Venchito Tampon

Product-Led Link Building For SEO

We’ve built backlinks for clients and my web properties for over a decade (2013 to 2024). As the CEO of a link building agency, I’ve seen the ins and outs of link building—what works and what doesn’t.

Today, many SEO agencies and in-house SEOs rely solely on their link building strategies, which involve “creating linkable assets” to build and earn links. 

Some have been doing the old-age skyscraper content, expecting to increase their content's perceived value and credibility by writing long-form content (usually 5K+ word content that targets several subtopics on one page). 

Others have pushed toward creating data-driven content (statistics, interactive pages, etc.), which is on the rise these days. 

Our approaches to link acquisition have changed. We now move from creating “linkable assets” to product-led link building.

At its core, product-led link building utilizes the brand's offerings (its products/services) as leverage and a means of acquiring high-valued links for the site. 

Why Product-Led Link Building Works?

• Instantly feature your brand’s main products/services on pages from which you want to get links from, giving you a brand advantage over your competitors.
• Increases demand for your product as users tend to see more and more of your offers as part of “best X list of” pages (“brand recall”). 
• Gets higher buy-ins from company stakeholders when you pitch link building campaigns, as the results (links) are directly tied to promoting the product/service, compared to pushing content assets (mostly informational) that only bring awareness about the problems your SEOs want to solve.
• Builds brand authority in your space (in much less time), as you constantly associate your products/services with pages on publication sites that directly talk about what your brand offers (e.g. lists of X tools/suppliers). 

In this post, I’ll cover actionable takeaways for utilizing product-led link building to build high-powered links to your site's important pages.  

1. Acquire Links From Pages with Product Recommendations 

In the past, SEOs followed the formula of building links to informational content (mid-level to top-of-the-funnel content) and then internally linking from that page to core landing pages to push rankings of these pages for commercial keywords. 

While this can still work, building links directly to product pages would be more robust. 

For instance, if you’re doing link building for eCommerce, tons of “list of X”s “where to buy” pages list down products in industry categories. Getting links from these pages drives link juice and referral traffic to your pages and helps establish your brand identity through product recommendations. 

As users see your product listed among the top X products/services, you’ll increase brand awareness and help become a “top-of-mind” brand in the industry for Google searchers. 

Once you have occupied lists, LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini are likely to start presenting your products when users start searching for specific product recommendations.

More Actionable Tips:

• Use link intelligence tools like Ahrefs to find a “list of X” page or product recommendation lists corresponding to your products. You can find pages directly linking to your competitors (using Ahrefs) and see if there’s an opportunity to be listed by reaching out to publishers of those pages. 
• Consider different angles for list inclusion. You may only be the best in some features and directions, but at certain benefits, you can present your products as one deserving of the lists. See this example from SiegeMedia's “best of content writing services” post. 

2. Leverage Digital PR For Building Valuable Links 

Harnessing the power of digital PR can propel your brand’s authority in your space. 

Securing valuable links from industry publishers and seed sites (domains that are manually selected as trustworthy) not only drives ranking power to its destination pages but also creates more awareness for your product or services. 

How to do it:

• Identify stories about your products (customer reviews, testimonials, impact on your community) and how they resonate well with your targeted audience. By picking the right data and storytelling it effectively, you’ll have a bigger chance of getting attention from A-list news sites and publishers interested in covering your stories.
• Create something interesting and helpful content related to your product. When you create content, don’t neglect relevance to your core offerings. Ensure it’s still relevant to what your brand offers. Then, reach out to relevant, authoritative websites for them to link to it. 

3. Publish Product-led Surveys or Data Studies 

Aligning content ideas to products is truly a brand-building strategy. Given that information from content assets can be leveraged to generate more sales for the brand, it’s worth investing in this type of content that matters. 

Publish product-led content assets such as surveys or data studies that can naturally fit on sales pages. These content pieces are likely to drive long-term SEO value for the business, as they are tied directly to the potential conversions of the brand. 

More actionable tips: 

• Reference data points at the top of the sales page to emphasize the differentiation of products from its competitors.
• Repurpose first-party data into other content formats such as infographics and interactive pieces, for further amplification. 
• Invest in building these product-led assets across your site to provide users with value through information content and increase conversions by turning them into buyers. 

4. Invest in Social Listening

Keeping tabs on who’s talking about your brand and products can open up new brand-building and easy link building opportunities. 

By monitoring what customers say about your product online, you’ll gain valuable insights into customer sentiments and potential influencers in your industry with whom you can collaborate. 

Using this approach, you can better equip your in-house departments to handle significant public relations crises before they become unmanageable. 

You can use brand mention analytics tools or even link intelligence tools like Ahrefs to monitor pages and authors as to whom your brand is mentioned across the web. 

 

More actionable tips: 

• Assess customer sentiments and identify specific words and phrases they associate with your product/s. 
• Never miss opportunities to gain brand mentions - even if they’re unlinked. These unlinked brand mentions can drive more branded searches. Searches may include keywords that could associate with your brand - and could be picked up by Google easily, helping your website pages to rank higher for non-branded keywords. 
• Invest in viral marketing to build brand awareness. Leverage search-driven social media platforms like Youtube and Tiktok to increase product searches through audience-first marketing campaigns. 
• Create content assets that push your brand’s benefits and results (through customer testimonials) on social media to increase branded and organic searches on the platforms. 
• Invite niche influencers to review your products through their native content. See one series of campaigns we did for our coffee shop that drove several weekly store visits. 

5. Buy Publisher Websites with Relevant Targeted Communities  

If you can’t beat them, buy them. 

Interestingly, many publisher websites amass thousands, if not millions, of traffic from search. They have built a community of targeted audiences that’s been generating revenue only through ads and affiliates. 

If you’re a software, you could consider investing in the websites by buying them directly as part of your company’s web properties.

The leverage of this approach is you’ll eventually absorb targeted followers who could directly purchase the product you’re selling from the site itself. 

More actionable tips: 

• Attend industry conferences in digital marketing and start networking with people. Some may own publishers’ sites that align with your target audience, which you could invest in.
• If you have no budget for acquiring sites, you may look for the tools, templates, and community strategies the publisher site is currently using and try to replicate or even beat their content strategy. You want to gain bigger market share in your industry by ranking for multiple keywords, which skyrockets your entire site’s organic traffic. 

Wrapping Up 

Investing in link building campaigns is a no-brainer for industries with a competitive search landscape. The key to getting ROI from it is to utilize product-led link building campaigns that directly impact sales and branding of our clients’ offers. 

Following these tips will set you on a path to attracting more awareness and valuable links to your products and assist your site in getting its market search share.

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by Venchito Tampon

Key Insights From Google Documentation Leak: Implications For Link Building

The SEO landscape has been profoundly shaken by Google's core updates, further intensified by the recent leak of documentation for Google Search’s Content Warehouse API.

Consisting of 2,500 pages and detailing over 14,000 attributes, the leak provides us with underlying mechanisms of Google rankings that confirm some of our biases and personal best SEO practices. 

Many articles covered their own takeaways from the leaked Google’s internal algorithm documentation. In this article, I’d like to focus on my actionable tips, specifically on link building - most tactics haven’t changed much. It has only reaffirmed what we currently do as a link building agency. 

Actionable Link Building Takeaways From Google Documentation Leak 

1. Build Localized Backlinks 

The leak mentions “localCountryCodes,” signifying that backlinks from sites within the same country or region carry more weight and impact than those from other regions or countries.

This isn’t groundbreaking, but it only confirms what should be prioritized when handling local clients or even national brands that serve different regions in the country. 

What we have been doing:

• For clients targeting a national audience, we invest most of our time prospecting for country-specific link opportunities (i.e. .co.uk, .au.). Then, once we’ve exhausted all link opportunities within that country's industry, we could extend it to generic non-country-targeted domains (i.e. com). 
• We assess the impact of a few local links to a targeted page and see its immediate effect on rankings. Instead of bombarding dozens of links, we test out a few ones to know how easy it is to rank for the target keyword (with just a few links).
• Create more localized content as much as we build local links. Aside from link acquisition, it’s critically important to have a solid content strategy for a local audience. 

2. Add More Fresh New Links 

The leaked document explicitly states that “TYPE_FRESHDOCS” is similar in its type as TYPE_HIGH_QUALITY. 

This implies the significance of earning and building high-quality backlinks from new pages. 

What we have been doing:

• Look over the site’s current backlink profile and spot opportunities to earn or build new links from the exact referring domains. The approach could be providing new content pieces or identifying their existing networks within the space through external links they have on pages. 
• Set up alerts to monitor unlinked mentions of the brand, assets, product, or content. As such, it could sprout new links by reaching out and asking for credits in the form of links. 
• Continuously improve link building campaign to target existing relationships and new sets of publishers with strong appeal to a target audience. Balance out getting links from new publications and recurring links from existing connections. 

3. Invest in Author and Entity Authority 

As with the concept of E-E-A-T becoming part of SEO’s systems and practices, some still argue its validity regarding how Google uses it. 

Several times, it’s been discussed and proven that E-E-A-T is considered a quality signal instead of an absolute ranking factor.  

As a matter of fact, the leaked documentation indicates the value of authorship in its element, “author”. 

What we have been doing:

• Invest in hiring high-caliber niche authors rather than typical writers who can provide general advice. This not only increases the content quality, as these authoritative authors can provide more unique insights and experience on the given topic, but this also helps improve trust and authority in the eyes of its target readers and search engines. 
• Enhance our expertise and experience as personal authors of our own websites. Adding more credibility, such as accreditations, certifications, and formal education, to our author bio brings more value in bringing new helpful content that other authors haven’t covered yet on their blogs.
• Deep dive into the industry insights and trends, as this approach addresses the following levels or categories of the audience (i.e. intermediate, advanced level). Covering a wide range of topics but sitting within a similar niche builds the topical authority of the website.

4. Assess Based on Site Authority  

The leak confirms the existence of a “siteAuthority” score, a metric for Google to assess the site’s overall credibility, which profoundly affects how the webpages rank in Google’s SERPs.

This metric could be Google’s version of Domain Authority, a proprietary metric from Moz’s Site Explorer. 

What does it mean? Authority matters. 

Obviously, this isn’t the only metric to consider when qualifying potential link opportunities, but it’s a critical factor to see if a domain is worth getting a link from. Given that you’ll be investing resources for link acquisition, getting the most value out of every backlink is critical. 

What we have been doing:

• We use link intelligence tools such as Ahrefs to examine a website’s ability to drive potential link value to our destination pages, basing it on the site’s Domain Rating (Ahrefs’ DR). 
• Analyze competitors’ link profiles and see what authority sites are linked to them. This approach could give you more insights into how they attack their natural link acquisition campaign. Replicating their success, which means getting similar links from the domains that are linked to them, could also help boost your site’s authority.
• Prioritize the most essential pages to which you want to build more links. Invest in the ones with the highest yield in terms of conversions and potential business opportunities.  You want to build more authority links to pages that drive business revenue. 

5. Earn Hard-to-Replicate Links (“Concept of Seed Sites”)

Seed sites are websites manually reviewed and deemed legitimately reputable (i.e. New York Times, CNN, WHO). These sites only link to truly valuable pages, making it difficult for anyone to manipulate the rankings.

The leak confirms it with its term “NearestSeeds”, which underscores the value of acquiring links from these seed sites. 

Acquiring links from pages closer to these seed sites has extra weight in terms of trust and reputation. 

What we have been doing:

• You can use Majestic’s Trust Flow, a metric to measure a website’s quality based on how it is closely connected to the Majestic’s handpicked seed sites.
• Avoid getting links from private blog networks (PBNs) with the sole purpose of manipulating external link giving. Most of them are pure spam and are not deemed to be trusted by both users and search engines. 
• Invest in link building strategies that penetrate link opportunities from highly authoritative and trusted publications. While it would consume resources in terms of content asset creation, it would be a worthwhile investment as you would be getting links that other sites (your competitors) couldn’t easily replicate. 

6. Get Links From Pages With Relevant Traffic

Backlinks from pages that drive are more likely to impact rankings and search performance than those without. 

In the leak, there is a sourceType attribute, which records the quality of the source of a link, in correlation with the tier in which this content exists. The higher the indexing tier of a page, the higher the value of the links could bring to its destination pages. 

Google uses this information to determine the relative importance of a link from a sourced page to the page it links to. 

What we have been doing:

• Assess link opportunities if the site can bring relevant traffic to your site. Ensure that the domain has existing organic traffic that you can absorb through clicks on links.
• Strategically think of your link placements. In SharpRocket, we put links above the fold of the content, as it is more likely to get more clicks - as we know, most readers these days just skim for the content. Having links placed at the top has more chances to get clicks. While it’s not the only factor, you’ll have more advantages to drive referral traffic to your site. 
• Without constraints for a timeline of links, let’s say you’re not required to deliver a solid # of links per month and have the liberty to pursue the highest quality ones. It is best to prioritize websites with relevant traffic - your target audience. And for brands targeting a specific country, go for sites with similar audiences. 

7. Leverage Digital PR 

Today, most SEO agencies offer digital PR as a fundamental service. Utilizing digital PR to obtain high-quality, fresh links from news publications is essential for achieving optimal results.

While only some brands have the luxury of investing in digital PR, starting with low-hanging fruits is an excellent strategy. 

The leak has its encodeNewsAnchorData, which we can assume Google can tag links that come from news sources. The measurement and assessment aren’t indicated. It could be about the quality of the link from a news source or the quality (newsiness) of a backlink. 

However, we could assume that Google could be giving weight to links from news sources. 

What we have been doing:

• Invest in digital PR with a solid strategy from ideation to pitching. Seek news sources that could feature your unique stories and increase your brand's awareness. 
• Utilize content assets and promote them on social media platforms to enhance brand authority and increase branded searches. We’ve done these multiple times for our coffee shop and seen growth in branded searches on Google, which amplifies our pages’ rankings on organic search results. 

Ethical, Audience-Focused Link Building 

No matter how many changes we’ve seen in the SEO industry and what other takeaways we could get more from other industry SEO experts, it’s clear that ethical, audience-first link building is the key ingredient for SEO success. 

Don’t settle for any mediocre techniques that could lead to unsustainable results. 

If you need sustainable, ethical link buliding services, SharpRocket stands out from the competition by offering comprehensive and adaptable solutions to help SEO agencies and enterprise brands meet their SEO goals. Our team of skilled link builders and content writers can elevate your content strategy, freeing you to focus on business growth strategies. 

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by Venchito Tampon

How to Manage Advanced Link Building Campaign

Link development is a resource-intensive process that demands a lot of work behind the scenes before securing a single backlink.

While most SEOs see the visible part of success - links and their impact on a specific site’s ranking and organic performance, the invisible part (process) of starting, executing, and improving link building campaigns is an essential skill set.

Goal Setting and Managing Expectations

In starting a link building campaign, it is imperative to identify the primary reasons why you should do link building (or build links) for a client.

Integrating it into overall SEO (and digital marketing) campaigns helps link builders align their individual tasks to the overall objective of the brand and manage expectations set towards reaching SEO goals.

On top of detailed tactics, the strategy revolving around link building campaigns should mainly focus on the following:

• Improving the site’s domain authority and search ranking capability to get top spots for its targeted keywords (as higher domain authority can help the site gain better search visibility for its head terms and long tail keywords).
• Enabling content discovery through links from other authority sites in the industry.
• Building up the site’s overall link authority to improve crawl rate, as trusted backlinks can help crawlers find and index new pages and their deeper pages on the site.

Once you’ve identified your site's primary reasons for link building, it’ll be much easier to align your resources with your primary goals.

Your goals will establish your actions for every facet of your link building campaign.

If you’re working in an SEO agency, make it part of your protocol to conduct initial meetings with clients to understand their current SEO context. A few of the details we ask questions about our client include but are not limited to:

• Initial client impressions (SEO expertise, technical resources, specific preferences, etc..)
• Initial performance expectations (e.g., is there an initial target number of links to build?)
• Initial rankings and traffic data

Asking these critical details will help set the tone of the campaign and may help you manage expectations when you start laying down growth opportunities.

Team Bandwidth

Set up a good team structure to organize your link builders’ tasks and gain insights into your campaign’s current state.

Consider the following questions to guide your team structuring process:

• What is the quota we need to deliver for our clients?
• Are there minimum or maximum link deliverables we can make (generally) for clients regardless of industry? Or, if categorized in industries, is there any estimate or range of backlinks?
• How many link prospectors and outreach specialists are needed for each client?
• How many clients can your team heads capable of handling?

As a link building agency, we assign difficulty scores to each client based on niche difficulty (how easy or hard can we acquire links in the industry?) and niche consistency (have we gotten links from the same sector for our past clients?).

These two assessments can help dictate how confident we are in delivering initial deliverables for the brand.

This stage can also help you track your team’s performance and discuss tasks requiring more urgency and consistency with your team.

Performing Link Gap Analysis

One of the visible ways to track the progress of a link building campaign is by assessing how close you are to reaching the top spot for your target keyword/s.

Link gap analysis determines the estimated number of quality backlinks you must acquire based on current referring domains of the top pages in Google’s SERPs.

I’ve covered in this guide the exact step-by-step process for link gap analysis, but to summarize, here are the essential steps to take:

• Step 1: Collect DR20+, in-content, do-follow backlinks of your target page and its competing ranking pages.
• Step 2: Deduct qualified links of your top competing page from your page’s qualified links.

Here’s a document that walks you through the process.

Initial Link Opportunities

Securing link opportunities with quick turnaround allows for building the momentum needed for a sustainable link acquisition campaign.

Develop a list of the best link building strategies scalable enough for any industry (or most industries included in your target client base).

This activity also assists in getting buy-ins from potential SEO clients trying to understand your processes and strategies.

By proposing exactly the initial link building tactics to pursue, it would give them an overview of how your team would attack the link building campaign based on your current available resources.

Setting Up A Link Building Team

Strategizing the team's structure affects the operational efficiency and consistency of output.

While there is no standard blueprint for link building team structure, it is based mainly on different considerations (and business decisions):

• Is the agency specialized in one niche (or market segment?
• How many similar campaigns does the agency manage to serve?
• Is there a strict requirement for the number of links (for agencies) instead of delivering a few yet quality numbers (for in-house SEO)?

All these will differ based on the needs of link building campaigns and the preferences of the link building team.

Here are two conventional structures when building a team of link builders:

Sioed Structure

It is the conventional method of structuring teams with multiple departments with similar skill sets.

For this type of structure, you’ll notice having teams for:

• Link prospecting (web research)
• Outreach
• Content Management

These teams are managed by one or two department heads who will cascade all vital information about the campaign, including link targets, overview of clients, etc.

This link building setup initially flows from the link prospecting team (as they’ll assess the available link opportunities) and then transfers all qualified link prospects to the outreach team for contact.

Once the outreach team has positive responses for content (i.e., guest posts), the content management team will brainstorm content ideas and generate content for these responsive link prospects.

Functional Team Structure

Teams in this structure have their link prospectors, outreach specialists, and content managers. Each team functions like a military unit capable of handling multiple clients depending on their bandwidth and quality of skills.

Most link building (and SEO) agencies run this structure to infuse collaboration within teams, as each team must work as one to deliver expected links.

Creating SOPs

Developing SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) ensures consistent team deliverables and client communication quality.

In link development campaigns, there are two essential workflows any team (or agency) must create:

Prospecting Workflow

This phase must include a step-by-step procedure from identifying prospecting keywords to qualifying domains/pages based on standard link metrics.

To give you an overview, here is what our process looks like:

1. Identify Prospecting Keywords - brainstorming for topics and specific keyword phrases that align with the client’s niche and goals.
2. Input Keywords To Tools - we run this keyword list through tools such as Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and Web Explorer to automate a list of potential domains/pages. Note: we still use Google Search and advanced search operators to find relevant prospect linkers manually.
3. Refine Prospects - we eliminate any prospect that does not meet our relevance, trust, and authority numbers criteria.
4. Identify Contacts - we look for appropriate emails and/or website contact forms for suitability in outreach.

Different tools have emerged to semi-automate minor link prospecting and qualification tasks. Creating your in-house tools increases your leverage in efficiency.

Some micro tasks you can now start building with your development team include:

• Query Generators - combining topics or keywords with search query strings to produce different variations of keyword phrases that can be plugged into Ahrefs’ Content/Web Explorers.
• Blacklist Domains - creating an inventory of blacklisted domains/pages that are either irrelevant to any industry or not suitable for contact.

Pro Link Prospecting Tip:

We leverage simultaneous prospecting for link building strategies for a diversified and holistic approach to web research. It also expands our link lists better than solely relying on a single link prospecting method.

The way we attack this is to use both a manual Google search strategy and automated research features of Ahrefs and SEMRush to generate a list of relevant domains initially. By then, we’ll have more link opportunities in the process.

Outreach Workflow

Outreach bridges the gap between link prospecting and the actual placement of links, given that this phase is where rapport-building and value-adding approaches are mostly seen.

We simplify our outreach flow for the benefit of incoming outreach specialists and to wholly focus on the value of pitches rather than the complexities of each step.

Here’s what our outreach flow looks like:

1. Template Creation - we craft semi-personalized initial email templates that align with the client’s standards and consist of persuasion and rapport-building elements to entice positive responses.
2. Personalization - we add a few personalization cues to templates scalable enough to initiate the outreach sequence.
3. Initial Outreach Stage - we send multiple emails simultaneously using our custom emails and agency outreach accounts. This is where A/B tests are conducted to identify winning initial email templates.
4. Follow-up Emails - we use automated and manual approaches when sending follow-ups after three days of non-response.
5. Value Exchange - the entire outreach flow works deeply to exchange value with potential prospects through content contribution, fixing link errors (e.g., broken link building), or other value-adding methodologies to request/add links on their sites.
6. Quality Control - after every outreach campaign, we analyze the data and identify further improvements in email copy, additional insights for new value-added content, and new discoveries for audiences we can provide to link prospecting (web research team).

Pro Outreach Tip:

Create a list of blocklists for domains/pages that include:

• Domains of direct competitors of clients
• Not to contact domains, such as affiliate partners, responses with notes “not to contacted”) compiled mainly by the outreach team.

This activity simplifies outreach flow, cleans irrelevant data numbers in response, and links placement rates for future outreach campaigns.

Content Creation Workflow

This process is designed for link building strategies that require content creation for external publications (i.e., guest posts).

Agencies have different approaches to generating guest blogging ideas, and they are entirely contextualized based on the team’s capabilities and industries.

Here’s a quick way to understand our content creation workflow:

1. Setting Objectives - we define objectives based on prospects’ responses to outreach specialists and their link acquisition methods. If it’s purely content refresh, content creation aims to add new sections (or edit a part of the content). In contrast, an entire guest post request must align with the client’s goals and relevance to the intended publication.
2. Content Generation - we use human writers (with AI tools for topics and outlines) to develop content assets.
3. Content Quality Check - our content managers/writers review the content for quality and relevance.
4. Client Approval is an optional part where clients may want to see and review content before they go live. Conservative and majority enterprise brands demand review to ensure alignment with their branding guidelines.
5. Content Delivery - we send it back to outreach specialists so they can forward it to the publication editor/blogger. Once the content goes live, we nudge our clients with the link to the article.

Link Building Progress Reports

Creating a progress report for a link acquisition campaign is primarily based on what’s needed initially by the client.

The quality and fulfillment of published links must be a top priority, verifying each backlink aligns with the campaign objectives and meets the necessary criteria.

Elements of Quality Link Assurance:

Link Placement

Immediately check if the link is correctly placed on the target page of the site. Link placement affects its likelihood of receiving clicks from users.

Target Page and Anchor Text Usage

See if the backlink points to the desired target page and if anchor texts (head term or long-tail keywords) are appropriately used.

Dofollow and Nofollow Attribute

If done with the intent to pass link juice to your site’s target page, confirm it as required by your link acquisition campaign.

Link Metrics

Review the domain and page where the target backlink is hosted when servicing SEO clients. See if it passes your agreed link metrics with the client.

Continuous Development

Given that link acquisition is an iterative process, you can identify changes and improve elements after each successful outreach campaign.

Always on the lookout for opportunities that can improve your current link acquisition process and take your client’s business to the next level.

This may come in the form of generating new content assets that will allow them to acquire more links, rankings, leads/conversions, and potential partnerships.

The key part of robust client engagement when servicing link acquisition is providing strategic direction for review as a consultant.

It may be as simple as recommending new target pages that need more links to improve the pages’ rankings and suggesting new linkable audiences to target for content publishing (to increase the likelihood of passive links).

Our link building agency helps SEO agencies, SaaS companies, and eCom businesses generate relevant, quality backlinks. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line today to see how we can help.

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by Venchito Tampon

How to Optimize Anchor Texts Effectively

Search engines have long used anchor text to provide context clues as to the relevance of a given link to a website. 

Many have abused it and have suffered under Google Penguin’s update, which penalizes sites that were over-optimizing their page content with keyword-rich anchor texts. 

It is imperative not to use this abusive and spammy strategy to avoid penalties and bad rankings. 

As Google favors sites with a diverse and natural backlink profile, your site will dramatically benefit from proper anchor text optimization. 

In this post, I’ll cover the best practices how to optimize anchor texts that favor Google and provide the best experience for users. 

But first, here’s a quick recap of anchor text basics. 

Types of Anchor Texts 

• Generic - non-topical related words, such as “click here” or “go here”.
• Branded - words that used your brands/entities. An example is “SharpRocket” 
• Naked link - actual URL to your target page. Example: www.sharprocket.co.uk
• LSI (latent semantic indexing) - variations of primary keywords. Examples for the keyword, “backlinks” are “contextual backlinks”, “inbound links”, “organic links”, and, “in-content links”.
• Partial match - a combination of qualitative modifier and target keyword (e.g., best link building agency is a partial match to link building agency).
• Broad match - longer in terms of length (5 words or more). An example is “best link building company in the Philippines”.
• Exact match - keyword-rich anchor texts (e.g., SEO agency). 

Have a good understanding of these types of anchor texts, as it is foundational in mapping out a well-played strategy of choosing anchor texts for each backlink for your site.

Anchor Text Optimization Best Practices

1. Use Semantically-Related Keywords More Often

With Google Hummingbird and numerous core updates to interpret natural language queries and the context of words, it is easier for search engines to understand the topical relevance of a page through entities and surrounding words and phrases (co-occurrence).

This is a heavy alternative to optimizing the exact-match anchor text to all (or the majority) of all inbound backlinks to your site where high risks are involved due to possible penalties. 

Identify how search engines recognize your brand. 

You can use Google’s autocomplete or autosuggest feature to see keywords that Google associates with your brand. Keyword research features from Ahrefs, and SEMRush can also assist you by searching directly for your brand names. 

This is more useful for established sites in ensuring you’re building the right topical relevance of your brand (as to what topics and keywords you want your associate to be known for, at least on search). 

Once you’ve identified semantically related keywords, you can use them as specific anchor texts for your links. 

2. Learn How Real Publishers Reference Other People’s Works

Whether you’re creating new content on your site or external content on others’ blogs, make sure that you consider the natural approach of referencing the works of others. 

You can use highly descriptive anchor texts to provide more context to the linking page and help entice better user clicks from users (which also drives more referral traffic to your page). 

Linking out to credible sources and properly citing others’ works helps increase trust (Google’s EEAT factor), depth of quality, and perceived value of your content. 

This approach goes beyond the traditional approach of writing ‘guest posts’ to acquire inbound links. As we are all aware, the content from linking pages can assist in building your site’s topical authority (off-page).

3. Think Branding 

Having worked with enterprise-level link acquisition campaigns for years, we’ve seen how top-level in-house SEOs value every face of link building, including how they choose the right anchor texts.

Obviously, they don’t want their sites to be affected by penalties and bad rankings (as it could result in millions of dollars lost for their business).

But more than that, they view link building as a branding tool. It affects how both search engines and users perceive their brand. 

When building artificial links to your site, focus more on branded anchor texts (brand name, entity name, products, offerings, employees’ name, content assets, etc..).

Utilizing branded anchor texts helps build awareness and curiosity about your brand from readers of other sites, who might eventually search for you on Google (increasing the volume of your site’s branded searches).

4. Explore Topics, Not Just Keywords  

Research around topics to identify secondary keywords related to each industry.

If you’re doing an entirely new SEO campaign for a particular client, try to explore keyword themes using tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush.

Find interesting words your target audience uses to describe the topic. You can leverage these supporting keyword phrases to build external content around that central theme. 

Note: Ahrefs has this feature (Clusters by Parent Topic).

 

5. Place LSI and Secondary Keywords On Linking Pages

Improve the quality of your external content assets (e.g., guest posts) by placing more LSI and secondary keywords within subheadings, images’ alt tags, and content body.

Invest time enhancing the reading experience and optimizing your external content to rank for multiple keyword variations on Google. 

You can use more relevant Nouns and entities to enhance entity recognition (check out this Entity Optimization guide). 

By referencing entities like direct or non-direct competitors, industry thought leaders, and personalities, you increase the topical relevance of your content, which brings more contextual understanding to your anchor texts. 

Overall, it helps your site get the most value from every backlink produced. 

6. Link to Rich and High-Value Content  

Avoid misleading your readers by forcefully linking to sales pages to push rankings for target commercial keywords. 

Implement a strict strategy with your team to link only to relevant informational pages. 

Instead of pointing all links to landing pages, you can have a better holistic link building plan to create an internal linking system (linking your site’s informational pages to relevant landing pages. 

This approach helps your site to pass link equity/power to other important pages without risking the current rankings of your commercial pages. 

Keep users have a better reading experience throughout the content, as it affects both branding and user interaction signals. 

Integrate Anchor Text Strategy To Overall Link Building Strategy 

The key to optimizing anchor texts is understanding their role and impact on your entire link building strategy. It is a top-bottom approach to enhance every facet of the link building campaign. 

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by Venchito Tampon

Easy Link Building For Intermediate SEOs

When marketers say ‘easy link building’, what do they genuinely want to look for (and say) are:

• Replicable processes and strategies for their junior SEOs/link builders
• Strategies that can reliably be executed in simple steps (with or without process documentation)
• Low efforts and time spent compared to other link building strategies
• Scalable enough for multiple similar types or industries of clients (for SEO agencies)

In this guide, I’ll show you five easy link building strategies that are scalable, sustainable, and replicable for your web properties (or clients’ sites).

1. Passive Link Building With Linkable Content Assets

Linkable content assets are content pieces that encourage other publishers to link to them, given that it is worthy of being used as an additional reference or citation.

It goes beyond the traditional blog posts in a way that addresses the intended topic most effectively (user satisfaction, reading experience, etc.).

Linkable content assets (also known as “link bait” content) include whitepapers, infographics, how-to articles, data visuals, statistics, calculators, and other content formats that stand out from the rest of its competing content.

Several ways help linkable content assets attract passive links. These include:

Ranking for informational keywords.

Content publishers at their writing stage typically search on Google to find pages that could be additional resources/references. If it covers the topic in-depth, these content publishers are likelier to link to it instead of adding another section to their content to write about the subject.

Robust Community and Following

Establishing yourself as a thought leader in your space helps get passive links from niche site owners/bloggers who follow you in every content piece you publish.

By being at their top-of-mind, they lean on your every new work if they want to refer their networks/readers to a topic you’re an expert in. This builds more trust and credibility in the eyes of their followers, which helps you absorb more followers to your site (and eventually more passive links from their followers’ new content).

2. Content Partnerships

One central area that makes link acquisition more effective (and, in most cases, easier) is having relationships to start the link building process.

Relationships alone can initiate the exchange of links. Both parties can rely on trust in relationships and the value of content these two publishers can bring to each other’s target audience.

Content partnerships are an easy link-building technique if you’ve got a couple of friends and networks you can contact.

However, those starting their link building can utilize manual outreach to build new relationships with content publishers who might be interested in co-creating and co-promoting content.

Start by identifying content publishers in the industry with similar or higher authority and trust of domains.

You would likely receive a positive response from someone with almost similar authority as both of you can take advantage of each other’s link equity to further push both sites’ organic rankings (assuming your sites are not competing).

This is opposed to reaching out to high DR sites (DR70+) when you’re just starting to build your site’s authority (say <DR30). Most more assertive site owners are looking for better and higher levels of content partnerships.

3. Link Solicitation

Ask for links from suppliers, vendors, client partners, organizations you’re part of, and other pertinent partners.

Link solicitation is a common practice in eCommerce, as most manufacturers have numerous suppliers and retailers they can tap and request links. Conversely, retailers and vendors can get branded links from where-to-buy pages of manufacturers’ sites.

This activity is more valuable when both sites can offer links to landing pages, as these are primarily difficult to acquire links to, given their commercial intent, and not usually acceptable target pages by content publishers.

Remember to use this link solicitation with other link building strategies to get diverse link types, which naturalizes your link profile - having links for both informational and commercial pages.

4. Link Reclamation

Set up alerts for content sites that mention any of your assets or entities, including company members, profiles, brand names, products, or service offerings, where you didn’t have the link embedded in the mentions.

The major part of link reclamation is collecting a list of all these unlinked mentions and reaching out to them to reclaim links.

This approach has a high likelihood of link placement rates, given that the webmasters/publishers you’re contacting are already familiar with your content as they reference your entities on their pages.

Numerous blog posts have talked about this link building strategy. Here are some helpful guides:

• How to Easily Find (and Reclaim) Lost Backlinks
• Link Reclamation Guide

5. Foundational Links

Building backlinks from trusted domains by Google (“seed sites”) is one of the most effective strategies to get initial trust and credibility for new sites.

Given that new sites take time before Google trusts these domains,

Start by completing and building links from social profiles, citations, and local and niche-specific directory links.

A legitimate business will create social profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin. So, have your team fill out all the information on these social profiles and use them to promote your newest posts to increase brand reach and awareness.

If you’re doing local SEO, citations help you promote NAP consistency, which is considered a robust ranking factor to assist your site in appearing on local map packs.

6. Resource Page Link Building

While more challenging than it used to be, resource page link building is still viable for content sites that consistently publish evergreen content assets. These types of content are necessary to acquire in-content links from resource pages.

Look for relevant industry sites with resource pages related to the topics of your content.

You may even find ones that contain broken or expired links, which you can ask to replace by links to the content you published on your site (“broken link building”).

Make your evergreen content assets more comprehensive (not necessarily longer) but valuable than the old page they linked to.

The easy part of this link building strategy is the angle that you don’t need to push hard your outreach emails, as your content itself and their broken link issue will speak of its value.

Compared to the link building era of 2012, where this technique has been widely used and guaranteed to be effective, you would find these opportunities minimal (~100 link prospects in a tight niche topic).

You can increase link and response rates with the right approach, emails, and content assets.

You can check out these resources to get started with resource page link building:

• The No-Nonsense Guide to Broken Link Building
• Complete Guide to Broken Link Building

Link Building Takes Time

Link acquisition is resource-intensive and requires buy-in from stakeholders, proper strategy, and execution from the SEO or outsourced link building team.

The easy part is its doability and aftermath impact to organic traffic success once links are built.

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by Venchito Tampon