SEO Backlink Strategy & Techniques – Guide To The Right Path

By Rank Jacker on May 5, 2022

While most of our clients are SEO Agencies, who understand SEO like the back of their hand and have had almost negligible complaints with the quality of our delivery ever, we do come across cases where random gigs are ordered with misplaced expectations.

This often results in disputes, arguments, refunds and as a result, the end of the relationship. Honestly speaking that’s the last thing we seek.

So just to make your experience pleasant, working with us, I’ve strongly felt the need to put my perspective across, with respect to SEO & Link Building that will help you have realistic expectations that are consistent with your requirement.

I want to assure you, that this is the exact process that we follow for our Managed SEO Campaigns and is completely Organic in nature. There are no ninja tactics and nothing complex in its approach and application.

Contents

Step 1 - Technical & Onpage Audit
The Goal:
The Goal:
Sandbox Stage:
Growth Stage:
Authority Stage:

Step 1 – Technical & Onpage Audit

For your campaign’s success, a well-oriented on-page SEO backed by Technical Audit is the basic pre-requisite before getting into building backlinks. Here’s what you need to achieve with

1. Technical Audit – The Perspective

Fixing the Technical SEO is a must for any content marketing to work, for it helps Search Engines be

Receptive towards your Website.
Conveniently Identify content & render for relevant searches.
And Efficient enough for user interactions.

The Goal:

The idea is to optimize your Website Architecture for easy & engaging navigation, Structure Data for content relevance & delivery, and website indexing & rendering.

Easier said that done!! Here’s a short Technical Audit video to help you do it practically.

Alternatively, you can order the your Technical Audit with us over here.

2. On-Page SEO & Content Strategy

Your website’s on-page SEO has to be perfectly aligned with your target goals, audience, and demography which is crucial for your organic rankings down the time as well.

A live and thriving blog is an essential aspect of your on-page SEO that ensures to get your business has the maximum eyeballs in the SERPs to lead them through to your funnel.

A thorough Keyword research provides a direction to establish a comprehensive content strategy to attract and feed your top-of-the-funnel audience.

It shall ensure wide exposure with respect to keywords and most importantly it has to be consistent in approach and uniformly aligned towards your website goals to extract maximum engagement.

I’ve created a practical guide to KW research using different methodologies that work in current times, you can check it out here.

In addition to optimizing your on-page SEO, it’s always important to maintain competitive Content effectiveness in terms of attracting the right audience, engaging them meaningfully, commanding trust, influencing their decision-making, and eventually driving results toward established goals and objectives.

Capture Contact Details
Appointment Booking
Transact on site

The Goal:

The effectiveness of your content ensures optimal user engagement which forms the ultimate basis for search engines to rank your content ahead of your competition.

We can help to optimize your On-page SEO to bring it at par with the topmost competitors in your niche, you can order it here.

3. Off-Page SEO Or Link Building

If you’ve got the basics covered as explained above, then it’s time to start building some link power for your website.

Traditionally, many SEOs use to start building high metrics backlinks like PBN, Guest posts, EDU links, or whatever is in fashion & it worked.

But not anymore, the algorithms have turned smarter to identify such spamming patterns & are quick enough to kick in their spamming filters to junk the site with penalties.

Now Machine Learning enabled algorithms can smartly track user engagements on a given web result & identify patterns toward goal achievement & then use AI to preconceive optimum user interactions to conclude if a web result is worthy of organic exposure.

So, in short, it’s the real engagements that are going to work for your rankings.

Thus the essential mix of Relevance, User Engagement, Trust & Authority has become the new cornerstone for organic rankings.

Your website’s content strategy & OffPage SEO deliver relevance, user interactions & goal achievement commands engagement & trust and finally links from good quality websites build up the authority to have a competitive advantage to push through the weaker competition quickly.

As a standard practice, one should endeavor to make every backlink as relevant as possible for the target website, by identifying domains or content sources to associate relevance; i.e.

Industry/Niche Relevance (Links from niche/industry-specific websites)
Topical Relevance (Links from Contents that relate to your niche)
Keyword Relevance (Relevance passed by the Keyword Anchor)

Sandbox Stage:

Furthermore, link building has to be planned, in accordance with a website’s life cycle stage. A new website, is often, sandboxed for a given time and it’s hard to earn organic reach and hence, traffic.

Building links to money pages or using KW anchors, at this stage, would be counterproductive. Instead, doing self-marketing and at this stage is natural and conducive to pushing some branding & attracting cold traffic. A website also needs a bit of warming up for aggressing link building at a later stage, so building out Foundation Links from Web 2.0 properties, Citations, and Press Releases are most recommended at this stage.

Guest Posting can also be used to push your branding, but as a matter of fact, all links should be directed to the homepage only.

Anchor Choice:
Picking up KW anchors isn’t just practical at this point in time, instead using Branding, Generic, or Naked URL anchors should be ideal.
Some of the key benefits of using these anchors are they help in your Brand shout-out & hence discoverability, it helps in diversifying your Anchor profile which ultimately helps in offering more room for KW anchors at later stages.

Growth Stage:

If you maintain a steady flow of publishing well-researched content that’s in line with your objectives, you’d be able to get traction on multiple pages.

Page 1 rankings on a couple of pages would be an added advantage and the time is ripe to aid your website’s growth by building some high-quality Guest/Sponsored Posts to most potential pages on your website.

The perspective has to be to push topical relevancy further using backlinks on a given content to make it sound like an authority in SERPs.

The best approach, in my opinion, would be to use Titles, Content angles, and anchors to add relevancy, however, we still need to be cautious while building Exact KW anchors (unless you have Page 1 rankings for a given KW). Instead of using long-tail KW, KW variations are to be used in the title and KW anchors.

This all helps content gain prominence against the competition you shall still have room to use KW anchors at a later stage when you need them the most. It also helps to keep the randomness of the anchor profile intact.

Authority Stage:

At this stage, a site enjoys relatively better credibility and multiple Page 1 ranking for multiple contents and KW. Usually, every new content published enjoys a wider organic reach and almost instant rankings.

Anchor Choice:

In most cases, I’ve observed that natural link velocity is so high, that it just doesn’t matter even if you’re building exact KW anchors regularly. All one needs is to identify KW opportunities lurking on Page 1 to build KW anchor-rich backlinks.

You can use all types of links be it GPs, Niche Edits, or PBNs. The purpose to avoid KW anchors at previous stages is to have a freer hand at this stage to build KW anchors.

If you’ve been building links like this, it hardly matters even if you’re building multiple exact KW anchors, since your website is on page 1 and it’s getting traffic for a given KW, and matching KW anchors would look absolutely natural and justified.

Although, it’s a very precise explanation of a complex aspect of SEO, still I believe, it’s one of the most effective ways to successful link-building.

I you need to look at a deeper analysis, I highly recommend, reading my Ebook “Structured Approach To Link Building” & “Tactical Framework For Anchor Text Optimisation” for a better understanding.

You can also use our Monthly Managed Link Building Service to let us take control of your Off-Page SEO to deliver results on automation.

From The author

Amit Kumar, Marketing Lead & Co-Founder at RankJacker SEO is an MBA & A former Sales Professional with a knack for experimenting with Content & Copywriting. He loves to keep a tab on the latest updates in Content Marketing & SEO applications.