What to Check in a Website Before Building Links?

Many people commit the mistake of delving into link building even before knowing or checking if the website they are working for is okay and rightly built with technical details or not. People start link building with great zeal and lots of investment on various tools and software, analytical software and what not. But then they wonder why so much of investment on time, effort, labor, thinking, money, etc., is not yielding the result they are looking for. The reason is simple.

In most of the cases. Links are built, and the website also starts to rank in some cases, and even gets traffic, but things inside the site are not great, and hence every effort gets nullified to bring great traffic and business to the site. The way out of it is to look at the site before you start off-page and link building. You have to analyze the site well, and see if the on-page SEO is done properly for the site and if the site has all the pages with page elements and content perfectly okay to get started on the off-page SEO part.

Technical SEO

Handling a site, checking its internal errors and rectifying them all before starting with link building, is called technical SEO. And experienced SEO experts like Philadelphia SEO Keyword Fyrebird would do this technical SEO first before going into any other thing. This is the best way to ensure that the effort done on link building gets fruitful. Hence you should learn how a technical SEO audit is done. Some of the things that are analyzed for the audit are:

• Broken links
• Pages with poor content
• Canonical and duplicate pages
• Internal link placements
• Top pages for link placement
• Best landing pages

Find out the top pages where traffic stays

There are many pages where the traffic stays for some time. Traffic reaches these pages through Google search. A check of the Google analytics report would tell you which pages these are top performing pages in terms of bounce rate, low click-through rate, and average time. And you should record the data.

Get a report of the 404 pages

Every website may have some 404 pages which are broken pages. And you must find them out so that you can see that if there were any important links placed on these pages, or any important content, etc. If you get any, you must scrape them out, and use the resources elsewhere can rather wasting them. And then you may kill those inactive broken pages.

Check through the content

One of the most important things to check is the content. Do the pages have relevant content? Contextual content which fills the volume of a page in a reasonable amount, and has data or matter to quench the queries or matter related to the page makes for good content. Your pages must have content that fulfills user queries, has proper legit data, engages the readers, and also has the right keywords at the place placement in them.

Internal linking of pages

Pages must have internal linking, so that one-page drivesan interested user to another, and can help visitors explore through the site by useful and meaningful links. If the visitors go through the landing page and shuts off the site, then the landing page has no useful value. If the landing page has good links to drive the visitor to other pages of the site, and also the other pages are similarly internally linked to each other in a meaningful pattern, then visitors can get great navigation and user experience.

Metadata

The metadata of a site must be appropriately designed and entered. The meta description with pages, etc. also are crucial in telling the search engine what the page content and elements are all about. Hence, the website must be designed and engineered from the backend such that every page, content, and elements on the pages have good meta tagging and description involving related keywords.

Finally get a backlink audit done

When you are satisfied with all of the above, then you may think of getting a backlink auditing. A backlink audit tells you of how many live backlinks the website has, and the backlinks are from which sources. This will give you the current scenario and will help you decide that from where you can start the work of link building.

Backlink building is a strategic work, which must be continued with daily and calculated inputs. Making too many links in one day will go against the site, and making too few links also will no work. As per organic SEO practices, a calculated amount of backlinks must be built every day at quality pages which will increase the value of the website more and more with time.

Get professional help

Being an entrepreneur or the site owner, you would possibly have not much time to go into such technical detailing with all the know-how. It would take you some time to understand things and much more time to gain expertise. Hence, instead of waiting for that much and experimenting, you should contact experts who can take care of the technical SEO. Anyone can become a link builder with time and effort and learning new things. But for the technical SEO audit part, you would need expert assistance. You would need professional help from a locally based SEO and digital marketing company, who can head the project with conviction.

Finally

Backlinks are the food for SEO, and that’s true. But this effort of building backlinks must be given only when you are sure about the technical correctness of the website. If the website is not good enough to retain the traffic, it gets for one or more reasons, and if the pages are not well connected, and do not have good content, then the effort given on the link building would surely go to waste. Hence before you start any project on link building and marketing, verify the website’s pages for their content, metadata, appeal and user operability, and average time and click-through rates.