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A backlink is when another website links to your website, typically with anchor text like this, but sometimes in other forms like images, video embeds, and much more. To search engines like Google, backlinks are crucial because they send a signal of “trust” from one site to another, and this trust can save Google a lot of time weighing the authority of a web page. A backlink essentially says, this site trusts your site and if Google likes the site that is linking to you, you will typically get a boost in the rankings.
But how do you build backlinks? Below we outline the process of white-hat link building.
But first…
Black Hat link building can be simply described as any link that you did not naturally earn. Search engines want to see that other sites are linking to yours as a sign of trust but they do not want to see you paying for these links or building your own secondary websites to try to game the system. If discovered, black hat link building can do serious damage to your website and one of the easiest ways to get penalized is to wind up in a PBN.
PBN stands for “Private Blog Network” and these can vastly range in complexity. It could be as simple as a small agency building a few sites, a large agency building a fake review site to review and link to all their clients, or even software that builds PBNs for you. There are tons of software systems out there that claim to build links that slip by Google and actually pass value to your site. These systems build 2.0 or secondary websites that have no real value to users but contain information about your niche. Some of more successful than others, but all pose a serious risk to your ranking for the long term.
Sometimes you can even end up in the PBN without knowing. There are often companies that will email you excel lists of websites and prices that they can get you featured on. Besides the high likelihood that all of these sites are in a PBN, there is also the chance that just 1 is involved in a PBN and linking to one can cause a crawler to go down a path you do not want it to associate with your website.
Before we build a single backlink we need great content. It is almost impossible to earn a legitimate backlink without having a great article, video, or piece of information on your website. Think about it, why would an authoritative site link to anything but great content? It would only put their own site in jeopardy.
Our content team starts off your SEO efforts by submitting a 6-12 month plan of action. Once we have the first couple pieces of content on your site the backlink team can start manually reaching out to websites that may be able to enhance their site by linking to our content. The ultimate goal is to provide valuable information for their readers.
Once the content is live we manually create a list of websites in and around your niche. We vet each link based on Ahrefs metrics and Moz Spam Score so we know we are talking to websites that will benefit our client before we ever start a conversation.
We then reach out to these pre-approve sites under the premise of our client coming out with a new piece of content that can improve the value other sites provide their reader.
Writing content for a website is hard and staying on top of every detail in an industry can take a team. You would be surprised how many other websites in your market are willing to link to one of our client's blogs so that they can provide their visitors with as much information as possible.
Once we have a website agreeing to link to yours, our link-building experts fight to get your link on the best-performing page that website has to offer. We run the prospect's website through Ahrefs and SEMRush to see which pages and keywords perform the best for that site and then negotiate a placement on that page to make the most of the link for your business.
After the link is built, Mad Mango Marketing makes a concerted effort to keep up the relationship with the prospect for future linking opportunities. This does not mean we link often to the same site. Website owners do talk, and you never know what other opportunities these resources may have for your business. The backlinks we have built have sometimes lead to things much greater than a link like a customer, a supplier, we have even made lifelong friends through our link-building efforts.
We talk about a lot of the details that go into link building like anchor text and how exactly to make these prospecting lists in our blog. We hope the breakdown of our process above helps build the trust that is necessary to run a successful SEO campaign and offer several different backlink-building packages for businesses of all sizes.
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