Link building is probably the most important process in Search Engine Optimization and certainly the toughest and most tedious one to execute. Making your link prospecting a consistently implemented part of your SEO campaign is essential, as this allows your site to scale its marketing campaign, which can result to a sustainable growth in traffic.Acquiring high quality links from highly trusted domains is known to influence ranking web page
s; it’s a common factor that makes many sites and their pages show prominently on SERPs. The good news is that the new version of Traffic Travis has made it much easier for you to find link opportunities, through various features and site/page metrics that can help you identify high quality external web pages that you can acquire links from.
1. Keyword Research
One of the foundations of finding link opportunities for your off-page optimization campaign is searching sites/pages that target the keywords you are aiming to rank for. Similarly, finding related search terms can return highly relevant pages that you can acquire links from.
Traffic Travis’ Keyword Research feature allows you to extract data such as a list of keyword ideas/suggestions, global search count, competition, number of pages using the keyword(s) in title and the difficulty of ranking for the keyword.
However, at this stage, we will be using this feature to scale the capacity of your outreach list building by identifying other link opportunities through the other related keywords that the tool will suggest. The more you uncover link opportunities for your site, the more you can improve your site’s prominence in search results. Here are the steps on how you can utilize this feature for link search:
Make a list of all the suggested keywords that will fit your campaign perfectly, or export the results in an Excel sheet format and then highlight the keywords that you’ll be using to find link prospects.
Search for the top ranking pages for each keyword that you have listed. Identify and separate relevant pages from strong domains as priority when you start with your campaign’s link acquisition.
You can use Traffic Travis’ Competition and Backlink’s Overview feature to find these pages and to analyze each page’s site metrics (Domain Authority, PageRank, number of linking domains/IP addresses and percentage of followed incoming links).
2. Link Finder
The new Traffic Travis also has a Link Finder feature that makes finding backlinks almost effortless. On the SEO tab, you can find the Link Finder panel; here, you can easily get a list of highly relevant pages, where you can build your links, by entering your targeted search term. The information is designed to help users easily identify valuable link opportunities; the retrieved data is evaluated using some of the following page metrics:
Page type (if it’s a static page or a blog)
Link attribute (if the page attribute links as nofollow or followed)
PageRank of the Page
Page Authority
Approximate link juice that the page will be able to pass through
You can sort the list based on link attributes, PageRank, URL filters and Page type for specific targeting. The data is also downloadable in CSV format, which makes link valuation and segmentation more accessible for you.
3. Reverse Engineering your Competitors’ Links
Examining your top competitors’ linking activity is a vital part of link building, since this method enables you to know why your competitors’ are ranking well and, more importantly, gives you an idea of how you can outrank them, by showing you the domains/pages that have linked to them.
In Traffic Travis’ Competition feature (which is located on the SEO tab), you can see the top competing pages for a certain keyword, including page metrics like PageRank, Backlink count as well as the number of unique domains and IP addresses linking to the page.
When you double-click on the number of backlinks directing to a competitor’s page, the tool will direct you to the Backlinks panel, where you can see the actual pages linking back to your competitor(s). You can choose to sort the backlinks’ data through URL filters, PageRank of the linking pages and the anchor text used to link to your competitor’s page.
This panel also allows you to assess the external linking pages to your competitor, as page metrics are indicated on the right side part of each linking page (this includes Page Authority, PageRank, Alexa Rank, and the anchor text used for the link).
To further refine your link competition analysis, you can check the backlinks’ Site Breakdown section, to check statistics such as the number of high PageRank, TLDs, IP addresses and anchor text distribution of pages from external websites linking to that.
Identifying the strong external pages that support your competitors (or basically the links that allows your competitors to rank highly on SERPs) will give you a set of high-value link opportunities that you can use for your own link building campaign. List all the high quality pages that you have found through this process and plan how you can acquire the same type of link from those domains (for example, by contacting the webmasters).
4. My Site
Staging a good internal linking structure for your site is a vital part of link development, as this process allow search engine spiders to easily access and index pages – especially deeper pages – in your site. Using highly descriptive anchor texts for your internal links can also help improve your important pages’ search rankings, particularly if you have built the internal links thematically and contextually from strong pages of the site in order to pass more link juice to pages that you want prioritized.
Traffic Travis’ My Site feature monitors strong as well as weak pages in your site. The My Site feature provides data about individual pages/posts within the site, including each page’s PageRank, number of backlinks, Page Warnings and SEO warnings.
Determine the strong pages in your site, especially those that have received a lot of link juice from other domains, as you can base your internal linking structure by setting these strong pages to contextually link (using your target keywords) to pages that you are optimizing to rank higher on search results. Allow more link juice to flow internally from your popular pages to your target landing pages directly to improve link equity and to reduce the necessity of building irrelevant and manipulative incoming links to your preferred landing pages.
