Google ranks link building among the top three off-page SEO tactics. That’s why it’s so essential for new marketers. A backlink points back to one of your website’s pages. Google uses it to rank your site based on the amount of traffic it sends to your site. A site’s ranking increases as it receives more high-quality backlinks.
Among the SEO topics to understand for beginners is link building. However, one must become familiar with these terms for a deeper understanding. You’ve probably heard link building terms casually thrown around and wondered what they meant. That’s why you should read this post. Listed below are the most common link building words you should know.
Anchor Text
An anchor text is a phrase that represents a link. You may see words such as ‘click here,’ ‘learn more,’ ‘register now,’ or ‘get discount code.’ Besides, carefully choose your anchor text and avoid clicking on anything unrelated.
Authority Backlinks
Authority backlinks are links within content that are contextually relevant and have a lot of organic traffic. Studies have proven that backlinks from reputable domains constitute a significant ranking factor for Google. An organic backlink is more potent if it comes from a domain with more organic traffic.
Content
Content encompasses everything you search for and consume on the web. It may include a blog post about conspiracy theories, a photo of a dog, an amateur kickboxer video, an infographic about a weight-loss diet, a clickbait listicle, and an audio file of a webinar. It’s important to distinguish good content from other content.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority measures a website’s trustworthiness and authority according to SEO software company Moz. This number drives the lives of many link builders and SEOs. Despite its importance, it would also be best to follow other codes of conduct.
Google Search Console
It’s a free tool from Google, formerly called Webmaster Tools. You can also use Search Console to gather information about your website and integrate it with Google Analytics — which provides statistical data and rudimentary analytics to optimize and market your website. You can run various reports to learn more about your site’s SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) performance.
Keyword
A keyword refers to the search term (s) you want your website to rank for. This keyword is what your potential customers are typing into a search engine. ‘Dog groomer,’ ‘mind hypnotist, ‘24 hour chemist,’ and ‘car mechanic’ are all examples. To determine your keywords, you’ll need to perform keyword research.
Link Juice
“Link Juice” is the power hyperlinks pass from one website to another. Likely, a link from a high authority site such as The BBC will give more link juice than a new, regular blog such as examplesite.blogspot.com.
Linkable Asset
Linkable assets are excellent pieces of content on your website. These are the links you might see on another web admin’s site. Although you may wish they could be linkable, product pages and category pages aren’t.
Outreach
Outreach involves manually sending an email asking for a link from a target website. It’s essential to plan your outreach, be polite, and avoid being pushy.
Prospecting
There is no relation between prospecting in the link building world and gold prospecting in the 40s. It involves looking for good target sites and building links to them. In other words, “link prospecting” means looking for high-quality websites on Google for link building.
Search Intent and Volume
A search engine user’s search intent is what they intend to accomplish when they enter a search term. A person searching for the ‘best economical cars in Detroit’ wants to find that car – finding a website listing the most expensive vehicles goes against their search intent. Search volume measures how often people search for a keyword term.
Target Website
Whenever you seek a link from a website, you refer to it as a target website. As a result of your prospecting, you are now preparing to reach out to the target site. You might even build a link if all goes well.
Conclusion
Do you feel knowledgeable enough now that you understand all of these terms related to link building? Despite this being the tip of the iceberg, hopefully, this will help explain how generally simple all this jargon is. There is no limit to who can learn and apply.
The next time you attend an SEO conference, don’t feel overwhelmed by the jargon or left out – speak your mind! Besides, you may know more about link building than someone who only speaks in link building jargon.
