If you’re even remotely aware how SEO works then you must be aware that backlinks play a decisive role in the success of any SEO campaign. Although Google has always kept its ranking signals secret and rightly so, backlinks are widely considered as the holy grail of SEO. However, in today’s competitive landscape merely acquiring and piling up high-quality links won’t be sufficient enough to propel your website in the Google ranking. There is much more to backlinks than the blind pursuit of chasing invaluable links from reputable websites.
You actually need to know the practical know-how about managing links, precisely known as backlink management. If your website deals in highly competitive niche where your competitors are breathing down your neck and the margin of error is minimal then backlink management is probably the only bet you can take.
What is Backlink Management?
Backlink Management is a comprehensive and all-inclusive process that touches and covers every important aspect of backlinks. From acquiring links, continuously monitoring & tracking to discarding the toxic links. The ultimate aim of this wide-ranging and 360-degree process is to maximize its positive impact on your SEO campaign.
Let us now breakdown this definition and briefly look into the key components that will help in better understanding this complex process.
Important components of Backlink Management
Analyzing links:
Probably the most initial step in management of links is analyzing links. First and foremost, you’ve to analyze the links of your own website that will help in properly gauging where does your website stand in terms of backlinks. For instance, how many links are coming from reputable and high-authority website as well as low authority website.
This needs to be followed with analyzing your competitor links that ultimately helps in finding the link opportunities. This entire process is called ‘Backlink Gap.’
Acquiring links:
The next step or component is acquiring links, preferably acquiring high quality links. Broadly, there are two ways to go about this immensely important task.
- Earning links (also known as organic link building)
- Link outreach
Earning links implies that you’re trying to earn links naturally, with high-authority websites linking to your website on their own without you having to ask or pay for it. Your website needs to have linkable asset in the form of high-quality content to achieve success in organic link building.
In link outreach, on other hand, you ask or reach out to other websites in your industry or niche to link back to your website usually in the exchange of guest post or guest articles. Guest posting often forms an important part of most link outreach campaigns. It involves writing an expertise article that publishes on third-party websites with an assurance that it will link back to your website.
Managing anchor texts:
Anchor text is a visible clickable link, usually known as hyperlink, often used in a guest post articles or other forms of articles to link back to your website. Since anchor text forms an important part of backlinks, it is incumbent on the backlink manager or whosoever is responsible to practice anchor text diversity.
Anchor text diversity means using anchor text variations, which helps your website or links from getting penalized by Google or other search engines.
Backlink audit:
Backlink audit helps in identifying any potential issues in your link profile. For instance, you’ll come to know whether all the links are active or not and how many toxic links are there in your link profile. Regular audits will also help in spotting broken link opportunities for your website.
Disavowing toxic links:
We’d briefly touched on toxic links in the above point. While identifying them is an important part of backlink management, what’s even more important is discarding or disavowing them. If you found that your link profile has too many of them then disavowing them is the best thing you can do. It will not only help in cleaning up your profile but also help your website in avoiding any negative SEO impact in future.
For all those who are not aware, toxic links are usually low quality and spammy links that can adversely impact your SEO ranking.
Benefits & advantages of managing links
By now, most of the readers may have understood that managing or handling links isn’t a straight forward task by any means. However, if you can pull off this complicated task efficiently and also quite consistently then your website’s SEO and organic traffic performance will surely benefit in the long run.
Allows in controlling & maintaining quality of links:
Since regular backlink audit form an important part of managing links, it fully ensures that your link profile only includes those links that come from high-authority and reputable websites. This will make sure that your website’s ranking never drops off and your organic traffic keeps surging ahead.
Let’s you optimize your link building strategy:
By regularly analyzing your links and that of your competitors, you exactly come to know where your website stands in the backlink game. This invaluable information helps you to optimize your link-building strategy accordingly. You basically get a clear idea which websites you need to chase to consolidate your Dofollow links and how many high-quality links you need to beat your competitors in the SERP ranking.
Protection from Google penalties:
Proper Backlink management helps in getting rid of those low quality or spammy links that have been plaguing the health of your link profile. Moreover, it also encourages you to follow good SEO practices like using diverse anchor texts. This collectively ensures that your website is spared from Google penalties and its subsequent negative consequences on your SEO ranking.
Builds credibility & authority:
One of the central focuses of managing links is acquiring high-quality links, which invariably helps your website in building trust and credibility in front of Google and other leading search engines. As your credibility goes up, so does your organic traffic that can potentially have positive impact on your lead generation and sales.
Conclusion
The success of any SEO campaign certainly and surely goes through backlink management. There cannot be any debate about this. Especially if your company deals in highly competitive niche and needs constant organic traffic then backlink management is your ultimate secret sauce. It makes sure that every link gives you maximum results while fixing all the loopholes in your link profile. You can call it the art and science of making most out of your backlinks, which ultimately drives your organic traffic and also potentially increases your lead generation and sales.