Best Practices for Link Building
We know that link building is hard. It’s challenging to do and it’s very brute force.
So, how should we still think about it in today’s age?
The answer is two-fold.
Pay attention to What Google Prioritizes
First, base your link-building approach off of what Google is already indicating is important.
Google decides what’s important and less important when it comes to ranking. If you pay attention, you can use this to your advantage.
For example, if there’s a website that’s getting valuable traffic from related keywords that you’re trying to rank for, that’s a good sign that Google has already endorsed that website and therefore they’re going to endorse your website, too.
Internal & external Linking
Another second critical component to approach link building from a strategic direction is to consider is how “free” a website is with providing links to external parties. In other words, how often or not often they’re linking to other peoples’ websites.
One of the metrics that SearchTides looks at is internal-to-external link ratio.
What that means is, how frequently is a website generating links on its own versus how frequently is a website sending out links to other websites.
Having a good internal-to-external link ratio tells us (and Google) “hey, this is a high-quality website because they have a high number of links coming in and a more cautious or conservative number of links going out.”
