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How Link Building Works and Our Processes

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What is link building?

Link building is the process of connecting two websites together using clickable hyperlinks. Links can be either outbound or inbound. Outbound links are those that link from a website out to another; these are important to show Google where the site “sits” within their link graph (the site’s position in the web). Inbound links are those from external sites linking in to a site.

How important is link building for SEO?

Link building is verified by Google to be a major factor in how a website ranks. Search engines like Google crawl the web using hyperlinks. They gather data about who is linking to where and use it to determine relevance, quality and other information to help them rank sites fairly.

What are the best links for SEO?

From an SEO point of view, it’s accepted that inbound links from relevant, well-written content are the most important type of link. There are many types of inbound links, but the best are those that are from trusted sites and help the user to achieve a goal. An example would be an inbound link from an uncommon word to a definition page on a high authority dictionary site. Links can be from images or text, home page or inner pages. The strength or “authority” of a link, is determined by the domain and page it is placed. Because Google does not indicate this, SEO practitioners use software to help them make decisions. Tools such as Moz, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and SEM Rush provide metrics that provide vital clues. You can find out exactly how to value backlinks here.

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Our link building process

Our agency has always been quality conscious. We have stuck to our principles regardless of the commercial opportunities to sell backlinks at scale and always to delivered links that meet higher standards, even introducing the first formula to use five industry standard metrics for assessing websites; M-Flux. 

The first phase is the proposal. We offer all potential customers the option for us to perform an analysis of their backlink profile, and supply a campaign budget estimate. This phase is free of charge and their is no obligation. If the opportunity is out of reach then we will say so. We have no interest in taking money for a service that does not improve your current position.

Our proposal will include:

Keyword opportunity analysis

Competitor strength overview

Estimated number and quality of backlinks

The estimated timeframe for ranking

Understanding your business

  • The keywords used by your target market
  • The questions your customers are asking

Analysis of the search engine activity

  • Competitor strength (backlinks and their content)
  • The type of content needed to rank for target keywords

Link strategy development

  • How many backlinks
  • The types of sites needed (niche relevance)
  • The strength of sites needed (Moz DA, DR, TF, M-Flux, SEM Rush traffic)
  • Anchor texts ratios
  • Campaign period

Outreach planning

  • Email template development (first contact, follow-ups)
  • Target site list
  • Outreach schedule
  • Reporting documents

Campaign management

Stage one:

  • Private client dashboard provided to you
  • Sites provided in the dashboard for your approval
  • Content titles supplied for your approval

Stage two:

  • Content added to the dashboard for your approval (48-hour window where possible)
  • Anchor text used for links is checked and agreed by you
  • Content is sent to the selected sites for publication

Stage three:

  • Published links reviewed by UK Linkology
  • Published links are added to the dashboard for your review
  • Links monitored by UK Linkology

Transparent methods

  • We show you every site and every piece of content before we publish. Not only that we explain why we have provided a site or written a piece of content. Getting you results it at the heart of our service, selling as many backlinks to you as we can is not.

Verified processes

  • Our link building process is tried and tested over many years. We were there at the start when link building was considered a dark art, and have refined our methods. We place backlinks that are safe and effective and aim for our clients to fully understand how our link building process works.

Fair pricing

  • Take a look around. Cheap links are everywhere, but if you want results without taking huge risks, you need to choose your link building agency carefully. Link builders that use one, simple metric to value their links (like DR or DA) are not providing you with clarity or good value. We use at least five metrics in our M-Flux formula, plus a 22-point human check to ensure sites meet the high standards that search engines are looking for. The extra careful approach takes more time and costs more but the long term visibilty of your website is far more important than a cheap boost that could destroy your rankings.
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FAQ

A metric developed by Moz.com. DA is a helpful guess at how a site will perform in search relative to other similar sites trying to rank in its niche. It is not a direct replacement for PageRank. Moz uses link counts, known factors related to link manipulation, spam and link quality and traffic estimates. And others, which they are not clear about (probably for commercial reasons).
TF Measures the amount of trust you can have in a website due to the ‘quality’ of its backlink profile. Quality in this context means the authority which is arguably a proxy for trust. A trusted site could be CNN.com or the BBC (again, debatable but it’s Google we are dealing with and they cater for the masses). Majestic compiled a list of what they deem to be highly trusted sites. To give a website a Trust Flow score, they measure the distance from these trusted sites using hyperlinks. The closer your site is to their set of trusted authority sites, the higher the Trust Flow (TF).

Ahrefs Domain rating claims to show (measure) the ‘strength’ of a backlink profile. DR is calculated by looking at the DR of the unique links coming from one site to another. The amount of DR passed from a site depends on the number (and DR) of the sites that links to it and the number it links to; the more it links to, the less it can pass as DR dilutes.

SEM Rush looks at the visibility of a site for its keywords in Google. It then uses a formula to estimate the amount of traffic the site could get in each of the positions. E.g. Keyword gets 1000 estimated visits per month and the site ranks at number 1. The click-through rate at number one for this niche is 35%, so the site is assigned 350 organic traffic.

M-Flux is our in-house scoring system that uses five different metrics, including; DA/DR/TF/traffic/keywords plus a final human 22-point review. M-Flux provides a balanced score for a website by using a mix of metrics that measure different qualities of a website. M-Flux supports the expert view that more metrics are better than one. It is trusted by SEO agencies that take a long-term view of building clients backlink profiles and are risk-averse. You can discover how our M-Flux formula works here.

Backlinks are hyperlinks from one website to another. They were first used by Google to determine how trusted a given page is by other people, the logic being that people only link to other pages they trust.
These are backlinks that are within the text of a page and are “within context”, i.e. they are relevant, timely and naturally occurring.

Anchor text is the words used in a hyperlink that the reader sees. For example; look at these red shoes on this site that are on sale, the anchor text is the underlined text. It informs the user precisely what to expect on the linked page. Anchor text with keywords in was once a powerful ranking signal, but nowadays it is best used sparingly.

Relevance is often misunderstood in link building. The most important thing is that the link is placed naturally and is relevant to the article it appears in. The next important is the page title, then the overall theme of the site. If you have all of these factors covered, then the link could be more powerful.
Outreach a recent word, meaning to make contact proactively. The alternative would be to sit on your hands and wait for links.
Google is an answers engine, and websites providing the best answers will usually rank the highest. You should try to provide the best content you can at every opportunity even when it is for placing backlinks on other sites.
The algorithm is actually made up multiple algorithms, each with a job to do. They measure the quality, relevance, freshness and popularity of content and assign values to assist Google to rank pages. Your SEO strategy will involve creating content and backlinks that is favoured by the algorithm.
A ranking factor is something that helps a website to rank well in search engines. Know ranking factors are content, backlinks and rank brain – the latter being a machine learning component that measures results and adapts them to improve user satisfaction.

Here's what our customers have to say...

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UK Office: UK Linkology, Sadler Bridge Studios, Bold Lane, Derby DE1 3NT.
Hours: Mon-Thur, 9:00AM-5:30PM. Fri, 9:00AM-5:00PM
Phone: 01332 742 516
Email: contact@uklinkology.co.uk