Advanced Techniques for Improving Link Equity

November 6. 2020

When running a website, or an online business, effective link building is extremely important. If you do it as you should, it will result in powerful link equity and prominence in search. This is exactly what everyone wants to achieve, so it remains the gold standard of the SEO world. Some tactics, like black-hat link building, luckily have been eradicated. However, links are still as important as ever. So, people are always searching for new advanced techniques for improving link equity.

We all know that link building is very time-consuming, so you should make sure that you’re getting the most out of both new and old links. If you want to get to the first page of Google or to stay on it if you’re already there, here’s what you need to know and do.

Make Sure You Don’t Have Any 404 URLs

According to some recent researches, broken links are what frustrates people the most on the internet. And since this is such an easy thing to fix, there’s no reason to let yourself have these on your website.

Having a few of those may not sound like a scary story. However, this annoying error will soon be followed by your customers departing from your website. It’s an almost inevitable thing that you want to avoid at all costs. Additionally, if a search engine finds lots of dead links on your website, it’s very likely that you’ll be pushed down in the SERPs.

Now, a few things can cause this error. The most often seen one is to do with internal linking structures within your site. If you updated or replaced pages recently, all the chances are that old links aren’t working anymore.

There are a few ways you can go here, but the most obvious thing would be to set a redirect. It has to be effective and people should still be able to find the content they were looking for. You can always get a quick fix and make all 404 pages redirect to your homepage. That’s what most people opt to do as it takes the least time to complete.

The other option would be manually going and fixing each and every broken URL by replacing it with the new destination link.

Fix Broken Redirects

If you recently moved a website, there’s a real possibility that you have a problem or two more than just with 404 links. Broken redirects can occur for many reasons. Sometimes they even happen because of something simple like the site being around for a while.

It’s simple really. Every time the URL changes, there’s a chance for a link to break. And the same goes for redirects. For instance, if you change the name of a page after creating a redirect – it can result in redirect breaking. Therefore, you need to be careful when doing any maintenance work on your site.

Using different analytics tools can help you a lot with identifying broken redirects on your domain and fixing them. It’s not an exciting task to undertake, but it sure is a vital one. And if you do it regularly, you’ll end up having a user-friendly website everyone will love.

Quality Is Always The King

It may sound strange, but having quality content is one of the best advanced techniques for improving link equity. You see, if you have good content you also have a much higher chance to have strong link equity. Having something that people care about enough not only to read but also to link to is an incredibly nice asset to have.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what kind of content we’re talking about. All forms are acceptable – video, audio, text, etc. Pretty much the only important thing is for it to be sharable.

In the past few years, entertaining light-hearted videos were a way to go. However, nowadays we see text-oriented blogs gaining popularity again. Therefore, the ideal scenario would be to stay diverse. This way you can find out what works the best for your niche at the moment so you can push that kind of content more.

Just make sure to always offer your uses something of a value. Teach them something new, offer business advice, or give them some tips of any kind. Anything that’s interesting enough for them to share it with their colleagues and families is excellent. Displaying your Facebook timeline on your site is a great way to remind them to share something if they like it.

Resurrect Dead Backlinks

One of the best things that can happen for your SEO is to score a backlink from a major authority website in your niche. If you track link clicks and button clicks you’ll see that you get a lot of traffic from these places. On the other hand, it will give you no joy at all if it’s broken.

It’s a sad and bad situation but it happens. Regardless of all the efforts, you have put into link-building, your link can be killed off when another webmaster makes changes to their own site. So, it’s a smart idea to have a spreadsheet of key links that you’ve built over the years.

Check them every now and then and make sure that they’re still working. If they’re not, send an email to the other company and forward them a new link. Most people will be very pleased you’ve done this as you actually helped them also.

You get an important link back, and they have one less 404 pages on their website. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. This can also freshen up old contacts or create new ones. You never know when a great opportunity will arise to link that new article that you posted yesterday.

Conclusion

If you want to get the most out of advanced techniques for improving link equity, look at them like at the fuel that runs most SEO strategies. Of course, keywords and good technical structure are important, but quality links are crucial. Don’t be tempted to go for the route of using old school link farms as these don’t work. Nowadays, you have to put a little bit more work into everything, but it will pay off.