Developing a strong backlink profile is the best way to secure competitive placement on the search engines for the keywords and phrases related to your enterprise and its website. Building links and citations however can prove difficult in some cases and seemingly impossible in others.
To ensure that your SEO efforts are on the right path, it proves useful to keep tabs on what others in your industry are doing and the approaches they take and the beliefs they have about the practice.
Link-Assistant's recent survey on link building, for example, provides a wealth of information that can benefit those responsible for search engine optimization initiatives. Let's take a closer look at some highlights of the report:
+ IMPORTANCE OF BACKLINKS: 72 percent of SEOs believe backlinks are a "significant' ranking factor, with 24 percent indicating they think backlinks are only somewhat important and that many other factors play a part in the ranking algorithm. Just 4 percent of SEOs assume backlinks have "little" influence on rankings.
+ LINK BUILDING CHALLENGES: The same barriers to building backlinks are encountered by SEO professionals and small businesses engaging in the practice in-house. Dealing with "boring" industries, a lack of opportunities, low response rate, a personal lack of experience, and the requests for fees are the primary challenges.
+ MANUAL & PENGUIN PENALTIES: Most SEOs have had no backlink penalties (80.1 percent) while 14 percent did not know and 5.9 percent indicated they had been penalized. Of those that did receive a penalty, manual actions were less frequently than Penguin, but SEOs indicated that manual penalties were easier to recover from.
+ BACKLINK QUANTITY: The survey also revealed how many backlinks were being acquired each month. Link-Assistant did not go into much detail but it appears (based on the chart below) that well over 80 percent of SEOs acquire less than 20 links per month and approximately 15 percent acquire between 20 and 100. Only a handful of respondents build over 100 links per month.
+ LINK BUILDING TECHNIQUES: 23 different techniques to grow links (organized into 7 groups) were addressed in the study including creating content assets (infographics, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), PR-based methods (press releases, interviews, etc.), outreach (link reclamation, broken link building), social media (content-sharing, viral campaigns, etc.), local-focused efforts, community-driven tactics (commenting, forums, Q&A sites) and miscellaneous tactics. Creating content and social media were the two tactics that received the most use among SEOs.