In truth, almost 95% of all webmasters and SEO team members are looking for SEO hacks that will change their fortune in 2018. Does that mean you should stop working on SEO and start investing in something else to boost visibility? Is it even wise to compete with at least 1000 other businesses in your niche for a spot on the first page of Google SRL? According to the experts, this is the time to take out your trash and clean up the path for more traffic and views.
SEO is something you should never sweep under the rug. Yes, there is much competition out there, but that means you need to find wiser ways that can get you organic traffic more easily and effectively. None of the SEO and link building strategies we are about to tell you are going to burn a hole in your pockets. In fact, they are some of the most commonplace ideas that most SEO experts miss.
Fix your broken links
A new website is all spick-and-span. An old website is where all the trouble brews. There are posts from 2 or 3 years ago, which contains links that probably lead nowhere. It is possible that a once-high-ranking website that provided you with inbound links has gone defunct. Many websites have undergone rebranding and acquisition over the last few years.
All these reasons are the primary causes of broken links on websites.Inbound links that once lead to high authority pages can return 404 errors. These are terrible for organic ranking, traffic, and UX. No matter how well you are optimizing your local searches and on-page factors, broken links will take a toll on your ranking.
You can try tools like Screaming Frog and Dead Link Checker to scan your current outbound links. These tools tell you if the destination still exists or if the link(s) need some fixing.
Build a network of internal links
Even in 2018 Houston SEOexperts are not paying enough attention to internal linking. Internal links not only determine the different connections of the web pages, categories, subcategories, and content, they also provide a pathway for search engine spiders to complete their crawling. Via the easily accessible internal link the spiders can reach the far corners of your indexable content while utilizing the crawl budget.
Internal links can also help you keep target users and new visitors to your website using a network of relevant and interesting content. The lack of internal linking or the presence of broken internal links can wreck your UX. This can harm weaken your ranking signals significantly.
You can use tools similar to Screaming Frog to scan your internal links. Find out where they head. The only way to find out what kind of UX your website is offering your users; you need to be able to step in their shoes for a while.
The power of suggestion: new link building
This is a time-tested way to build new links. The process involves three easy steps –
- Identifying the broken links on a site.
- Creating content on your website that is akin to the original content at that link.
- Approach the website/webmaster with a proposal of broken link building by replacing the broken link to an old website with a new link to your website.
LinkMiner is a free Chrome extension that enables you to find all the broken links on any website or webpage. You can use this one broken link to mine potentially hundreds of links. Copy the broken link from LinkMiner and visit Ahrefs Site Explorer. Paste the broken link and check out the number of sites that have outbound links to that particular page! Sometimes you will find upwards of 10 referring domains to a single missing page or broken link.
In case you are looking for a way to work on a bulk link building process for a bigger firm/website, you can replace LinkMiner with Screaming Frog and Ahrefs Site Explorer with Ahrefs Batch Analysis Tool. Voila! You will find hundreds of sites that are linking to that page.
No matter how many links your website has right now, do not take the numbers at face value. Due to evolving Google SEO updates and new policies on Black Hat SEO, some websites are losing authority, going broke and losing business. The outbound links that were good yesterday might be as good as non-existent today. You need to have a faithful link checker tool by your side 24×7 to keep an eye on the status of your link profile. The link profile is the leading contributor to your site’s optimization, and you need to pay attention to your link qualities before it is too late.