Ahhhh the good old task of building inbound links: time-consuming, difficult and potentially the most frustrating ‘Must-Do’ task on the list of the average SEO or in-house marketing team. Sadly despite what Google says it is the most important element to get right if a website is to achieve any modicum of ranking success. To this end it pays to ensure that the links that you have already built, are working as hard as they possibly can for you. Also, make sure to you do some simple tweaks to make building links easier.

10 Simple Tips To Improve Backlinks To Your Website

1. Monitor Mentions Then Ask For Backlinks

Monitoring mentions is extremely important and an easy way to scoop up quick backlinks. Mentions are when a website (or blog post) references your company by business name, brand name or even just your URL in raw form (e.g. http://yourdomain.com). Tracking these down and asking the blogger, author or webmaster for a link back to your website is an extremely easy way to pick up link juice. I will admit, this is a much more effective strategy for larger, more active brands that get mentioned regularly among the digital community.

You can use a tool to track down mentions, such as the Unlinked Mention Finder. There is a tutorial that shows you how to use the tool and it also dumps the results into a Google Spreadsheet for easy tracking.

Once you have your list and email address of the appropriate point of contact, just drop them a note and request the backlink.

To automate this process in the future you can set up Google Alerts for specific raw URLs, brand mentions, etc.

2. Review Link Anchor Text And Request Changes

There are many reasons why you may want to change your link anchor text (hellooooo Penguin!) such as you changed your business name, brand name, product name, etc. Obviously, you want to make sure your business and brand and reflected consistently across the web.

The best way to do this is to use a Google Webmaster Tools (since it’s free). If you are looking for a premium option I recommend Spyfu, Link Research Tools, or Backlinko.

The goal is to review your anchor text and reach out to webmaster’s asking them to update the anchor text accordingly. Don’t forget to make sure the URL matches where you want the link to point otherwise this will be a wasted effort.

3. Add Alt Attributes To Your Images

This is something that web developers should be doing every time they build a website, especially for an ecommerce site that has 100s or 1000s of images. The difficulty isn’t in adding the actual attributes, it’s deciding the proper keyword information that you want to add to ensure it is relevant to your SEO strategy.

The benefits of adding alt attributes to your images are two-fold:

1. It ensures search engines are crawling your images and understanding what they are about
2. For users performing image searches, they know what your image is about for linking purposes

For Example, whenever I write a blog post like this one, I do a Google search for a phrase that I think will help me find a good image. Once I find the image I like, I make sure it is the right size and download the image. At the end of each post, I provide a link back to where I got the image.

By adding alt attributes you are increasing the liklihood that searchers will find your images and thus, increasing your opportunity to build more backlinks.

4. Double Check Your Disavow File

The Google Disavow Tool is great for ensuring that harmful links aren’t dragging down your rankings. It’s also very powerful, hence why Google gives the following message before allowing you to disavow links:

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.Mr. Google

It is easy to accidentally add a link or two that aren’t “spammy”. These links could potentially help your SEO by ensuring you are passing the most link juice. Below are some case examples of why you should review your disavow file periodically:

• Past SEO workers have disavowed inappropriate links
• Previously penalized links hit with a Google penalty that are no longer applied
• Previously compromised links that were flagged up as leading to malware, but that have now been cleaned up
• The site that was previously linking back has cleaned up its act, going from spam filled to decidedly squeaky clean
• The site linking back has transitioned from a massive amount of outbound links, to more manageable numbers

5. Review Internal Links Pointing To Dead Pages

If you are like most website owners, you’ve probably gone through a couple iterations of your website. That means there is an extremely high chance you have internal links that are pointing to dead pages.

To help identify broken internal links, I recommend using the following tools:

• Screaming Frog
• Broken Link Checker
• Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Why do you want your internal links not pointing to dead pages you may ask? Well when internal links come in and the link juice is being passed through, you will be passing that valuable juice to a page that is dead. That means you won’t be making the most of your hard earned backlinks.

6. Make Sure External Links Point To Live Pages

Piggy backing off the above point, make sure that those dead pages are being redirected to pages that are live. Also, make sure that you’re redirects aren’t passing through pages unnecessarily. To keep it simple, think about it like this; every time a link flows from one page to another, the link juice is being diluted. So again, if you are working had for your backlinks, make sure you get the most from their “value”.

7. Analyze Your NoFollow Links

Every website should have a good mix of DoFollow and NoFollow links as this is a natural part of the web. There isn’t a defined ration your website should strive to maintain, but obviously the more Dofollow links the better.

In order to beef up your DoFollow links, here is what I recommend:

1. Run your website through a backlink checker such as Moz, aHrefs, Link Research Tools, or another similar tool
2. Review the backlinks and make note of which links are listed as NoFollow
3. Scan that list by reviewing each domain to see which links are coming from blog posts or similar web pages
4. Visit each respective page and contact the Webmmaster to ask for the NoFollow attribute to be removed

Now this strategy will work, but it is definitely time consuming as is most link building. Please be advised that in some cases, your link is automatically assigned a NoFollow tag (e.g. profile links on some social sites). Those links should be ignored because you can’t change them. Instead focus on links that are in the body of a webpage as these can easily be changed by the website owner.

8. Overhaul Old Content Linking To Your Website

As part of link building, you’ve undoubtedly written guest post on third party sites many of which you still have access to. If that is the case, a simple way to jolt your backlinks is to rework this content to be fresh for search engines. Also, depending on the number of links the article contains pointing to your website, you could do any of the following:

• Add more links pointing to your website
• Adjust the location of where those backlinks are pointing (maybe you made new pages)

One thing to consider is the number of backlinks pointing to your website from the same page. You don’t want to stuff a bunch of backlinks into an article, but if the content is beefy, might as well toss in another if it make sense to the content.

9. Link To Inner Pages And Not Just The Home Page

This is a rule that most SEOs are following nowadays. Just make sure you are driving links to internal pages and not just the home page. If you have the ability to control or modify your internal links be sure to do so. Again, make sure that it seems natural and is relevant. The result will lead to lower bounce rates and longer visitor duration, not to mention creating a solid (and natural) structure of interlinking pages.

10. Tackle Negative Backlinks

Last but not least make sure that you are monitoring your backlinks consistently. You want to remove toxic backlinks that are hurting your rankings. We’ve created an awesome guide to removing bad backlinks that will tell you everything you need to know about tackling negative backlinks.

For reference, here are some common websites that may be considered negative by Google:

• Websites with adult or gambling content
• Websites with offensive content
• Websites that are unrelated to your industry or business

Featured image courtesy of SEO Clerks.