Updated January 13, 2023
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In Link Building Part 1 we explained what good link building is. Now, let’s move on to how to gather and manage your website’s links.
Managing Your Link Building Efforts
A backlink is another term for an incoming or inbound link. You — or your webmaster — will want to measure and manage your inbound links. One low tech way is to use a simple spreadsheet. However, as the popularity of your website increases, a spreadsheet will get cumbersome and potentially inaccurate.
Raven Tools is one of my favorite internet marketing tools because I love to dig into the analytics. Disclaimer: I like this tool so much that we became an affiliate. However, if you want do some comparison shopping, we blogged about SEO tools in our 4 Tools for Effective SEO Link Building post. Geek Alert!: these tools are not for the faint of heart or technically challenged.
Even so, here are the main concepts you need to know about managing links:
1. Relevant Links – To maximize SEO efforts, your links obviously need to be relevant to your business space. If you sell shoes, links that sell movie tickets won’t get you any Google juice. Links from a famous fashion blogger would be more appropriate.
2. Anchor Text – This is a technical aspect of link building that’s often missed. Anchor text is supposed to describe what the link is about. Anchor text is important to search engines
3. Link Gathering Efforts – Establish a reasonable number of links you want to add to your site (monthly/quarterly) and be consistent with your ongoing efforts. Huge spikes in the number of links added to your domain may be an SEO red flag. As you reach out to sites for link building, focus on businesses that will drive traffic to your site with a high probability of generating leads and sales. Otherwise, what’s the point.
Next time we’ll talk about the common mistakes that will lose you SEO equity when you don’t manage links properly.
Link Building: An SEO Power Tool Part 1