Back link plan discussion

[Cfarcher]

When you have a lot of keywords that you rank for say something like 15,000 or more.

How do you develop a good back link plan?

I was thinking to first look at the highest volume keywords we already rank for but aren't in the top 1-3 spots. To focus on those few words trying to obtain more high quality back links. But I'm not sure if this is the best plan .

What would you do?

What are some good consistent back link plans you can use to work on a keyword or lots of keywords?

Thanks for the discussion,

Chris

[Cfarcher]

Appreciate the answer.

That was sort of my game plan to pick out our top 4 keywords that we aren't ranked on Google spots 1-3 but would bring us back the most volume of traffic.  I do have four keywords like this that we are are either at the bottom of page 1 or on page 2 & if we obtained a better rank could bring back 11,500 to 30,000 per-keyword.

I just didn't want to focus on only 4 keywords by trying to get anchored text links or high quality links by manually reaching out to sites for only those four keywords if there was another plan to distribute more juice to a wider variety of words.

But you are correct that is the issue with coming up with a plan, that we have so many keywords some that bring back little traffic some that bring back a lot and how do we focus on the many or should we just focus on the four for now and then focus on a new set once a goal is accomplished.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Chris,

I'm not sure I fully understand your question:

"The question now is, How with so many ranking keywords do you come up with a solid back link plan."

Do you mean how many keywords you can target with link building?

If so, that's not really the way to think about it because most high-quality link building won't use your keywords as anchor text and may not link directly to your commercial landing pages. The approach should be on getting links into the domain which are high quality which 1) help the domain as a whole and 2) can be filtered to your key pages via good site architecture.

Going back to your first question, if you are going to focus on link building, then you do need to prioritise and focus on key landing pages first. But you have two options for this:

1. Try to get links directly to those pages - this is hard unless those pages are link worthy in some way or you're prepared to pay for links to those pages which I wouldn't advise.

2. Try to get links to your domain/content and then use internal linking to filter link equity to your key pages.

Link building with a focus on improving 15,000+ keywords individually isn't going to happen and probably why you're struggling with this a bit. Focusing on a few at a time by doing the things above or trying to improve the domain as a whole is going to be more helpful I think.

Cheers.

Paddy

[Cfarcher]

The company is in an odd industry, real estate. So our user base is posting out content in a sense which drives traffic. We don't have many "articles" or "content blogs" ranking for big keywords.

If you'd like to do a review just use MOZ Domain Tool we are www.nystatemls.com

[Cfarcher]

Our website is well out of the "early stages" we are ranked for nearly 17,500 keywords bringing in about 200,000 unique visitors a month and 1 million page views. Most of this happened naturally without any focus on Search Engine Optimization.

The question now is, How with so many ranking keywords do you come up with a solid back link plan.  I am looking for something consistent, that a team could start doing every week to capitalize on the keywords we are ranked for that have huge traffic potential that are near the top but not in place yet.

Just sounds sort of crazy that the best option is to manually reach out to high PR sites to see if we can get a back link to either our ROOT or an Anchored Text.

Any ideas?

[EGOL]

"Ultimately, you should be trying to come up with ways to make your website naturally link worthy so that you end up getting links which you didn't ask for."

Paddy is absolutely right.

You say that you have rakings for 15,000 keywords.   Let's say that is done by 500 articles.   If your content is superb enough for each of those 500 articles that the pull in  just one natural link per year for each.  That is a nice number of links.

If you spend the next year improving that content enough that each article pulls 2 links per year, that is almost like having a full time person doing link building.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Chris,

Link building can be very manual, particularly in the early days of a website and when you're trying to get going. Ultimately, you should be trying to come up with ways to make your website naturally link worthy so that you end up getting links which you didn't ask for.

This can come a few ways:

• Your product or service being genuinely useful to your target audience or within your industry so that people recommend it/reference it etc
• Creating content which genuinely answers questions and solves problems for your target audience
• Creating content which has some kind of an angle which encourages top tier sites or bloggers to links to it such as informative guides or statistics/data related to your industry

You may find it hard to get links to lots of your product or sales pages unless they are link worthy in themselves. So also try to focus on getting links to your content and then distributing the link equity from these pages to your key pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

[Cfarcher]

But is the real plan to get back links to reach out to these high powered domains? That seems very manual and time consuming. I understand some may need to be done like this but how do you outsource or come up with a real plan to get back links each day or week from good sources without using spam methods.

[EGOL]

Let's consider two goals...

First:   Try to improve rankings where a modicum ranking improvement in position will best move the needle of your business.  Very often these are pages on your site that rank at #4, #5, #6, or so for money keywords at the present time.  Getting a ranking boost there will result in a major improvement in your revenue.   Improving the content on that page and making other improvements that might facilitate conversions can make big paybacks.

Second:  Often, people try to improve the rankings of sales pages, but, it is often easier to improve the rankings of article pages - especially if they are fantastic.  So, I would suggest, after picking some pages for your first goal, write comprehensive articles that thoroughly explain that topic.  These articles might attract links, they might be better targets when asking for links, these pages might rank better than your sales page.  You will link them to your product pages and make every visitor to the article page know that you have the items for sale.