How to Begin Link Building
Marketing professionals know that the first step to successful online marketing is beginning with link building. Link Building is the practice of creating links from other websites or content to your own, and it’s a crucial part of any marketing campaign.
This blog post will help marketers understand how they can begin their link-building process by knowing how to kick off your link-building campaign and what to focus on first. It all starts on your website, though, before even focusing on the external sites.
Page Targets
Choosing which pages are important to you on your website is the first step in beginning your own link-building campaign. Pick which pages you want people to come into your website on, and those should be where you want external links to point to.
You likely don’t want links pointing back to your “Contact Us page” or “About Us” page. Rather, you’d want links to your homepage, categories, products, service pages, or blog/article content. Those are the pages that will be most beneficial and likely to get you closer to your business goals.
Keywords/Anchor Text
After you pick the page targets, the next step is to match those pages with keywords for your ideal anchor text. The best way to pick this is to use a keyword rank tracking tool like Semrush to see if your target pages already have some strong rankings associated with them. If so, that should be some ideal anchor text or the text you want to be linked within the content on an external source.
If the page you are trying to build up doesn’t have any strong rankings, shoot for the stars. Pick your ideal dream keywords or how you hope someone would find you on Google, and keep that in mind as your ideal anchor text. After all, SEO is a game of cat and mouse, beginning your own link building is one of the baits to higher keyword rankings.
Choose External Target Websites
This requires some heavy lifting. You need to find external sites that you would love to get a link on. You can do this by searching Google yourself or looking at where competitors are getting links from and trying to mimic it.
This should be done every month. You aren’t going to get every link, but that is why you have to prospect many sites every month.
How to Begin Link Building: Outreach Strategy
Once you have external targets, it’s all about outreach and a strong communication strategy. You have to entice the external site of why it’s a good idea to link back to you or why it might be beneficial.
There are many outreach templates just a Google search away that have decent success rates. If you don’t like any of those, you can always create your own. Just make sure it’s customized, so you don’t sound robotic.
