A good netlinking strategy is important to improve the natural referencing (SEO) of your website.
It aims to create quality inbound links to increase the popularity and traffic of a website. How to implement an effective netlinking strategy to boost your SEO? Answer below.
What is a netlinking strategy?
Netlinking or link building is an SEO practice that consists of building external hypertext links (backlinks) to your website. Also called external linking, it is one of the three pillars of natural referencing.
The netlinking strategy is a set of actions that contribute to obtaining and properly exploiting quality backlinks. While the internet mesh is made with internal links, the links used in netlinking come from external sites.
The netlinking strategy aims to optimize your visibility on the Internet to improve your acquisition of qualified traffic.
Indeed, Google judges the relevance of a site based on the backlinks that point to its web pages. If the source of your backlink is trustworthy, then Google considers your site to be an interesting response to query intent. It will therefore grant a better position in the search results.
Why implement a netlinking strategy?
Link building plays an essential role in the natural referencing of a website. Indeed, backlinks improve the authority of your site by ensuring a better position in search engines.
The implementation of an effective netlinking strategy is therefore necessary to improve the visibility and the confidence index of your website.
The name varies according to the tool used:
- Domain rating for Ahrefs,
- Trust Flow with Majestic SEO,
- and Trust Rank with Google.
But the success of your website largely depends on its trust rate. More generally, a good netlinking strategy is beneficial for all the different web stakeholders:
1 Search engines: backlinks serve as a gateway for indexing robots (crawlers) to browse all the sites on the web. This makes it easier for them to notice updates to old pages and newly created pages.
2 Internet users: thanks to backlinks, the reader surfs from high value-added content to other quality content. He discovers new things, broadens his field of knowledge and obtains more complete answers to his questions.
3 The owner of the website: quality backlinks help improve the natural referencing of a website and therefore its visibility. A better position in Google leads to more qualified traffic and therefore a higher conversion rate. It is an essential element to increase your return on investment (ROI).
How does it work ?
The objective of a netlinking strategy is to obtain backlinks from recognized websites addressing a theme close to yours. It aims to improve the notoriety and audience of your website. Several possibilities are available to you to have backlinks:
- buying links,
- link exchange,
- natural links, etc.
However, a good netlinking strategy ensures that you find quality links capable of increasing the popularity of your site. Where to start ?
1 | Find partner sites
The first step to implementing a winning netlinking strategy is to find potential partner sites. This is to find blogs, directories or press releases where articles including your backlinks will be published. There are several ways to identify it.
Use Google: search for your sector of activity or your theme preceded by a keyword such as "guest article", "Guest blogging", etc. Better still, you can extract sites already positioned on thematic voting keywords using the SEMrush Link Building Tool.
Track SEO metrics: the site's organic traffic, the number of referenced domains, the Page Rank and the Trust Flow provide valuable information on the relevance and popularity of the identified site.
Find partners with your competitors: carry out a digital watch to analyze the practices of your competitors as well as the source of their backlinks.
Not all inbound links are created equal. A backlink from a non-indexed site or a black hat may penalize your SEO. Take into consideration :
- The quality of the site (with the SEMrush extension)
- Its seniority (with the Whois command)
- His honesty
- The number of backlinks
2 | Create a tracking file to organize yourself
Over time, your number of partners will gradually increase and the netlinking strategy will become more difficult to follow. This is why it is important to set up a tracking file to better organize yourself. For this, a spreadsheet (Excel or online) will be a great help. Highlight information on this document such as:
- Partner's website
- Its popularity indicators
- The type of partnership
- Its prices
- The negotiation stage
3 | Follow up regularly
At the end of the negotiations, you will need other information to follow the evolution of your backlinks over time:
- The link of the article that contains the backlink
- The anchor text used
- The state of the backlink (dofollow and not nofollow)
- The date of obtaining the backlink
It's up to you to create a table that contains all the information you need to do a good follow-up. Then, we recommend that you check your links every 3 months to spot broken links and fix them. Do not hesitate to entrust the task to an SEO professional to lighten the task.
4 | Include linkbaiting operations in your netlinking strategy
Linkbaiting is the best technique for acquiring backlinks from Google's point of view. What is it about ?
Linkbaiting is an SEO netlinking technique that consists of creating high-quality content on a site (or blog) in order to naturally obtain backlinks. Here, the high added value of the content is what will lead other site owners to offer you backlinks for free.
You must therefore have an original and very well-developed content strategy to convince your future referring sites. Here are some techniques used by web specialists to succeed in their linkbaiting campaigns:
- The production of infographics, white papers or studies
- Conducting an interview with a famous personality
- Newsjacking
- Making tutorials
- The organization of competitions
- Conducting webinars
Regardless of the technique used, the fresh, unique and relevant side of your content is what will determine the success of your linkbaiting strategy.
5 | Monitor the effectiveness of the netlinking strategy
Nothing is won in advance even with good SEO practices. Stay attentive to the evolution of the results of your strategy to adapt it over the long term. Here are some things to watch out for:
- SEO traffic on your different targeted pages
- The trust rate of the targeted pages
- The position of your targeted pages in the SERPs
- The trust rate of your website
If after a few months, you observe an improvement in these factors, it means that your netlinking strategy is effective. On the other hand, if nothing changes after several months, your strategy is not working and needs to be refined.
And if you notice that your site is losing places on Google, it is a sign that certain actions of your strategy are penalized by search engines. The best thing to do in these conditions is to start all over again.
When to take action?
The best time to take action and implement your netlinking strategy is as soon as possible. In reality, SEO natural referencing is an endurance job where efforts pay off over time.
The sooner you start optimizing for SEO, the sooner you'll rank higher in search engine results. And a netlinking strategy is not created in a day, it takes time and requires resources. It is a long process !
You need to go step by step to gradually increase the number of links pointing to your site. Also keep in mind that your strategy will not necessarily be effective from the start and that it may need to be improved or reworked. So you might as well start early and surround yourself with the right people.
To conclude
A good netlinking strategy is essential to achieve your SEO goals. But it is not enough to create many links to pages on your website. You must also ensure the quality of the link used and its relevance to Google.
A relevant backlink for the search engine must come from a web page that meets the following criteria:
- a theme close to yours
- a PageRank greater than 3
- with few outgoing links
To the relevant backlinks, we will add quality content and optimized technical SEO to boost your SEO.
