In old times, getting the site to the top was extremely easy. You had to write a text, stuff it with keywords, and wait for robots to index it and show your pages to the customers. Site owners wrote the articles for bots, not for people. The more keywords you inserted, the higher the site was in the results. At that time, Google used primitive algorithms, so this strategy worked very well.
Nowadays, things are different. And, to be honest, we should be grateful for that because our experience as users has increased tremendously. But what should you do as a site owner? Master SEO! Today, we’ll concentrate on two of the most significant parts of search engine optimization – link-building and keyword research.
Link-Building: Definition and Application
Link-building is the process of building a backlink profile for a website. It is a quite complicated procedure, and you will need a good knowledge base to ace it. And the good place to start would be to understand the concept of keywords. Search algorithms pay attention to keywords to ensure that the users get accurate search results. It is one of the major factors to determine whether the content suits the user’s request.
Another factor is how organic and useful your content is. Remember how before, the more keywords you used, the better it was for your rankings. Now, it’s hardly like that. If your text is stuffed with keys, the algorithms will consider it useless for users and decrease your ranking. What should you do, then? Include the keywords in the headings and subheadings, meta tags, and image attributes, and mention them a couple of times throughout the article. It’s more than enough for bots to understand the topic.
Why is it important for link-building? Whether you’re doing guest posting or just want others to link to your content, you have to take great care of how well-optimized your copy is. This is the only way to rank, attract more eyes, and get more backlinks. But how do you find quality pages that could link to you? This is the question that both beginners and experts ask themselves all the time. And your answer is professional backlink-building software. It was tested by tens of thousands of people and continuously provided perfect results.
How to Use Keywords
Today, Google algorithms have become much smarter – they now distinguish helpful articles from randomly written texts and punish unscrupulous optimizers who try to manipulate search results. Today, search engines evaluate how well a page responds to a query, not by the presence of key phrases in the text but by the fuller picture. It includes all the other articles published on a website, its history, backlink profile, age, etc.
Particular attention is paid to the naturalness of your content. Google sticks to the people-first policy (E-E-A-T) to ensure the best possible content is delivered to the first page of search results. That’s why the most appropriate approach is to write texts for users, not for robots.
Using Keywords in Link Building
Now that we’ve learned more about keyword optimization let’s see how all those rules and tactics apply to link-building. Of course, if you want to get serious about building your backlink profile, you will need to learn many more strategies. A great next step for you would be to understand proper tracking approaches (aka SEO OKRs). That’s a whole different topic, though, but you can learn more about this technique on Jarvee.
As for the keyword application in link-building, pay special attention to the following factors.
Keyword Ranking
When getting backlinks, you have two main approaches:
- Find a page that is already published and ask to get your link there. In this case, you should check whether this website ranks for any keyword related to your niche (product/service).
- Alternatively, you can write a guest post and ask to publish it on the other website. For this scenario, you have to optimize your copy to make it rank in the future. But well, writing proper guest post is an art. So, if you want to take the full advantage of this tactic, do more research and practicing.
So, in both cases, you have to be very particular about your keywords. Otherwise, you won’t achieve the results you wish for.
Anchors
The choice of anchor text (target linkable keywords suitable for your SEO strategy) is one of the most critical aspects of external optimization of a website. The first step when choosing an anchor is to figure out the ideal target anchor distribution in your niche. You should use both niche-specific words and general anchors such as “click here,” “read more,” etc.
Of course, you should use the main keyword you want to rank for as your anchor. But don’t overdo it. Moreover, you need different anchors for different pages you want to promote. How should you do it? Find what keywords you pages rank for and use them for your external optimization. There are various SEO tools for keyword research that can help you do that.
URLs
Don’t forget that keywords could be included in the URL itself. This life hack allows you to capture the attention of your target audience more effectively and attract them to your website. What’s the point here? We take the keyword that the page is being promoted for and add it to the URL of that page.
This simple action will increase the effectiveness of link-building and have a positive impact on the positioning of your website. However, remember that short URL addresses are more efficient. Both users and search algorithms perceive short, human-oriented URLs more favorably.
So, those are the most important things you have to know about keywords in terms of link building. Remember, though, that after getting your backlinks out there, you have to track them by using special link audit tools to evaluate their effectiveness.
Conclusion
If you want to master link-building, understanding the concept of keyword research is absolutely critical. Today, you’ve made the first step toward that but never stop learning. Because educating yourself and putting that knowledge into practice is one sure way to achieve the best results.
