Link Building Services
The VELOX team will optimize your presence and performance online using unique strategies to build your site a well-rounded, healthy link profile.
What Is Link Building?
Simply put, link building is a part of the search engine optimization (SEO) process. External links, or backlinks, that lead to specific areas of your site are placed in strategic areas across the web. These backlinks serve to bolster the overall authority of your site, or a specific page within your site, to encourage a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search engines use links, whether they come from an external source or another section of your site, for two primary reasons. First, their crawlers index any links that point to or from your site to help them discover new web pages. They also use the data collected from crawling links to gauge how relevant a given website or page is to a user’s search query. Well-crafted links with content-relevant anchor text tell Google and other search engines what the page it links to is about, making it easier for the algorithm to decide where your page or site should rank based on user intent.
Other factors are obviously involved in the overall determination of a website’s rank in SERPs, but link building is still a critical piece of the puzzle. It can be a difficult, time-consuming process, but your SEO strategy would be remiss to exclude it. Essentially, no strategy can be successful without a strong link building process.
The Anatomy of a Link
Why is Link Building Important?
Brand Authority
As a major player in the game of search rankings, link building shouldn’t be ignored. Accumulating a variety of well-placed, naturally varied links can do a lot for your brand. Obviously, you want traffic to your site, but what link building does is send more qualified users your way. So not only are you garnering traffic that’s already interested in what you have to say, but you’re building awareness of your brand before anyone even gets to your site. And that helps you foster authority in your industry. The more links you have pointing to your site, the higher the likelihood your content is trustworthy. Users are going to gravitate toward sites they can trust.
Another note on authority: Link building also plays a major role in determining the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of your site. While these metrics don’t come directly from Google, they are widely accepted as strong predictors of how well your site will rank in SERPs. Scores range from 1 to 100, and the higher your score, the better chance you have of ranking well for a given search query. That’s because your DA and PA indicate a number of other trustworthy, authoritative sites are linking to yours, meaning yours must be an expert on the content presented too.
Why Is Link Building Important?
Sustainability
The effort you need to put in to the link building process may seem daunting, but it’s nothing compared to the long-lasting benefits of a healthy link profile. That’s the biggest reason link building is an important piece of your SEO strategy: it’s sustainable. There are a lot of successful ways to get your brand out there, but link building done right is one factor that, once you put in the initial work, is cost-effective and enduring. Once your links are out there, they tend to stay out there, and they usually only require monitoring and a little upkeep to ensure they continue to work. While it takes time to first build a link profile, keeping it healthy and adding to it are considerably less challenging over time, as long as you continue to play by the rules.
It does require an investment, though, which makes partnering with an agency that’s built an effective, widely successful process a worthwhile consideration. Having a team that can focus solely on both building and maintaining your backlink profile, ensuring errors or issues are handled as quickly as possible, and updating your key words and links as soon as you need them changed is a gamechanger when it comes to the fast-moving and ever-evolving landscape of the web.
Best & Worst Practices
Black-Hat Tactics
There are a number of companies out there that will try to sell you an innovative technique that promises super speedy results at shockingly low prices. Don’t be fooled. It can be argued that any technique you implement comes with some risk, but the tactics used by black-hat SEO managers or agencies are far riskier than they are rewarding.
We’ve already mentioned the time and effort required to build a successful, healthy link profile. Black-hats try to get around this investment by implementing some underhanded tactics in an effort to rank your page higher without doing the work necessary to fairly keep it there long-term. Google expressly warns against these practices, and if you’re discovered using them—Google’s algorithm gets more adept at doing so every year—the penalties can be potentially insurmountable.
The big one is buying links instead of using natural, editorial efforts to place them in relevant sites across the web. Some SEOs may try to move the needle more quickly by purchasing links, irrespective of the relevance of the site the link lives on and how it relates to your own. They may also use cloaking techniques or sneaky redirects, trying to fool Google into thinking the link leads to one type of content when it will actually present something entirely different to the user. A lengthier list of the practices Google’s webmaster warns against can be found on their site.
Best & Worst Practices
The Consequences of Black-Hat Tactics
Presumably, the hope of the black hats is that you’ll see big results sooner, trusting that their methods are on the level, and letting them continue to do work for you. They may even use the consequences of their ill-advised efforts as an excuse to charge you further, using some unrelated reason as a scapegoat for why the tactic failed in the first place.
Black-hat efforts can have immediate consequences, resulting in very sudden drop in traffic and rankings, meaning a decrease in revenue for you. They may work in the short-term, but their results are also short-term since Google has gotten wise to a lot of these techniques and is consistently on the lookout for them. However, repairing the damage takes a long time, making the focus on instant gratification rather than lasting success not worth the trouble.
Using black-hat practices won’t just earn you penalties from Google (which can be costly in time and money on their own); it can also lose you a significant amount of money outright. Even if a black-hat SEO promises low costs in exchange for their services, you’ll end up investing even more to fix the issue and then implement white-hat practices that follow the rules and consistently work.
The best thing you can do is research. Take the time to look into an agency or individual before you contract them to implement a link building strategy. They key is transparency—any well-meaning SEO will have no problem outlining their process and how it works. You should have a good idea before any work is begun whether it’s on the level as long as you make the effort to do your due diligence.
Black Hat
- Promises suspiciously high results with an unreasonably quick turnaround
- Deceptive, misleading, or cagey about their link building process
- Implements link-buying, cloaking, or any other practice listed by Google’s webmaster as prohibited
- Incurs penalties from Google
- Causes a sudden drop in rankings and traffic when discovered
White Hat
- Honest and transparent about their process, the time it takes, and the financial investment involved
- Results in long-lasting, sustainable success
- Steers clear of penalizable tactics with short-term gains
- Causes a steady, measurable increase in rankings and traffic over time
- Monitors the work to allow for efficient adjustment as needed
Best & Worst Practices
White-Hat Tactics
White-hat SEOs, alternatively, know the value in putting forth a dedicated effort. They’ll be honest with you about the time it takes to build up a strong link profile, and they can present you with case studies illustrating the results of a successful campaign.
It’s much easier to lay out the best practices of link building because, when you do it right, the process is fairly straightforward. A strong link profile requires three primary components: naturally written, original content; relevant placement; and appropriate keywords. As Google’s algorithms continue to advance, the focus falls more on content that is both beneficial to the user and written the way people write and speak. So white-hat SEOs will ensure the content you’re generating for the purpose of building a link profile satisfies the expected user intent and is written in natural language easily digestible for your intended audience. They also confirm the key search terms you want to rank for are incorporated in an organic way so readers (and search engine crawlers) won’t be deterred by clunky, keyword-heavy content. Then, they’ll take that content and distribute it to websites and pages across the internet that your audience is already paying attention to. This bolsters the goal of satisfying user intent, as well as generating traffic that will be engaged before it even reaches your site. Over time, these placements—and others along the way—will build an established, authoritative link profile throughout the web to give your site credibility and qualified traffic. The longer you work to build your link profile and the more thorough you are, the better your site becomes as a resource for your intended audience, which in turn will result in higher rankings in SERPs.
Factoring Domain Strength
DOMAIN AUTHORITY (DA)
This score is used to determine how well a given site can be expected to rank in SERPs. Scores range from 1 to 100—the higher the number, the better its predicted to rank.
PAGE AUTHORITY (PA)
Page Authority is a score indicating the predicted rank ability of a specific page, rather than the domain as a whole. As with Domain Authority, PA scores also range from 1 to 100.
Anatomy of a Healthy Link Profile
- NATURAL VARIATION
Links should be spread naturally across websites with DA and PA scores ranging between low, medium, and high. - SUBJECT RELEVANCE
We place content on sites where audience are looking for information about that industry or topic, ensuring more qualified viewers. - APPROPRIATE KEYWORDS
We create content that contains naturally written placement of the key search terms you want to rank for, as well as descriptive, concise anchor text, that Google’s algorithms prioritize.
Our Process
How It Works
At VELOX Media, we’re only interested in white-hat practices. Our process is, essentially, what we’ve described above. The difference is we do it all for you. Our team of expert researchers, content writers, and editors craft original, authoritative content highlighting your brand or products that will then be strategically published on trustworthy sites across the web. By incorporating carefully selected keywords and linking to your target landing pages, our techniques will dramatically improve your search engine rankings, raise brand awareness, and drive traffic to your site.
We have a diverse third-party network that allows us to identify sites with zero penalty scores across the web to find the most strategic placements for your content. We factor in pages with low, medium, and high domain and page authority to ensure an authentic, organic, and high-authority link profile. Just as the content we create for you is designed to target your audience’s interests, many of the placements we select are also relevant to your industry and brand. We’ll include some general platforms, as well, to maintain variety in your profile and improve your pages’ authority overall. We won’t stop at placing the content, either. Each month our team will test the links we’ve placed for you to maintain that zero-penalty score.
Our Process
Why We’re Different
We use proprietary techniques coupled with trusted industry metrics such as DA and PA to ensure the process is working. If it’s not, we make adjustments to ensure you’re always getting the best strategy possible. And when it works, the results are clear. You’ll see dramatic improvements in your search results rankings over time, as well as more traffic to your site. Not only will your traffic increase in volume, but the quality of visitors will improve, driving more conversions and boosting your revenue.
The difference between us and everyone else is simple: What we do works, and we have the case studies to prove it. Our method is successful because we don’t focus on a single aspect of digital marketing. We believe in a holistic strategy, incorporating all the elements of perfecting an online presence. Our team is outfitted with experts in everything from creating high-quality, genuine content to implementing the perfect paid media campaign and more. We communicate openly and proactively across departments to ensure each piece of the machine is firing on all cylinders. We also communicate with you regularly, staying up to date on your goals and priorities, as well as keeping you in the loop on how things are working.
Whatever your overall goals are, our team is well-equipped to get you there. Contact us today to find out how we can help you achieve top 5 rankings in SERPs, boost your ROAS up to 400%, and drive higher revenue.
