Do you need help developing an effective backlinks management process and wondering how to manage your backlinks? Considering how crucial links are to your site’s SEO, having a strategy for managing your link profile is prudent.
Just like authoritative content aids in ranking for relevant keywords, backlinks also help establish page authority with search engines. As a result, many SEOs devote much attention to building and managing their external link portfolios.
This post presents a solution for managing these backlinks in four stages: protect, review, grow, and analyse. Additionally, it highlights why an enterprise-level platform provides the most significant opportunity in these areas and how to leverage it to manage backlinks for your site’s benefit.
Managing Links for SEO: Why It Matters
The answer appears straightforward. Backlinks continue to be one of the essential ranking signals for Google. This is because Google evaluates the quality of backlinks to determine a website’s authority and corresponding rankings.
Links are an essential element of the internet, with nearly every list of SEO ranking factors emphasizing backlinks’ significance in driving a website’s search visibility and rankings.
Furthermore, Google has acknowledged that links are one of the three most critical ranking factors.
There are other reasons why managing your site’s linking structure is essential, which we’ll explore.
Link quality is a crucial factor to consider when building backlinks, and although it remains relatively easy to create links, most of them might need to be of better quality. This could negatively impact your website’s search visibility.
This is where anchor text comes into play. The clickable text of your hyperlink should contain relevant terms related to the linked page rather than including unrelated words in the anchor text. The best anchor text indicates to users that they will find information associated with that term if they click on the link.
Regular backlink management allows you to identify and remove potentially harmful links early on, preventing them from affecting your website’s performance.
Having broken links, which point to non-existing URLs, can harm your website’s SEO. Such links lead to a poor user experience for visitors who expect to access the promised content but end up on a 404 error page instead.
The challenge lies in managing the entire backlink profile to enhance search visibility, which requires extensive data analysis and insights to develop an effective plan.
This is where utilizing an enterprise-level platform can prove advantageous, as it provides the necessary tools and resources to streamline the management of your backlink profile and boost your website’s performance in search results.
Understanding the Various Types of Links
When we consider links, we typically refer to references within a webpage’s content that, upon clicking, redirect to another relevant resource. However, links encompass more than just that. Admittedly, text links enclosed within the <a href> tag in HTML code are the most prevalent. Nonetheless, your link profile may consist of other link types too.
- Images themselves do not convey any information to Google about the link or the associated page. However, if an image is utilized as a link, the search engine will rely on the text in the ALT and TITLE tags to comprehend the link’s context. Each tag functions similarly to an anchor text for the link in such instances.
- Links generated using JavaScript may only sometimes be crawlable by Google, potentially impeding their effectiveness. Nevertheless, these links, when implemented correctly, have the ability to boost your site’s authority.
- A link with a “nofollow” attribute indicates that crawlers should not follow the link but instead focus on other pages in the site’s structure. For external links, the “nofollow” attribute directs search engines to withhold any link equity from the linked page, diminishing the link’s impact on the page’s authority.
Leveraging Enterprise Platforms for Effective Backlink Management
There are four stages to backlink management: Protect, Review, Grow, and Analyse. Each stage yields unique results, so let’s explore them in detail.
- Ensuring Link Preservation
Backlinks are a valuable asset for your website; losing them can harm your search visibility. Unfortunately, there are various ways in which you can lose them. That’s why the first stage of managing your backlink profile is to protect the existing links.
While you can’t protect all of your links as some websites close down, webmasters remove outdated pages or decide to reference other sources instead; you can still revive lost links in many situations. For instance, a webmaster may not even realize there is an issue with a page or server, and a quick notification could help republish it, bringing your link back.
- Assessing Your Link Quality
Analysing new links to your site can reveal valuable insights into your content and SEO strategies. For example, the steady growth of backlinks to a page indicates that other webmasters consider your content authoritative, engaging, and relevant. By analysing these links, you can gain insight into what makes your content link-worthy and replicate those elements on other pages to increase their chances of acquiring organic links.
An enterprise-level platform can be particularly useful for managing new links. Such a platform allows you to combine data and insights from multiple sources, including new link data and other data points. By combining this information, you can identify which of your existing pages to promote further to gain more links and which pages are particularly authoritative in the eyes of relevant webmasters. This can guide your outreach efforts and help you acquire more high-quality links.
- Build Strong and Relevant Links
Part of managing your backlink profile is identifying and expanding it by building more links. There are many effective strategies to acquire more links, including:
- Guest posting on top industry sites
- Digital PR and outreach to pitch guest posts or request links in existing articles
- Finding brand mentions without links and requesting a referral to the website
- Reclaiming name mentions by asking sources to add a link
- Content syndication
- Creating listings in business directories and associations
- Securing links on industry resource pages
- Sending products for reviews
- Participating in forum or Quora discussions and including links
- Creating linkable assets that others will want to link to
- Appearing on podcasts or giving interviews
By implementing these strategies, you can increase your site’s visibility and authority while expanding your link profile.
- Analysing Competitor Backlinks
Another way to find new link-building opportunities is by examining the link profiles of your competitors. This can be done using the same process as auditing your backlinks.
You can identify strategies that have produced impressive results by analysing your competitors’ link profiles. For example, they may have promoted an infographic, published a long-form content piece, or created an ultimate guide. In addition, each industry has trends regarding what type of content is shared and linked to.
An enterprise-level platform can help you correlate multiple data points and identify your competitors’ most successful link-building strategies.
You can also gain valuable insights into link-building trends within your industry by auditing top sites. This can help spark long-term strategies to improve your link profile.
When evaluating your competitors’ backlinks, please pay close attention to the types of links they have, their link profile growth, and the anchor text they use. This can provide valuable information on the keywords and topics they are trying to rank for.
Conclusion
Effective backlink management is crucial for SEO success. However, manually analysing data from various sources can be time-consuming and challenging to manage your backlink profile and improve your site’s authority. This can lead to missed opportunities for enhancing search visibility. Don’t let this hold you back. Take advantage of our monthly SEO packages and let our experts handle your backlink management needs. Contact us today to learn more.
