A thorough audit of backlinks is a great way to boost site rankings and drive more traffic to your online resource. With a few key tools, you can improve your backlink profile and ensure that all backlinks to your site make your online project grow and develop properly. The link ranking algorithm is an important point in overall site ranking in search engines. This means that the link profile needs to be constantly analyzed and improved. Let’s figure out together how to conduct such an analysis as efficiently as possible and what to pay attention to when picking a platform to post backlinks to your site on.
Top Reasons to Post Links
Backlinking plays a crucial role in effective site promotion and recognition among users. If you want to boost site traffic and raise revenue, then LinkLifting specialists recommend taking special care of the site link profile and its development. There are a couple of ways to benefit from posting backlinks to your site:
- Getting more traffic – By putting a link on an external site, you can be sure that people interested in your business or product will most probably come to you. And if potential customers like the product, then they will buy it.
- Creating brand awareness – Let’s assume that you have launched your online project just recently and a few people know about it. By posting a link to the corporate site on different platforms, you make people know about you and your product. This is a good way of creating brand awareness.
- Being ranked better by search engines – The more good sites are linking to you, the better. Search engines better rank online platforms with a strong link profile.
- Winning customer trust – When customers see that a trusted site has a link to your resource, it means that they can trust it.
The Art of Building a Strong Link Profile
For the website’s link profile to be as effective as possible, you must perform the following:
- Evaluate competitors’ links;
- Analyze the anchor list;
- Check the site for external links;
- Determine the required number of links.
What else matters in this business? And how to make your backlinks perform even better? We have made the checklist for the selection of worthy websites and have listed tools that will help you in this business.
To Post or Not to Post? Choosing Sites for Backlinking
Let’s try to figure out what are the main parameters to choose sites for placing backlinks to your online resource. Unfortunately, not all external links are useful for website promotion as there are many negative ones. These include the following:
- Link spam (placing identical links on different sources);
- Posting the same materials on different resources;
- Posting the same messages in comments to blogs; etc.
Another important aspect of an effective backlinking strategy is choosing appropriate platforms for backlinking. Here are some of the key criteria you should be guided by:
- The site age – You should give preference to old and well-established sites.
- A large number of visitors – The more people visit the site, the better. If the average daily traffic is less than 200 people, then you should consider a different platform for backlinking. The expiration date of the domain registration also matters. It is necessary to remember the possible difference in the period of domain registration and site placement. It is the age of the site that is crucial for us when choosing a platform for backlinking.
- Indexing of site pages in Google – a page that not indexed by the main search engines is of no interest to you, which means that you will hardly achieve anything from placing a link on it.
- PR and TCI of pages – The rank should be different from 0, while the optimal value for TCI is from 30 to 1,000. The main page PR must be 1 or higher.
- The number of external links – the fewer the better. If their value exceeds the number of links leading to the site by 20% or more, you should not buy external links on this project. This will only negatively affect SEO optimization and website promotion.
- The thematicity of the link – The closer the main site theme is to yours, the better.
- Site presence in DMOZ – The presence of a platform in DMOZ is an important indicator. It is a sign of the site’s reliability and trust in it from the search engines. Having such a platform as a part of your backlinking strategy will be really effective.
- Site content – At this point, you should consider a number of important indicators. The site should contain unique, regularly updated, diverse, and interesting content. Digital copy must be informative and engage the audience. It is also worth paying attention to the design of the site as it is an important nuance for both site visitors and search engines.
To ensure top performance of your backlinking strategy, it is important to have a monthly content plan that outlines the platforms, types of backlinks, and content to be generated.
Tools for Competitor Analysis
Wondering why you should check external links? There are a couple of good reasons to do so:
- Backlink analysis allows you to identify links from non-trust domains and exclude them from the link profile.
- In this way, you can find out who is linking to you and respond to reviews about your resource.
- It is a good way to identify spammy links to your site. Sometimes, competitors can post backlinks on sites with prohibited topics.
- Analyze the link mass of competitors and plan your promotion strategy based on these data.
Getting an idea of how your competitors promote their online resources will help a lot, especially if you are a novice webmaster and need some guidance. The below services will be of great service to you.
#1 – Ahrefs
- Cost: from $99 per month.
It is a great service for checking external SEO-optimization of the site. The solution shows the number of domains, pages, and IP addresses in the form of diagrams. It indicates link types and broken links. You can use Ahrefs for both competitor analysis and your site check.
#2 – Google Webmaster Tools
- Cost: free.
Google Webmaster Tools is a service from Google that performs link analysis using a core set of functions. The solution is intended for your projects only, but it allows for a full site inspection.
#3 – CheckTrust
- Cost: checking the first 500 links is free, then $30.
CheckTrust provides an assessment of the quality of links and generates a full report, which shows low-quality links without filtering.
#4 – LinkPad
- Cost: free.
LinkPad is a service for finding all backlinks, where you can track the level of nesting of every external link. LinkPad will help you identify grey zones and gaps in your backlinking strategy and assess the strategy of your main competitors.
#5 – Majestic SEO
- Cost: from $30 per month.
The Majestic SEO tool analyzes the number of links and source domains; it then produces a report showing trust topics. You can use these data for your content plan in the future.
Things to Keep an Eye on
There are so many things that you can access when using the above tools. It doesn’t always make sense to stay tuned to everything. We strongly recommend you to be focused on the following characteristics when analyzing a link profile of your site.
Link Profile Dynamics
A good (balanced) link growth graph is smooth with no ups and downs. Posting 100 backlinks in a week is never a good decision. You should find a balance and check what your competitors do.
Backlink Types
Different links must lead to the site: anchor and non-anchor, nofollow (prohibited for indexing) and dofollow (open for indexing), as well as links from images. You can check what types of backlinks lead to your site in Ahrefs.com, SEMrush, LinkPad.
Anchor List
The bulk of backlinks in a natural link profile should consist of non-anchor ones. These are the links that are presented in the form of a page address, site, brand name, or contain the words “here,” “visit,” “go,” etc.
Sites for Backlinking
When auditing external link mass, it is essential to evaluate the quality of the linking sites. It will allow you to identify low-quality sites and adjust the promotion strategy.
A regular audit of the link mass will help you to adjust the external promotion strategy, find new growth drivers for the site, and identify high-quality sites for placing backlinks. It is also a good way to identify potential problems in time and fix them fast.
Ready, Steady, Go?
As you can see, achieving a successful promotion of your site to the TOP of search engines requires not only knowing about the number of backlinks but also taking care of their quality. The main thing to make it all fly is to check links using the services, determine the type of link profile, thoroughly plan a backlinking strategy, and act accordingly. Believe us – it’s worth it!
