Search engine optimization, or SEO, plays a great role in keeping a business afloat, and one of the many reasons is that the majority of consumers can be found on online platforms. With proper SEO, you can gain an advantage over your competitors in the industry.
Under the SEO umbrella, link building, or link acquisition, is one of the most effective strategies. Links acquired from high-authority websites are one of the best ways to increase your site’s visibility.
So, in this article, we will talk about link acquisition, the definition, things you must know, and its importance.
In this article
- What Is Link Acquisition?
- Things You Must Know About Link Acquisition
- Link Auditing
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Main Points
- Related Reads
What Is Link Acquisition?
Link acquisition is basically the practice of gaining links from high-authority websites back to yours. In SEO, these links are more commonly known as backlinks. This practice improves your site’s authority, therefore, improving your rank on various search engines.
Link acquisition can be done in different ways. Some of these are:
- Guest posting or blogging.
- Social media promotions.
- Manual outreach.
Things You Must Know About Link Acquisition
Below, let us talk about the things you must know to conduct an effective link acquisition practice. These things will help you determine how to go about the process of getting links that are beneficial for your business or organization.
1. What Makes a Good Link
There are thousands, if not millions, of available links on the internet. But not all links are beneficial for your site. Remember that link acquisition must be composed of high-quality links so that you can reap the advantages. So, how do you sort bad links from good links? Below are some things to take note of to land the good ones.
Natural-Looking:
Your backlinks should look natural and not forced. In general, this means that your link should provide value to the website’s readers and not come off as a paid portion. When going for a ‘natural-looking” link, take note of the following:
- Unique: The website on which you want a backlink should not look spammy. This means that your link must be unique and not just one of many. Being a unique source of information on a website gives various search engines the impression that you are reliable and informative in this niche. Imagine being one of the hundreds providing the same information on the same topic, yours will most likely be ignored and tagged as spam.
- Enough number of words: Today, search engines give lengthy page contents more value as they can provide more information. Lengthy content also gives the impression that the page is well-thought-out and not just produced for link purposes. This strategy improves your credibility as a source of information, therefore, improving your authority.
- Contextually relevant: When it comes to context, there are two things you should check. First is how contextually relevant the website you are getting a link from is to your page. Say you are offering bathroom accessories, highly-relevant sites would those offering bathroom products or services. After this, the way your link is placed in the article should also be relevant to the context of the page it lands on.
Reputable:
Aside from making sure that your links look natural, the website you are getting a backlink from should also be reputable. The site should not contain illegal materials, such as pornography or illegal substances.
On the other hand, here are the factors that make a bad backlink:
- Irrelevant keyword placement.
- Poor quality article.
- Promotional keyword placement.
- Mentioning the anchor text too many times.
- Too many non-value adding external links.
2. Link Acquisition Strategies
Now that you can determine good vs bad backlinks, let us discuss the different strategies involved in link acquisition. These strategies are what’s available and what you can venture into to maximize backlinking.
- Manual Outreach
One of the most common ways you can earn backlinks is to manually reach out to website owners. This includes manually looking for relevant and authoritative sites. When you have prospect sites, you can contact the site owner to add your link to one of their published articles.
- Guest Blogging
Guest blogging usually requires manually contacting website owners as well. The difference is the availability of content you want your link to appear on. With manual outreach, there is a preexisting article on the website and all that is left to do is add your link. With guest blogging, you provide the content.
- Producing High-Quality Content
Another effective strategy in link acquisition is producing high-quality content. One that will naturally attract website owners to link your content on their web pages. When your blog posts are reliable, accurate, and timely, other content creators tend to use this as their reference or source of information. This earns you a backlink.
- Unlinked Mentions
You can also search for published content in which your business or organization is mentioned but not linked. After this, you can contact the author and have your homepage linked to already existing material.
- Paid Promotion
Some website owners also offer paid link acquisition. This is usually offered by websites that have relatively higher DAs and a high number of traffic.
3. Link Auditing
In all plans, the monitoring stage is important. A good plan does not end after execution, rather, it should be monitored. The results should be monitored so that improvements can be applied. This is exactly what link auditing offers.
With link acquisition, quality is more important than quantity. You can have 100 bad backlinks, but 2 good links will have a greater impact. When you audit your current backlinks, you can distinguish links that are no longer serving their purpose. You can also reacquire links that are considered broken.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is a link building plan?
A link building plan is a set of structure techniques and strategies that one apply to get high-quality backlinks for a website. It includes a pathway of set white hat strategies you will implement to build links.
How link building benefit my business?
Link building helps in bringing your website to the target audience. It also helps your website ranking in the SERP along with helping in trust and authority building.
Main Points
SEO in general creates new opportunities for businesses, or organizations, by improving their reach. A successful SEO strategy always includes comprehensive link acquisition practices to ensure that only high-quality links are obtained.
This article discussed different things you have to know to properly link acquisitions. It involves differentiating good and bad links, link acquisition strategies, and how to monitor these links. You can apply these things to improve your overall link building plan.
