We sponsored The SEO Social for the second time this month!
Over the course of the evening, we heard from three exciting speakers – Craig Campbell, the Director at Digital Marketing Scotland, David Iwanow, Director of Strategy at Blue Glass and Ross Tavendale, a Partner at Ideas Made – all of whom shared their advice on link building and reclamation.
Here’s what we learnt from the evening:
The importance of links
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites. Links remain the number one ranking signal and it’s exceptionally hard to rank well without good quality links, unless you operate in a really niche market with little competition.
How to get more links
- WikiGrabber is a great tool for looking up keywords and finding links that are relevant to you
- Competitor analysis is also a good way to identify where to go for links – look at what your competitors are ranking well or not so well for to identify new link opportunities
- People like to share infographics – consider creating infographics that people will want to share on social media and on their own blogs to secure good quality link
- Remember to go for quality over quantity – you don’t need to have lots and lots of links – they just need to be good quality
- Ensure the links you get are relevant – focus on real websites that drive real traffic and avoid using irrelevant anchor text
Fixing your broken links
To increase your site authority, consider the following when link building:
- Fix any broken external links – you can use tools like Screaming Frog and SEMrush to identify broken links
- Stop using 302 redirects – 302 redirects will tell Google that the redirect link is broken
- Recover any 404 errors – managing your 404 errors and redirecting links that lead users to non-existent pages is a simple process that will help you avoid losing your rankings due to dead links
Link reclamation
Link reclamation is the process of locating and fixing broken links on your website and other websites with links directing to yours. Reclaiming links is difficult so it’s important to make sure you identify how many are actually worth reclaiming and how many require no action and should be ignored.
Webmasters require a good enough reason to action your request so it’s important you get them some background detail and reasons why you need it reclaimed, for example, you might be receiving negative messages or emails regarding your site.
You should include information such as who you are, your relationship with the website, why you want it fixed and what the new link you want put in place is.
To improve your success rate, you should make sure you don’t use a generic email address so that your approach looks more professional, you use real contact details and test different subject lines. Also remember to be nice! You’re asking someone to take time out of their day to do something for you, and manners go a long way in this context.
For more details, you can check out David’s presentation from the event here.
The SEO Social is just one of the meet ups you can find us at each month. To discover where else you can find us, follow us on Twitter.