We’re developing a brand-new SEO guide for you — The Professional’s Guide to SEO, designed as your next-step resource once you’re comfortable with the baseline provided by the Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
When we think of link building, one of the first people we think of is our friend Paddy Moogan at Aira, the architect of the Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, MozCon alumni speaker, and industry thought leader. That’s why we’re jazzed to announce that the link building chapter of our upcoming Professional’s Guide to SEO is authored by none other than the fine folks at Aira. And today we’re sharing an excerpt of that very chapter.
Dive in for a glimpse at our newest guide, and as always, give us a shout on Twitter if you have any thoughts or recommendations — we love hearing from you!
Link Building & Link Earning Tactics
Measuring link building
In this section, we explore approaches to measuring links and understanding which ones may make the biggest difference to traffic and rankings, along with business outcomes such as revenue.
Once your link building strategy is set and you’re underway, you need to measure your work so that you can understand the effectiveness of what you’re doing and demonstrate its value. There are a few ways that you can measure link building, which we’ll cover below, along with the pros and cons of each one.
Volume of links
You can use various tools (such as Link Explorer) to measure the volume of links to a domain and then measure this number over time. You can also manually measure the links that you build via your own outreach and record these over time.
The advantage of this measure is that it’s very easy to do and is usually a direct consequence of the work that you are doing. For example, if you engage in a tactic such as broken link building, you can see exactly how many links you were able to build as a result of that work. This will allow you to understand which activities are most worthwhile and effective at generating volumes of links.
There is a downside to this form of measurement. Not all links are created equal, and the raw volume of links isn’t very useful without important context such as the authority and relevance of those links.
One high-quality, authoritative, relevant link could do more for your site than a hundred low-quality links. If you only measure link volume on its own, then the hundred low-quality links may be seen as successful and effective.