Link building strategy
-
Hello Moz Community,
For the last couple of months we have been trying to improve our ranking in Google UK for the keyword "church candles"
http://www.wattsandco.com/church-supplies/church-candles.html
We’ve been contacting relevant interiors/lifestyle blogs to feature our candles including anchor text linking back to our page. Our anchor text has been predominately our brand (Watts & Co) but also other key search terms (Watts and Co church candles, Watts and Co pillar candles).
We have been tracking our ranking for the keyword “Church candles” using the Moz “ Rank Tracker” and we started on position 15 in Google UK. We went up to 12 briefly before moving down every week to 15, 17, 19 and 22. We checked today and we have moved back up slightly to 19.
Our progress seems to be a bit slow and inconsistent. We wanted to reach out for any advice on how we can move up? If there was any way we can improve our strategy?
Here’s the links we have built so far:
http://nostalgiecat.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/what-autumn-means-to-me.html
http://blog.pollyrowan.com/2015/10/5-small-ways-to-decorate-your-home-that.html
http://www.happyhomebird.com/2015/10/watts-co-candles-for-cosy-autumn-home.html
http://www.frolic-blog.com/2015/10/beeswax-candles-for-fall/
http://hisforhomeblog.com/lighting/watts-co-church-candles/#axzz3qhqN1wzA
http://lorilangille.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/sponsored-post-watts-and-co.html
http://www.californiahomedesign.com/product-finds/waxing-poetic-must-have-candles
Thanks so much!
-
It's best to either do redirects to pages that are essentially the same - did the blue candle have it's color renamed to robin's egg and thus got a new SKU/page? - or to build a creative 404 page that helps customers find the most common thing they look for on your site and putting a search box to help them. Here's an article about creative 404s for inspiration.
-
One of the hardest things about SEO is having the patience to wait for results! Keep building your high quality links and you should see some results soon.
You may want to revise your page title tag as well, you mention candles in it 3 times, i would mention candles twice max although im sure some would argue with me, it just looks a little spammy.
As another suggestion you could also have some introductory text on the page describing the candles, what makes them unique? why should people buy your candles and not other candles? This may help with ranking but will also add value for users.
-
No, all of these 404's are from links within your site. You need to explore which pages have the 404 because they now have broken links, redirect all to the home page is a really messy way to deal with these. Do you use a crawler? If not I suggest screaming frog, the paid version is great, but the free version will give you an idea how useful the tool is there is just a limit to how many pages you can crawl.
-
Thank you thats really helpful. Should we re-direct all 404 links to our homepage: http://www.wattsandco.com/ ? Thanks
-
7 Backlinks isn't really a lot, but I'm sure they are all high quality, keep at it, backlink building is a long game.
The first red flag that your site sets off for us is that in your robots.txt (see: http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt) you reference a sitemap that is not your domain http://www.wallpapered.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml. Update that to reference the proper sitemap http://www.wattsandco.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml.
Also we would suggest dealing with your 404's we started crawling your site, 35% done and already seeing 91 404ing links.
You might want to consider exploring using Moz Local, although we have found the majority of converting traffic come from Bing Places, Apple Maps, Google My Business and Facebook business listings, the rest of the listings in Moz Local serve as great backlinks.
I hope that helps, good luck
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Directory links with no follow
Hi I'm researching competitor backlinks & they have a lot of directory links which are no follow - but they rank very well. Is this type of link building even allowed by google? I know they they aren't allowed followed directory links, but will no following them help with rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Hammered by Spam links
When we moved from one host to another in Wordpress engine, we had this insertion weird redirect thing happen. We 410'd the page cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi, but it hit us hard in the anchors. If you go to ahrefs, we are literally all Asian in anchors text. Anybody have any suggestions, thank goodness it looks like it finally stopped. I am looking for creative ways to repopulate our back end with the right stuff. Any thoughts would be great! Heres a example: allartalocaltours.com/tumi-tote-401.html ↳customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳www.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳lockwww.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
Link building… how to get high rewarding links?
Hi Guys, I have a few people whom I have built relationships up in my industry with that would like to link to my site. Is there any particular things I need to be mindful of before having them link to me? I'm just mindful of the unknown. Also, which links to use etc? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Is it even possible to have a link building strategy?
I've been learning all about the SEO industry since starting my own website and l am truly baffled as to how to even begin generating inbound links. Does anyone have any tips or ideas? Every article l read swears that by generating good content, other sites are going to link to your own naturally. According to many, the best sites to link to your own are related sites that publish similar content to your own. If you are business however, these sites can only be competitors. Why on earth would a competitor want to link to another competitors website? Even if you launched a email marketing campaign notifying other organisations in your industry about an article you have written regarding the latest market news.......they may click and read it.......but are they honestly going to contact their web designer and tell them they must mention this article on their site!?!?!?!!? I would love to here various thoughts this matter. Have l got it completely wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Cross linking between categories
Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ? I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... ) but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?0 -
Link Building Post Penguin?
I really am lost as to what to do these days.. The problem with my industry is the whole idea of link bait isn't very lucrative. There are no bloggers either, so guest blogging also isn't a very good option. Seems to me like the best thing I can do is just publish content! So, publish a lot of quality content? LOL, sounds like that's right up Google's alley. Where do you publish your content, and what would you say has shown the best results for you personally? We called an SEO company, Arteworks, a few days ago (Friday), and they really didn't go into any details about how they build links. We called them because I saw a post that you commented on, here, and it recommended a few companies at the bottom of the post. (Arteworks being one of them) Really, this is where I get so dang confused... The goal is to build links like the old days, except only use unique content, diversify your pages, and anchor text? Sound about right? Or, should I only create content on my site? Thanks in advance for your time and advice!! Sincerely, Tyler Abernethy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740