At Galactic Fed we strive to deliver a 100% white-hat link-building service. We have built the link-building machines behind household name brands and businesses just getting their start. Our approach is simple yet extremely effective: we let the quality of the content we promote speak for itself, and reach out to relevant websites and publications asking them if they would like to share the content we create with their audience.
This volunteer-based link-building process (no payment of links, or shortcuts) requires that the content we promote be excellent. In the process, we earn links. This is the definition of white-hat link-building, and the core of Galactic Fed’s link building services.
As part of our SEO Series, in this guide, we will walk you through the step by step process on how we gather links from our partner sites, and subsequently, how you can implement these strategies to garner white hat links that enhance the visibility of your own brand.
What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own (Moogan 2014). Search engines utilize these links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are various strategies that can facilitate link building, one of the most common is content-based link building. We submit content to related-sites who wish to use our content as a resource by linking to it, or publishing it on their site and linked to the original article.
The Value of Link Juice
One of the major benefits of link building is passing over “link juice” from an external source that links back to your own site.
Link juice is the term used in the SEO world to refer to the value or equity passed from one page or site to another. This value is passed through hyperlinks (a.k.a. links). Search engines see links as votes by other websites that your page is valuable, credible, and worth promoting.
It is important to note that link juice differs in its authority depending on the sites linking to you. Primarily, link juice comes from:
- Pages that have content relevant to your site.
- Pages that have a high PageRank.
- Pages that have relatively few outbound links.
- Pages that contain quality content.
- Pages that appear high in SERPs.
- Pages that have user-generated content.
- Pages that are popular with social media audiences, i.e. they are mentioned often in social media.
Quality vs. Quantity of Links
Once you’ve understood the value of link juice, you should be able to equally value the “quality” of links you bring to your website. This is how we conduct the quality vs. quantity of links in our link building service.
A quality backlink is a link that comes from a high domain authority website that is well-trusted by search engines and searchers alike. In other words, not only do the robots trust the website, but actual people also trust the website.
Quality backlinks have few benefits including: generating passive traffic and that each one tends to be worth more for your SEO. Because the links are from high domain authority websites, they are also more valuable than other backlinks. The more high-quality links you build, the better your rankings will be. However, given the good side of these quality links, there are also down sides on the other end including: it’s harder and more time consuming to generate, and if you’re a relatively new site, this high DA site will most likely outrank you.
In this regard, we also consider quantity backlinks. There are a few reasons that building a lot of links without focusing too much on the quality of those links is a good thing. For one, it makes the overall process quicker. Also, there’s no denying that these links will help your site’s rankings. Most of the time, they are going to move you through the rankings faster than relentlessly focusing on quality.
In either case, you ensure that all links are relevant to your site.
By now, you should have a better understanding of link building and its value. Here, we show how you start your link building process.
Starting Your Link Building Campaign
By this time, you should already know a big chunk of what, why, and how, you should build links to your company. Here, we share with you the specific instructions and techniques for each of the core components and major players of link building. This is crucial information that is imperative to a deep understanding of the link building process and understanding how each aspect plays a part will have a huge impact on the success of your link building campaign.
The three key component of a successful link building campaign can be broken down into three parts, teams, or roles:
- Prospecting – Find relevant URLs to reach out to. You can do this through a combination of manual prospecting as well as usage of automated tools such as Scrapebox.
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Quality assurance – ensure that all the emails you send out during outreach maintain 100% 1:1 relevance with the target site. Ensure all names, email addresses, and templates are devoid of any spelling, formatting, or grammatical errors. In short – ensure you send no spam and do a great job representing your own company or brand.
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It is highly important to ensure that you are contacting the right person. To do this, QA must check if the content of the page is relevant to yours. While perspective in “relevance” might be quite subjective, the basis of relevance is defined below:
“Relevance means that the third party article or a site’s content is overlapping in themes, concept and message with our article.”
- Communications – this includes responding to all incoming Outreach emails, building partnerships with site editors, and securing the link. Collect a list of responses, as well as log any additional inquiries and opportunities (guest posting, advertising, conference invitations, etc.) that come as side-products of our outreach campaigns.
Email outreach is one of the most organic techniques to be able to build links wherein you get in contact with your prospects who have passed the QA test, and offer them a partnership regarding content sharing. We define content sharing in different ways including:
- Reposting an exact copy of your article (including the article’s original link structure) wherein the original author of the article and the credit line “This article is originally published at ” with the link back to the original article and/or to your homepage is incorporated below the title;
- Extracting context from the article, revising or summarizing the original article wherein the credit line “This article was lifted from with the link back to the original article and/or to your homepage is incorporated below the title; or
- Using your article as a resource linked to your original article.
Different Link Building Techniques
Here are the different types of link building that have a proven track record for success. Being adaptable and using a different approach when you fail to get links using one approach is another element to increasing links. Some are also specifically asked by clients so we tried those techniques to ensure we try to deliver their requests.
Benefits of Link Building To A Client’s Site
We suggest setting a goal for a certain link-velocity, which is the rate at which you acquire new backlinks. An average, manageable amount is generally in the range of 10-50 links per month. With some high-scale clients, we’ve done syndicated link-building at the rate of 60 per week.
This is a consistently effective way of getting links; sending outreach emails to relevant sites to pitch reposting your blog material on their site. The prospect gets a free (republished) article, and your brand gets an attribution link back to your site.
Key Performance Indicators in Link Building
Some ways you can measure the success of link building with defined performance indicators including, include but not limited to:
- Do-follow backlinks
- Referring domains
- Backlink profile
- Number of organic keywords that we rank for now vs. before we started link-building
- Rankings (avg. position, to be specific)
You can refer to our Essential SEO Guide for Beginners for more information regarding foundational SEO concepts. Stay tuned for more step by step SEO guides and tutorials.
