What Types of Links You Need

What Types of Links You Need

When defining the strategy for your link building campaign, you will need to think about the types of links you need to get. There are various types to consider:

1. Links to your homepage2. Links to “deep” pages (such as product or category pages)3. Links containing your brand / company name4. Links containing the keywords you’re targeting

Additionally, there are combinations of the above, such as a branded link to a deep page. Identifying what types of links you need will start with a detailed link analysis of your current website as well as a look at how you rank for certain keywords in comparison to your competitors. You can use Open Site Explorer to run this kind of analysis and see what your link profile currently looks like.The analysis will show you opportunities for improvement. For example, you may see that you’re not ranking for one of your main keywords. After doing some link analysis, you find that you have no links pointing to your website that contain this keyword, or, you find that the most relevant deep page has no links at all pointing at it. If you identify something like this, you have a tangible problem that you can work to resolve. In this case, it may mean that your strategy includes trying to build links to the deep page that currently doesn’t have any links and doesn’t rank for your target keywords.

Finding link targets

The first thing you need to think about is what types of people you should contact, as you want to make sure that you are contacting people who are likely to be interested in your content. If you contact people randomly, your response rate will be a lot lower, and you’re likely to give yourself and your website a bad reputation.Ideally, before you actually start a link building campaign, you should have a rough idea of who you think will care about what you’re doing. If you create a piece of content that you want links to, such as an infographic, you should ask yourself right at the start of the process who will care about it. More importantly, who will care enough to actually link to it?

This last bit is crucial. While you may find it quite easy to get people look at your content, it is a whole new level of engagement for them to actually link to it. Linking to something requires a bit of effort and time, so you need to make someone care enough for them to not mind doing this. The barrier for getting your content shared on social networks is much lower. More people have a Twitter or Facebook account than a website or blog, making it easier for them to share.

So How Do You Make People Care Enough to Link?You need to find a hook that makes people care. You need to work this hook into your content right from the start. If you put off creating your hook until the moment you begin your outreach, you may discover that no one cares about the point of your content, the result being that you will have devoted a lot of time to crafting content no one wants to link to.

There are lots of hooks, but the ones above should at least get you thinking about what you can offer to people that will make them link to you. A simple exercise you can do here is to go to your Facebook feed and see what links people are sharing. Note down what characteristics each link has and try to find patterns. Chances are that links shared on Facebook are funny, because many people use this platform for personal stuff and may not share more serious stuff there, with the exception of big news or controversial topics. Now go and take a look at your Twitter feed, note down which types of links are being shared there and ask yourself why. You may find that more long-form, informative content is shared on Twitter than on Facebook.