It is an established fact that incoming links give a website authority as well as improve overall rankings. Apart from links there are several other elements that affect domain authority. Most people still do not understand the real attributes of a link and how it can affect a website’s rankings.
Here’s the list of elements that influence link value:
Anchor text
Most marketers think that anchor texts are not important; however, it has its own value and helps a website to strengthen its overall structure.
So, use anchor texts. However, if you can get a link without the desired anchored text, don’t hesitate to do so.
Domain Authority
Domain authority plays an important role in SEO. In fact, Google gives prominence and trust to those sites that have high domain authority. So, improve domain authority to gain rankings.
External Links vs Internal Links
This is still a matter of debate and contention. In terms of SEO, both external and internal links are important. However, internal links should be increased because too many external links distract users as well as pass on link juice, which can affect ranking.
Relevance
This is quite important. For example-if you have a blog on automotive engineering, provide links only to its relevant sites or blogs rather than to dog food or clothing sites.
Spam links
This is the most essential thing to focus on; never share your website’s link with any spammy or suspicious website. This will degrade your site’s overall value and may attract penalties from search engines.
Tips:
- Always perform link audit at regular intervals.
- Never trust any spammy website.
- Stay away from link wheeling.
- Do not participate in link schemes.
- Stay away from paid links or malware.
"SEO tools’ demand has increase by 200% over the past decade and continues to rise".
Follow vs No-follow
It is a known fact "follow links" generate good value when it comes to page authority, whereas "no-follows" is used to generate traffic.
For better results, focus on generating both. In this way, your website will become more authoritative and eventually generate better traffic. "For better rankings, you should have good number of follow links".
"SEMRush is the most popular SEO and link tool in the world, followed by Ahrefs".
Here are a few tools that will help you to perform link audit:
- Ahref
- MozRank and MozBar
- Screaming Frog
- Wayback Machine
- SEMrush
"Lists posts receive 74% more links than any other content type".
Benefits of link audit:
Link audit improves the quality of existing links.
- It helps to find natural and spam links.
- It helps to identify and fix broken links.
- Avoid Google penalties.
Tips to improve
link building efforts:
- Start a blog.
- List your site in trustworthy/authoritative directories.
- Write an excellent and useful guest post.
So, take care of these elements to improve the authority of your site and increase its rankings.
