Starting your own business is exciting–you’re taking your ideas and putting them out into the world to try to help others while building a legacy for yourself.

At the beginning, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, especially with search engine optimization, or SEO.

You might wonder if you can just skip SEO for now, but the truth is you can’t afford to. There are many ways to market your business, and SEO should be one of your top concerns.

This is because SEO now touches on every aspect of digital marketing. If you plan to have a website, and you hope to draw customers or clients with that site, you need SEO and you need it from the start.

While many practices like social media are important, and in fact can influence SEO, search is the top factor in driving traffic to websites, outpacing social media by 300%.

However, even though you can’t ignore SEO, this doesn’t mean you have to tackle every aspect of it right away.

We’ve put together this SEO checklist to help you focus your initial efforts where you’ll get the most benefit. Start out with these five SEO tasks, and you’ll be well on your way to developing healthy SEO practices for your website and business.

SEO Checklist for Startups

SEO involves so much that if you try to focus on it all, you might miss opportunities. Scaling your SEO practices with your business growth is a better idea. Start with these five tasks:

• Technical Optimization
• Backlinks
• Content
• Security
• Analytics

Let’s delve into some more detail with each one to give you a better idea of their importance for your startup.

Technical Optimization

This tops our SEO checklist because if your website doesn’t operate properly, no one will want to use it. User experience is important to SEO because it’s important to the people browsing your site. What are some technical goals for your website?

• Speed. Your site needs to deliver information as quick as lightning or users will lose interest in waiting.
• Flow. Your users need to be able to navigate your website in a way that makes sense.
• Responsiveness. Your website needs to look–and function–on desktops, mobile phones, and tablets without making text tiny or skewing images.

These are great starting points to get your website up and running the right way from the beginning.

Backlinks

The main goal of SEO is to get more traffic to your website. One way to do that is with backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks that point back to your website.

Sounds simple, right? Getting them the right way is important. If you get your backlinks the wrong way, it can cost you. You might see increased traffic at first, but when search engines figure it out, they might penalize your site making it impossible to get decent traffic.

Getting backlinks from a reputable SEO source is crucial.

Content Is Still King

Years ago, Bill Gates coined the phrase, “Content is king.” It was as true when he first said it in 1996 as it is now. In fact, content marketing can lead to a 40% increase in revenue.

At least, content marketing done the right way can garner such results. Content can be everything from your blog to your email newsletter, to the text on your website.

Content needs to address users’ concerns. You can answer questions, provide engaging information, and build a relationship with online visitors, all with content. Research, create and market your content with the end user and their search in mind, and you’ll find more success than if you haphazardly throw some words up on a page.

Security

With the expansion of the internet, privacy and protecting financial and identifying information became paramount in the minds of users. That focus still exists and is actually stronger than ever. You need to have a secure site, especially if you’re going to sell products or services online.

Not only does a secure site save you the work of fixing a breach should one happen on a non-secure site, but it also tells users that you care about their privacy and you’re willing to take steps to protect it.

Creating a great user experience is necessary for successful SEO, so we had to include security on our SEO checklist.

Analytics

Analytics allow you to monitor your site’s SEO performance. You’ll be able to see everything from where visitors are coming from to how they behave on the site. Some behaviors you will want to track include:

• Time on the site
• User flow (which pages they clicked on)
• Pages per visit
• New versus returning visitors
• Bounce rate
• Landing pages (which pages on your website draw users in)
• Exits (which pages they view last before leaving your website)
• Conversions

You might think that because your business is new, there’s nothing to track. The thing to remember about analytics though is you can’t go back in time to retrieve data from before you started tracking.

Start tracking now, even if you’re only getting a few visits each day. You might want to draw comparisons later down the line and you won’t have any data to compare to a year from now if you don’t start tracking your analytics.

Another reason to start analytics tracking now while your business is new is to learn about tracking. Get comfortable with it while you’re still new to SEO so that when your business is booming and you don’t have time to learn the ropes, you can see at a quick glance how your website is performing in SEO.

Conclusion

Having an SEO checklist when you start your business is as important as having a business plan. If you’ve already started your business and haven’t begun your SEO yet, don’t worry. You can start now.

But if you can get off to a running start with your SEO, it will only help your website–and business grow. Do you still have questions about SEO or any of the topics discussed on our checklist in this article? If so, we invite you to contact us so we can help you on your way to SEO success.

The internet has lead to increased competition for both customers and views. Achieving higher authority for your domain is absolutely essential to improve your search engine performance.

This is because you cannot have customers if they can’t find you. Higher authority is the only way to guarantee eyes on your page and clicks on your CTA buttons.

Over one-third of web traffic goes to the number one search result on Google. So unless you want to keep missing out on those clicks, read on.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a metric invented by Moz. It predicts how well your website will perform.

It does this by ranking domains on a range from one to one hundred. Domains with lower authority will have lower numerical scores, whereas domains with higher authority will have higher scores.

Older domains tend to have higher domain authority. This means it’s better to use domain authority as a measure of long-term SEO performance than a tool for SEO experiments.

Because of this, it’s also important to note that your actions will have an impact on your quest for higher authority.

This makes it essential that you do business with legitimate SEO professionals who know what they’re doing. Being penalized by search engines will damage your domain authority for a long time.

Your SEO strategy should be centered around improving your domain authority.

How Can I Achieve Higher Authority?

An element of improving your domain authority will be patience and a long-term commitment. That being said, increasing your authority is within your control regardless of the age of your site.

SEO Siren makes it clear that the three best ways to achieve higher authority are by improving on link quality, link diversity and the number of links on your site.

As you can tell by that information, links are absolutely critical to your success when it comes to domain authority. Luckily, we’ve been experts on links for over ten years and know how to use them for customers seeking higher authority.

Link Quality

If you aren’t careful, toxic backlinks will torpedo your SEO strategy.

Toxic backlinks are links to your website posted in a spammy way to generate short-term improvements in SEO performance.

In the long-run, these links will result in your site being penalized by Google and effectively destroy your chances of higher authority.

If you find toxic backlinks leading to your website, take action to have them removed. If you cannot, disavow them.

Instead of relying on toxic backlinks, you should focus on using high-quality links to generate traffic to your website.

Link quality refers to the legitimacy reflected by a website generating traffic to your site through linking to it. High-quality links come from relevant and legitimate websites with high rates of visitor satisfaction.

These traits should apply not just to the website where your link is hosted, but to your link itself. Avoid associating your website with link databases and other “black hat” SEO strategies.

The potential costs are absolutely not worth it.

Link Diversity

Link diversity refers to both the wording of anchor text leading to your website and the balance of “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. High link diversity on both fronts is essential to anybody striving for higher authority.

Having diverse anchor text is simple and is an important element of any modern SEO strategy. Unnaturally overusing keywords, in anchor text or otherwise, will lead to penalties.

“Nofollow” and “dofollow” links are links with coded instructions for the search engine on whether or not to follow them.

With a nofollow link, though the person clicking on it will follow the link, the search engine will not. This means nofollow links will not influence search engine rankings.

Number of Links

Along with the quality and diversity, link quantity is another measure that, if utilized effectively, will lead to higher authority.

Having a reasonable number of internal links will improve your SEO score by providing more “link juice” for search engines. In general, less is more when it comes to these.

When it comes to external links, the focus should be on providing a large number of useful links to quality sources. Don’t skimp on these in terms of quantity, but the quality is what makes these shine.

Keeping this in mind, there is still a maximum number of links beyond which your site could be penalized. Moz says that you should avoid having 100 or more hyperlinks on your page, though this still can depend on the size and depth of the page.

For instance, an in-depth guide is going to have more hyperlinks than a blog post and is less likely to be penalized for this.

What Else Should I Know?

Giving your website a higher authority score will be the most important element of your future business success.

Links are the most important way to do this. When using links for higher authority, don’t rely on untrustworthy “black hat” firms more interested in making a quick dollar off of you than ensuring your long-term success.

Here at Backlinks, we’ve been helping business professionals succeed in the digital age by harnessing the power of links boldly and intelligently. We’ve been in the industry for over a decade, and in the process, we’ve helped over one hundred thousand professionals reach higher authority and achieve greater success.

We would love to make you one of the many professionals who has been helped by using backlinks. Set up a buyer or seller account on our website and give your website the domain authority it needs.

If you’re still skeptical, that’s great! We’d love to hear your concerns, wants, and needs and come up with a link-buying strategy that works for you. Schedule a free link building consultation with us so we can talk!

You likely already know that backlinks are key to good SEO rankings for your website. They drive new visitors to your site and boost your rankings in Google.

But have you ever considered the importance of a doing a backlink audit?

Backlinks boost your site only if they are high quality. Harmful backlinks can actually lower your site’s SEO rankings, doing the opposite of what you want.

You might even be penalized by Google for having too many unnatural or unhealthy backlinks. That would mean you have to work extra hard to recover from the penalty and get your SEO back on track.

Avoid these backlink pitfalls by doing an audit. Don’t wait until you’ve received warnings in your inbox: start right now.

In fact, a backlink audit can even open up new opportunities for your site. You will easily see how you can get more high-quality links to your site once you learn how to do a backlink audit.

In this simple, step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how.

Conducting a Backlink Audit

1. Understand the link audit

Many people don’t fully understand the power and purpose of backlinks, much less how a backlink audit works.

That’s fine: we’re here to show you what you need to know.

The first step is understanding what the link audit does.

A link audit will evaluate how well your current backlinks (or link profile) are working for your site. If there are any bad links to your site, they will be revealed by the audit.

Many companies charge a lot of money to get this valuable information for you. However, it is possible to do a link audit yourself with these next steps.

2. Find current backlinks

You need to know what links are bringing people to your site when you get ready to do your backlink audit.

Fortunately, Google Search Console makes this task easy. Sign into Google, go to your Dashboard, and click on “Search Traffic” in the lefthand sidebar.

Under “Search Traffic,” click on “Links to Your Site.”

This will give you a total number of backlinks, as well as other helpful information, like what anchor text was used and which sites link to yours the most.

3. Perform the analysis

If you think you have the time for it, you can do this, the hefty part of the audit, by hand.

This means you would click on each link and evaluate it yourself. If there are only a few links to look at, this is reasonable. However, you might have large numbers of backlinks to go through.

If this is the case, use a link analysis tool instead. There are several free online link analysis sites, so choose one that works for you to make the work faster.

If you evaluate your links by hand, you’ll want to make sure they work and aren’t “dead,” and come from real, reliable websites.

4. Look for penalties

It’s important to make sure none of your backlinks have received penalties when you do your backlink audit.

The link penalties you might get come in two forms: algorithmic and manual.

An algorithmic penalty happens when Google’s algorithm, Penguin, catches something in your link profile that shouldn’t be there.

A manual penalty happens when a person on the Google team was manually reviewing your link profile and found an issue.

Either one of these penalties will cause a Google ranking loss for your site.

You will usually be alerted to manual penalties with a message from Google Webmasters. An algorithmic penalty comes from an automated system, so there is no alert.

However, if you see a sudden drop in organic traffic to your site, there’s a good chance the cause was an algorithmic penalty.

5. Fix any issues

If your backlink audit showed that you have problematic backlinks, it’s time to make a plan to fix them.

Maybe just a few of the backlinks were bad. Maybe all of them were. Either way, it’s important to do something about it, and add quality links in their place.

Remember: the best audit in the world is worthless if you don’t act on that information.

First, figure out how to remove the bad links you found. Links that don’t work or links to spam sites or penalized sites should be removed.

If the link is to a spam or penalized a site, reach out to the website’s owner with a friendly, professional request to remove the bad links.

If the link is dead (or doesn’t work), you can disavow that link. Deadlinkchecker.com is a free resource that can help you do this.

6. Replace with quality links

Once you’ve removed the bad, it’s time to add in the good. Quality backlinks will be relevant to your site and should come from another relevant site.

They also should offer value to anyone who clicks through. If someone is reading about architecture, a backlink to your page about cooking probably won’t be of interest to them.

Seek out these high-quality links. More backlinks aren’t necessarily better if they go to bad or irrelevant sites. It may take more work to get the good links, but it’s worth it.

Conclusion

You will want to perform audits regularly to get the most use out of this information.

The more often you do a backlink audit, the less time each audit will take. Doing this work every six months is a good plan for most websites.

If your link profile had issues, there’s no need to panic. The solution is easy: get rid of the bad links and add in good ones.

There are many creative ways to get those good links. Maybe you’ll use social media sites like YouTube as a way to get more links. Maybe you’ll find other strategies that work for you.

It’s important to have a link building strategy. But if that strategy doesn’t address what to do with bad links, you’re not doing your site any favors.

Look at the places where you removed bad links. Now you can see the potential for good backlinks there. Reach out for those high-quality links, weed out the bad ones, and know that you won’t have too many surprises when it’s time for your next backlink audit.

Ask anyone in the SEO biz, and they’ll likely tell you twice: building backlinks will never get old or irrelevant. It’s driven blogs since the beginning, and it’s here to stay. So if you want to optimize your searchability, become a better backlink builder. We’ll show you how.

Entrepreneur attributes “80% of the weight that search engine algorithms give websites” to backlinks. They say it’s clear: “links demonstrate a site’s popularity.”

But not all backlinks are created equal, according to Entrepreneur. Two key factors are 1) links from an already high-ranking site, and 2) from one relevant to your business or industry. In other words, great content is what it takes to hit the ranking heights.

Forbes states that “high-quality content is one of the primary drivers of relevant search traffic.” Forbes credits content for the sensational success of their “10 Wildly-Successful Blogs That Earn Outlandish Incomes.” Incomes like $215 thousand per month! $1 million per month! $14 million per month!

We’ve got great tips on how to leverage top-notch content to build better backlinks. Follow us!

Free Advertising

When you start out with your backlink builder strategy, go for relevant sites that carry high-quality content. This doesn’t have to cost a penny. Here’s how to get free exposure.

Build by Guest Post

When it comes to creativity, you can’t just skim off the top. You have to dig deep. You have to brainstorm, get typing, and generate those gems that will set your blog apart. Once you have that, blast the internet with your grammatical gold.

Guest posts are a great way to get known. And many will earn you extra cash. Depending on your industry or area of expertise, you can earn $100 or more for 500-1,000 words. For instance, AMC Outdoors pays up to $700 for high-quality content on all things Appalachian.

But as an avid backlink builder, you’re not concerned with a few bucks here or there. The real payoff is when you widen your web presence with all the free advertising guest blogging affords. Each host should invite you to share a bio and links to your sites and pages.

Create a Press Release

Got a new product you want to shout about? How about a new exec coming on board who’s a major attraction in the industry?

Anything newsworthy is worth sharing in a press release. And talk about free advertising! Major news sources are looking for the latest, and what’s new with you qualifies. Include your pages in your release, and the big guns will bolster them automatically.

Take It to the Masses with Social Media

According to Time Health, 77% of people ages 18-24 say they reach for their mobile device first thing when not otherwise occupied. Even the NIH published a study on social media addiction.

Score! Capitalize on that sh*t. Start a page on Facebook, provide the link to your website, and, for as little as $3, you can boost to 1,000 viewers. Twitter and Instagram offer comparable services.

Use Video as a Backlink Builder

In his recent article “When People Pay Attention to Video Ads and Why” appearing in Harvard Business Review, Prof. Thales Teixiera tells what it takes to get your video ad noticed.

When you know your audience is watching, say at the very start of a YouTube video, aim to entertain without being too emotional. Also, it is important with this type of situation to start the hook after the reveal of the brand.

When your audience is anything but captive, like when they’re browsing and looking to ‘X’ out, shoot for viral advertising.

For instance, Duracell went viral with 16 million views on YouTube, despite the fact that batteries are one of the most widely-skipped items when it comes to ads, according to Prof. Teixiera.

Backlinks built the success of the Duracell ad when the company hired big-name bloggers, internet celebs, and online trendsetters to show it on their blogs and sites.

The Prof says “Entertain people to grab their attention; only then turn to your advertising needs by providing relevant information.”

Applying the Prof’s advice doesn’t have to break the bank. You can generate oodles of buzz with low-budget videos.

DIY videos go viral every day. One example is “World’s Best Skateboarding Cat! Go Didga Go!” by Robert Dollwet, Australian pet trainer.

His video hooks the viewer in the initial 25 seconds when a self-propelled skateboard invites an aloof cat on an adventure around Coolangatta, Australia. The marketing content is brief and discreet. It appears at the end of the video and includes a subscribe link.

You can do that, easy! Don’t overestimate the potential cost of video and miss out on the opportunity to make your brand known.

Other Ways to Advertise

Remember Forbes’ “wildly successful blogs that earn outlandish incomes?” Coming in at #8 on their list is Gizmodo, and they generate $325,000 per month.

They got there by delivering high-quality content that induces daily hits to their sites. You can post for free on Gizmodo, if you create an account and avoid promotional content.

Fellow Gizmodo contributors can quote your blog if they backlink you. Gizmodo may also choose to use your content in additional blogs, with the courtesy of a backlink. Or they may repost you on one of their affiliates: Lifehacker, Deadspin, Fusion, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, or The Root.

Words to the Wise

According to Entrepreneur, avoid paid backlinks. Search engines frown upon them, and they diminish your visibility, studies show. Apparently, this wasn’t an issue for Duracell, however, so you may want to keep your options open.

One more tip: track your backlink builder progress with Google Alerts. Lifehacker says Google Alerts does for free what PR reps charge buku bucks. Search only high-quality results.

Also, you can continue to build backlinks with Google Alerts. Once you find those high-quality results, contact sites that reference your brand or quotes without providing a link. Ask them to; they’re more than likely to oblige.

Earn monthly passive income from your unused ad space by selling backlinks on your site. Here’s how.

We’ve got over 10 years’ experience building backlinks for over 100,000 customers. We’re BackLinks.com. Check out why we’re still the most trusted brand in the industry and the leading choice for advertisers and publishers. Register for your free account today!

We want to hear from you! Contact us. We offer 24/7 support. But also, we want to know what questions you have about becoming a better backlink builder. Please leave a comment below. Thank you!

If you are struggling to rank higher and increase your website’s traffic, you should give tiered link building a try.

What is tiered link building?

This strategy might sound complex, but when you get to it, it is really simple.

Instead of creating websites that link back to you (low authority websites) for the sole purpose of building backlinks, you use guest posts on authoritative websites to link back to another guest post written by you in the same niche.

Have I lost you?

“But where does my website link appear in all this story?”

We will get there.

In the first tier, you will mention your website. However, the second tier will only strengthen the first one to make the backlink to your website stronger.

Instead of building two backlinks, you build just one—a quite powerful one, at that.

There are many things to be said about tiered link building, so let’s get to it!

What isn’t tiered link building

You are probably thinking to yourself, “I don’t need to wreck my nerves trying to find authoritative websites and then get rejected because my content is not good enough. I could just use the old trick: buy expired domains and then create content on those websites that will strengthen each other, and then point the first tier to my website.”

You are right. You could do that. But that is a black hat technique that will get you penalized.

Creating websites that you use as tiers is not white hat tiered link building, and it most likely buries your website on page 10.

If you want to rank higher, you will have to be able to produce high-quality content that is accepted by authoritative websites in your niche.

That is the secret to tiered link building.

How to get started

If you want to make tiered link building work, you should know a few things before you get started.

High-quality content is a must

Not everyone is a writer. Maybe you are, but your resources are better used elsewhere in your company.

If you do not pitch content that is worth posting by big players in your niche, you do not stand a chance.

Google is sick of guest posting being used as an easy way to backlink

According to Matt Cutts, “guest blogging is done, it has become too spammy”.

What Matt Cutts wants to get across is that far too many people pay to get accepted to publish on a certain website. This usually leads to content for the sake of backlinks, and not for the sake of providing solutions to readers.

This type of content is usually diluted and filled with fluff.

When you publish on another website, make sure your content does not look like you wrote it just for the sake of filling an empty page.

Google’s algorithms are now capable of seeing through spammy posts.

The SEO toolbox

Before you start searching for authoritative websites, you should check a few details such as domain authority, traffic, where they get their backlinks, keywords they are ranking for, etc.

Some websites are decaying. Make sure you do not post on a website that will be in ruined 9 months from now.

How to find websites who are interested in your content

An easy way to find your first tier is to look at Google trends in your niche. You could also perform a keyword search and pick between the first websites ranking for that keyword.

The first tier must be the most powerful. The second should have a domain authority ranked at least 30.

Keep in mind that in tiered link building the second website strengthens the first, and only the first has a link back to your website.

There are several ways to approach tiered link building. You can search for broken links in those websites and promise to replace them with working links to your content.

You can create an infographic that goes well with their content and then add a description to it which contains your link on your first tier.

There are several approaches to guest posting. But no matter what you do, provide value. It makes the website owner you are pitching to happy, it makes Google happy, and it probably makes you smile too.

How to write the perfect pitch

If you want to make your tiered link building strategy work, you need to convince the website owners you can write high-quality content.

The first step you should take is making sure you get your emails opened. Keep in mind that you are dealing with influencers, especially for the first tier.

They probably do not open every email they receive every day. Their inboxes must be flooded. This is why standing out is a crucial step.

There is a trick many email marketers use to increase the opening rate of their email.

To make your email sound more human, not just another autoresponder in the subject line, write “no subject”.

These types of emails make the receiver curious about what is inside. Plus, many people write emails like this to their friends when they are in a hurry.

It also makes the receiver wonder if they know the sender or not.

After you caught the attention of the receiver, start writing the pitch. This should gravitate around the benefits his website will receive if he posts your content.

Do not try to brag or sound like a salesman. Instead, just show a proven record of how many shares, likes, and traffic your content has received.

Be short and to the point to improve the odds of your email being read from start to finish.

Wrapping up

Tiered link building is all about guest posting on authoritative websites.

You choose your first tier and the other websites point at it, while only the first tier points at you.

This is a white hat technique that can put you on the first page of Google when done properly.

If you want to find out more about tiered link building, do not hesitate to take a look at our blog.

We also provide a free link building consultation for companies and individuals interested in ranking higher.

YouTube has been a reliable source for billions of users. It helps people find information and circulate information to others online. Another incredibly powerful source to attract your audience is youtube backlinks.

Getting people to your YouTube channel might be tricky but sending people to your other work is easy. You will only need to include backlinks to do so! There are simple tricks and tips to boosting your online reputation through YouTube.

You will first want to make sure that the content on your website is tempting and alluring. This is how you will attract your audience.

Making videos isn’t for everybody. Once you manage to create an idea you consider valuable, you can simply piece together the visual for it. You can always outsource the editing.

Most of us feel more drawn into watching information than reading about it. In fact, 65 percent of people are visual learners. This makes YouTube a resourceful place for the use of backlinks.

You can promote your brand, your company, your products, and yourself through YouTube. It allows customers to get a good look at what you’re trying to sell them.

It also amplifies your image. People get the chance to see you or your products from different angles on YouTube. This will also make them want to look for even more information.

This is where your youtube backlinks come in.

You can include links to your website in different parts of your YouTube video. By doing this, you are making people aware of anything relative to your brand. That is key.

The effectiveness of digital marketing is unmatched and shouldn’t be underestimated. And embracing YouTube will increase your number of visitors.

How to Use YouTube Backlinks

Disclaimer: All youtube backlinks are NoFollow links.

Lucky for you, NoFollow and Follow links are losing relevance as Google advances.

YouTube Channels are your best friend.

You should create a YouTube channel so that any videos you create can be under one direct source.

Once you have your channel you can begin to add backlinks to your other content. YouTube will ask you to provide general profile information. This is where you will add your links.

At this point, you will need to include two permanent youtube backlinks. Here’s how:

• On the “Channel” page you need to click on the “About” tab.
• Fill the appropriate boxes with all the necessary information.
• Next, fill the “Custom Links” tab with as many links as you want.
• Be sure that the link to your main page is in the first box.
• All information and backlinks you’ve entered will now appear on the “FAQ Tube”.
• The first link (your main link) will be a small link over the artwork you use for your channel. This will be there with whatever tab users are on!

But wait, there’s more:

Making Videos = More Backlinks

Creating content for your YouTube channel is the fun part.

By making videos you not only make your channel more interesting, you give your audience more to look for.

Video descriptions is a section of your profile where you can include as many youtube backlinks as possible.

You should briefly describe your video then insert links to your content and website.

Make sure that you include http:// before any links. That will make it clickable and Google will better pick it up.

However, you have to make sure aren’t adding too many links at a time to avoid them being considered as spam.

Don’t forget the comments

Another option to consider are the comments section of your YouTube channel. You should apply the same caution as you would for the video description section.

Your comments can be a quick an easy source for other users to find your youtube backlinks. It’s simply another way to attract a broader audience.

How SEO Helps You

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is crucial for growing your online reputation. It is what boosts your rankings, circulates your content, and makes your website easy to find.

Google is your friend here. The popular search engine is what will help direct website traffic to your page.

The greater your SEO, the more likely your content is to show up on the first page of results. A good majority of google searchers click on the first 10 organic results.

Having a YouTube channel with tons of original content strengthens your chances. Google prioritizes videos. Quality content on your channel will build youtube backlinks to your website.

This will also increase the importance of your website and the links you have on them.

Social Media Also Helps

Your social media accounts help to build your SEO ranking.

Sharing content directly from your YouTube channel to your Facebook or Twitter helps. It encourages your customers’ followers to share your content themselves.

It also sends a strong statement to Google that your YouTube channel is growing.

YouTube creates the platform for you to share your backlinks to your social media. Your social media creates more backlinks to your website. Google picks up the growth and automatically boosts your ranking.

Sharing is just as important

You should constantly be sharing the videos on your YouTube channel. Sharing impacts the number of embeds your videos get on other people’s websites.

Having your work come up on other people’s websites and blogs gives you a higher ranking. It also showcases that your content is of higher quality.

Sharing also maintains your Google ranking and can possibly increase it.

Recreating the content you already have helps too. You can turn your YouTube videos into a podcast or a blog post, for example. Doing so helps develop a stronger SEO.

The stronger your SEO presence, the more backlinks you can have.

Keyword Tagging is Effective

Keyword tagging helps to pinpoint your target audiences.

Aim to create words based on the product, its features, etc. This can boost your SEO ranking as well.

Keywords will also tie into your youtube backlinks located in your video description.

Doing so can make your Google ranking skyrocket. It will also increase your conversions.

YouTube’s platform is effective with reaching a worldwide audience with a few clicks. You and your business can benefit from the utilization of a YouTube channel. You can expand your audience through building quality content and circulating it online. Following these tips will help but for further advice, check this out.

There is one underutilized SEO super power that, when used effectively, can take your link juice through the roof?

Internal linking is where it’s at.

If you’ve overlooked internal linking as a vital tool in your quest for online dominance, now might be a good time to pay close attention.

Yes, you will still need to understand the almost never-ending supply of Google algorithm updates sure to head your way. And generating quality backlinks will still be more important than ever.

And yet…

Success with search engine optimization boils down to the fundamentals.

No matter how advanced SEO tactics become, the critical fundamental of internal linking is one of the quickest and easiest ways to produce impressive SEO results.

Looking for more than link building tools? Seeking to gain more link juice from your site? Hoping to increase your engagement metrics?

You’ve come to the right place.

In this article, we’re focusing on how you can use your internal linking to produce the SEO results you crave.

But Wait… What Exactly Is An Internal Link?

Before we take the plunge into maximizing internal links, let’s take a quick look at what an internal link actually is.

Internal Links

An internal link connects one particular page on a website to another page on that same website.

Most websites have a central home page. They then branch out into different menus and sub-pages.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

How to Easily Maximize Your Internal Link Juice

1. Create Quality Content… and Lots of It

Are you an authority in your field?

If this hasn’t happened for you just yet, it’s time to start producing fresh content.

High-quality, trustworthy, informative content.

To secure a high position on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) you want your website or blog to become an authoritative space.

But, you also want to maximize your internal linking by keeping your potential customers on your site.

To do this, you have to create lots of quality internal links. And, in order to have internal links, you have to have some killer content to link to.

This is why, for most businesses in a myriad of different niches, content is power. Content is king.

Your internal linking strategy and your content marketing strategy should always be inextricably intertwined. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

Your task is to help them to work together.

2. Linking Your Content

Getting high up on the search engines is an absolute priority for any business wishing to dominate a space.

Internally linking your content is a powerful way to do this.

Why?

Because Google crawler bots can index your web pages faster when there’s a good internal structure present.

If you’ve got no internal links, or if your internal links are sparse or inadequate, the bots will take much longer to index your site.

Now, does internal linking have to be a super complicated process?

Of course not.

Your strategy here should be centered around creating amazing content for your audience.

Then, with each new piece of content, you must seek to link back to your previous awesome content.

Every time you write a new article, make sure that you link back to at least four other articles.

Great content linking… to great content linking… to great content.

Maximizing your link juice has never been so easy.

3. Use Anchor Text

While the days of keyword stuffing and anchor text are well and truly over, there is still big power in having anchor text.

An internal link with anchor text provides more link juice than an internal link with an image. And, anchor text improves the value of the link by adding keywords and content to the linking process.

Every time you attach an internal link to strong anchor text, you improve the value of that link. You also make it easier for your users to navigate through your site.

To do this effectively, make sure that the anchor text flows congruently with the overall content of the piece.

4. Go Deep With Your Links

When you’re using internal links as part of an overall SEO strategy, there is a golden rule you should always follow.

Link deep.

The deeper your links go, the better the link juice they’ll generate.

Remember here that the best links will be deep within the structure of your site.

Of all internal links, some types produce little link juice value and you should avoid using them in the body of your text.

Here they are:

Linking to Your Homepage

Most sites have far too many links to their homepage, to begin with.

From an SEO point of view, it’s far better, and much more valuable to strengthen your internal pages by linking to them, rather than simply pointing more links to your homepage

Linking to Your ‘Contact us’ Page

By all means, point to your contacts page in your call to action at the end of your piece. But linking in the main body of your text will be fruitless if generating internal link juice is your goal.

Top Level Pages

If the page you’re linking to is easily accessed in the main navigation menu on the homepage, try to go deeper with your link.

Maximize Your Internal Link Juice

As we move into the future, link building is only going to become more and more important for businesses.

Using internal links effectively are a simple, straightforward and proven way to enhance your link juice.

They also provide a much-needed boost to your SEO, while dramatically lowering your bounce rate.

All of this serves to keep your customers exactly where you want them – on your website.

Offering your audience unrivaled value with high-quality content, not only satisfies your customers, but it helps you to become an authority in your niche.

And that sounds like a win-win to us.

Have an internal linking strategy and allow it to underpin everything you do.

Your business growth and your bottom line will thank you for it.

There’s a lot to know when it comes to SEO. But one of the many unsung heroes of SEO is the anchor text link.

And while website owners feel that they can’t control their anchor text link, we’re here to tell you otherwise. Not only is it important to control your anchor text, but it can make or break your website’s search engine page result (SERP) ranking. Here’s what you want to do to optimize your anchor text link for your backlinks.

What are anchor text links?

Before we get any further, let’s take a minute to clarify what we’re talking about.

First, links. Links are the bits that connect one page to another. They’re an essential part of blogging and SEO, and on a deeper level, make up the fabric of the modern internet. They’re also how search engines tell what pages are useful and what pages are not, which is where SEO comes into it.

Anchor text is the text that actually appears on a website that you click to follow the link. In short, it’s the underlined blue text that you see on a website.

For example, in this link to our homepage, the link is http://www.backlinks.com/, and the anchor text is ‘homepage.’

Simple right?

How links relate to SEO

Now that we know what anchor text links are, it’s we need to focus on why you should care about them.

It’s pretty simple. There’s a direct relationship between how linked your website is to how well it performs in the SERPs.

Back in the day, this was a clear relationship. Essentially, the more links you had coming to your site, the better off your site was going to rank.

But the companies started what was called ‘link farming’, where you could buy links to these purebred linking websites. They were totally useless links, but they did drive websites up in the SERPs.

However, since then Google and other search engines have gotten wise.

Now, while links are still important to your final position in Google, they have to be good quality links:

• High authority
• Relevant to the topic
• Both coming in from other sites (backlinks) and internal within your own site (internal links)

Despite these changes though, linking remains absolutely critical to having a positive SEO.

So let’s recap quickly:

• We know that it’s important WHAT sites you link to
• And we know that links, both internal and external, are important to your overall SEO

So where does anchor text come into this?

Well, one of the ways that Google and its competitors decide if something is relevant to what the link is is through anchor text.

So if you are a car website, and you have lots of links coming to your site from other car websites with anchor text like ‘convertibles’ and ‘jeeps’, then that’s going to help your SEO.

But if you have lots of anchor texts coming to your site from non-car related websites that have nothing to do with cars, just random words like ‘mug’ and ‘jacket’ then Google won’t rank those links as highly.

Which is why anchor text is so important.

Types of anchor text

Anchor text links come in a few different variations beyond just relevant vs. irrelevant that Ahrefs covers in detail. But here’s a quick summary:

• Exact match: exactly matches a target keyword: backlinks
• Partial match: Contains the keyword, but also some other stuff: backlinks are great
• Brand name: The brand name of your site or company: e.g. Nike
• URL: the straight up URL of your destination site: http://www.backlinks.com/
• Generic: Just a generic word like ‘click here’
• LSI keyword: an LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keyword relevant to your target keyword: e.g. SEO keywords
• Page title/blog post title: the title of a blog post or a page, for example, a link to our post on how to make money with backlinks would be linked as Make Money Online and Sell Backlinks on Your Website

There are a few other categories but these are the major bones of the anchor text link business.

Anchor text links best practice

Now that we have a good understanding of what anchor text is, there are a couple of best practices you can employ when you’re getting backlinks and internal links in order.

First, what category is best?

As it turns out, Search Engine Journal (SEJ) has talked about this. And they found that the best link that you can have is a link with the title of your page or blog post.

First off, it’s easy to get lots of links that all have the same copy with this strategy. You don’t need to chase down external linkers to get the text you want, and people who you’ll never get access to (e.g. someone mentioning your work on a random blog or sharing your work on social media) will likely link by title anyways.

According to SEJ, most sites have about 25% of their inbound links coming from title tag anchor texts, so that’s what you should be aiming for.

So it’s just easier.

Second, keywords. Yes, ranking for keywords is important. And a key part of this is the development of a keyword ranking program is getting the right keywords in backlinks to you. What’s interesting is that it’s not so important if it’s an exact or partial match – they’re both valuable.

For links that you have control over, asking for keyword links might be the best option, since your title tag links will be rolling in naturally anyways.

According to a massive study completed by Ahrefs, over 84% of page one results had exact keyword or partial keyword inbound links, so there’s a clear correlation there.

But when they looked into the total link profiles for these pages, they found that that about 25% of the links came from partial matches. With the number 1 slot, they found that 13% of posts had an exact match, with first page results averaging about 5%.

What this means is that keywords and partial keywords are important, but perhaps not as critical as you might think. Aim for keywords, but if you’re struggling to get exact matches, don’t panic – partial ones should get you onto page 1 anyways.

In Conclusion

All in all, anchor text remains important for backlinks. If you can specify, whether you’re sharing on social media, working with a blogging network, or posting on forums/Quora, then you should focus on exact matches and title tags.

But overall, your focus should be on getting a LOT of high authority backlinks rather than focusing on getting exact anchor text.

Because while anchor text link is important, it’s better to aim for quantity of inbound links than a few really good ones.