like it when pages and posts are broken up by headings into easier-to-skim sections. If you manage to work your keyword into some of your headings, that’s even better for SEO.

Links

Internal and external links both factor into SEO. Internal links are links that link to other pages or posts within your website. An external link is a link that links to any page or post on a site that’s not yours. Having one (or even better, both) in a post will make search engines see it as more authoritative, and therefore deserving of a higher rank.

Alt text

Search engines can’t read images, and neither can screen readers for visually impaired people. Instead, you use alt text to describe the images in words. Alt text has two purposes – it should describe the image so people using screen readers can get an idea of what the picture looks like, and it should also contain your keyword to improve your SEO.