In SEO process, link building should be the most difficult part. People in the industry know it best that strong links to your own websites can make these websites get higher rankings in search results. But a question comes: how to effectively build strong links pointing to your sites to get positive influence on your rankings? For eCommerce website, higher rankings have great effect on their online business to increase sales and conversion rates.
As we said before, link building is a challenging task, so to build and maintain good links is not easy. Running a link building campaign needs you to think outside the box and be creative. You are not to obtain links but to get those links making a difference in your website rankings. For eCommerce websites owners, your need those good links making your eCommerce websites more powerful than your rivals.
In this guide, we are to talk about things about link building and share 10+ effective techniques for you to create good links for your eCommerce websites. Also, we will offer tips to remove those bad backlinks affecting on your rankings from your link profile. Follow us and learn to boost your eCommerce rankings via link building.
Why is Link Vital Especially for eCommerce Websites?
After studying research hundreds of thousands of times, the results always show that links and rankings have tight relationship. Over 225 ranking signals may be taken into account by Google algorithm before it decide which sites to display in the top results; however, the most influential is the number of the incoming links coming from different domains. Actually, the current major search engines like Bing are all using the same kind of search algorithms.
For eCommerce websites, you have to get the links from different domains as many as you can, so as to rank higher and obtain target website traffic. Then, more visitors and target potential customers can come to your eCommerce websites. So, when you making on-page SEO practices, you still need to pay much attention to link building.
Bad Backlinks vs. Good Backlinks
Before start link building practices, you should distinguish the differences between bad backlinks and Google backlinks.
Bad Backlink
Bad backlinks will bring your websites troubles. If Google algorithms identify your websites are driving traffic and increase rankings by artificially creating links, Google will penalize your websites. It may be applied to the whole site or just a specific page losing Google trust and high rankings. For eCommerce websites, these penalties are deadly. So, if your links come from the sources in following list, they are considered as toxic links to your website and you should avoid.
- Article directories – An article directory including many outgoing links is all for publishing articles, instead of being checked or moderated for quality.
- Website directories – They are used to list those websites without any additional quality content like nice reviews; for the purpose only, website directories include outgoing links pointing to those listed websites.
- Paid links (directly and indirectly) – If you pay other webmasters to add your link into their posts, or you offer free services or products to other webmaster and they add a review with links on their sites, then you and the other websites making business with you both will be published by Google then it finds out.
- Link Exchanges – That you and other websites make link exchanges is against Google Guidelines as well.
Good Backlink
After knowing bad backlinks, you’d understand good backlinks better. They are the links your site earned naturally. For example, you published amazing content on your site and other webmasters think it is great to share with their own audience, and then naturally add a link that points to your site. So, the natural links are good backlinks and can get the best trust from Google.
Nofollow Links
Why do we want to talk about normal links and nofollow links? When you are making link building for your website, you should know that not all links can pass pagerank value. Those links without pagerank value are the nofollow links. The current major search engines all allow webmasters to add external links pointing to their websites but these links do not necessarily pass pagerank value to other sites.
To make it, these external links are added the “nofollow” attribute to their html code, instructing search engine spiders not to take these links into account when crawling the site.
Here we introducing the nofollow links is to help you figure out the difference between normal links and nofollow links. You should know the links coming from any social media platforms cannot help you increase rankings.
So, if you are serious to create valuable links for your eCommerce websites, you do not need to build many links with nofollow attribute, but the links from those highly trusted websites without nofollow tag. Let’s learn how to create good backlinks for your eCommerce website together!
Top 9 Techniques to Build Good Backlinks to Your eCommerce Website
Just follow us to check out the following solid methods to build precious links that make a difference to your traffic and search rankings.
1. Run an active blog
To create a blog and maintain an optimized blog with properly setup is an effective way to driving precious links from other trusted websites for your eCommerce website. How to make the blog serve your eCommerce websites, you need understand several things first:
Firstly, you need to make the blog be part of your eCommerce website’s domain. It can be a sub domain as blog.yourwebsite.com or become directory yourwebiste.com/blog. If you run a blog on another domain, the blog cannot help your eCommerce website.
Then, to make use of blogging to drive links to your eCommerce website as many as possible, the blog should offer users the valuable and interesting content. Content optimization is important.
Beside, remember to build links pointing to your blog posts, which is very useful to indirectly improve your domain as well as product pages’ rankings. The links to your blog pages will pass the link juice to your product or service pages.
Actually, having a blog to help your eCommerce website is to make optimization on your blog, so as to attract links flowing in.
2. Get a Link from Manufacturers’ Website
As eCommerce website, if you can get a link from manufacturers’ websites, it will be good. There are several common ways to make it:
- The most direct way is to visit manufactures’ websites, and find out whether they have special section to put the links pointing to their retailers.
- Or, if you cannot find such a place, you can just contact them via email to ask if they can display your site or products pages in a featured part.
- If manufacturers have blogs, then you can ask whether they can publish a post about your eCommerce website.
- Make full use of their showcase section if they have, and ask to submit your eCommerce website entry.
Don’t feel shy or sorry to bother them, and actively keep in touch with them to check for your link on these manufacturers’ website.
3. Guest Post Part One – Find Websites to Accept Guest Posts
For webmasters, the most common and effective methods to obtain links from other websites is guest post. How does it work? Let’s go through the following process:
- Find the websites not only related to your niche but also have keen interest in guest post writers;
- Go through their guest post publishing policy or guidelines carefully;
- Create an interesting and valuable post that contains links pointing to your own websites;
- The website publishes your guest post and your site gets a link from it.
When checking out the steps above, you may think it is as simple as one, two, three go; but it’s not true. At the very beginning, you will face the challenge of find the right websites, which should:
- Be in the your niche;
- Accept your guest posts;
- Be of high-quality considered by Google;
- Allow dofollow links included in the posts.
How to Find Them?
- You can take advantage of Google, and search for various related terms.
You can use these terms such as “guest post”, “write for us”, “guest blogger”, “blog for us”, “writers needed”, “contributor”, and “submission guidelines”, followed by your niche.
Then, you can get pages of results. Click into and check for their main menu or footer for the options such as “Contribute”, “Write for Us”, and “Submit an Article”.
- You can learn from your rivals.
When you find your competitors are doing better than you in rankings, then they must have better strategies for link building. If that is true, it is necessary to learn from them and optimize your owns. To analyze your rivals’ link profile, you many need tools.
Actually, just learning from them is not a bad thing, because you are not doing bad things on them. Learn from experienced webmaster is a must to be an excellent eCommerce webmaster, because it is a good way to save your time and start your link building work easier.
To fulfill this task, we think SEMRUSH is the most effective tool helping you understand your link profile compared with competitors’ and tell the places to get links.
More importantly, SEMRUSH released a new feature named Backlink Gap Analysis that can compare up to 5 websites’ backlinks and figure out the untapped backlink chances. Although SEMRUSH is not free of charge, but many of its features are very useful. If you hesitate, it comes with a 14 days of free trial that you can take advantage of.
When not to guest post to the website even though it accepts your post?
After you get a list of websites for guest posting, you cannot just write a guest post to them. You still have several checks to do to make sure these websites listed are good candidates for guest posting. The qualified websites must be high quality, which means these websites:
- Have high rankings in Google and are not under its penalty;
- Obtain a good amount of monthly traffic;
- Have nice original content and not only offer guest posts.
Therefore, once you make the list of candidates, you should visit these websites and check out the post type they published and the last time to update posts. If you find that they only publish guest post, then they can be kick out of the list, because these websites will be found out they only publish guest posts and Google will penalize them soon or later.
After that, you can use SEMRUSH to check these websites with their domains. The plugin can offer you the valuable data including the traffic type the site receives, where the traffic comes, whether the site is under Google penalty or not, as well as their keywords. With the detailed data referring, you can avoid to waste your time on the websites without good rankings or traffic.
How to make your posts be published?
After you completed these steps above, you can get a very useful list. One thing you have to do is to check out their guest posting guidelines carefully. It is to save your time and adjust your strategy for writing guest posts. Now, you need to get in touch with them. Email is one of the best ways. You can introduce your company, yourself and products in the email.
4. Guest Post Part Two – Ask for Links
In the guest post part one, we just talked about how to get your posts published in the websites actively looking for guest posts. As for the websites publishing your post, we sincerely suggest you start from the websites which have published your competitors’ posts.
To make it, you should follow a personalized approach.
When you send the first email to ask whether they accept your guest posts, remember not to use a ready-made email template. It just wastes your time only.
As we recommend, you should dig out more details about the website and find out the editors’ contacts to send them emails to explain what benefits your guest posts will bring to the website. Besides, in your first email, you will not only ask for publishing your guest posts, but also give them the same chance, too. There is an example:
In order to avoid link exchanges, you just need to make sure your guest post or theirs have value here. Then, nothing should be worried.
5. Link to Other Blogs or Websites from Your Blog
When you are working on your blog content, you also should link to other blogs or websites which of course are not your main rivals but in the same niche.
Why should you do that?
If your blog is linking to other blogs or websites, then there is possibility that these webmasters notice your links from their own SERush accounts, WordPress or Google, and if they link your content or think your blog offers useful content, they may return the links.
Also, this is not a link exchange, because it is natural and Google also recommend this methods to expand link building effectively.
6. Create Affiliate Links
According to Google’s guideline, all affiliate links or those links on advertisements should be onfollow. It means that when doing affiliate program on your blog, you should be careful and consider how to set it up with zero risk.
How to use affiliate links for your link building
Before you start, we should make you know clearly that using any dedicated platforms for affiliate links is not useful, because these platforms for affiliate will make those links all onfollow, so your website will not obtain any value for your link building from the part.
To use affiliate links for link building should use personal affiliate system, such as affiliatewp. Then, these links are followed to contribute to your link building.
How to maintain it?
Give all the ads you create your affiliates to promote your products, and add onfollow tags on these affiliate links. Usually, these ads are placed in your sidebar and site wide.
However, the text links used for your affiliates in your blog posts can left without nofollow tag.
Maybe you don’t know that for your affiliates, you cannot control how the affiliate links are added in other sites. So, the best way to get rid of risks of penalization for your affiliate system should be to offer the instructions given above to your users.
7. Get Published on Media Websites
If you can get your guest posts published on any big media website, such as Inc, Entrepreneur, HuffPost, Forbes, and so on, you will get more than a link back.
For eCommerce websites, this is a good method to promote your business, because it cannot increase your brand awareness but also helps building trust among your audience. There are to ways to make it happen:
Get in touch with Journalists
This is a natural way. To make journalists link to your blog or website from their own posts needs to make them know your existence, business brand, and your eCommerce websites. So, the first thing is to give them your information.
As for contact, email the most normal and useful one to do this. Besides, you can contact them via social media like Facebook or Twitter
Pitch Editors
Apart from the first way, you can also pitch the editors with your guest post program. The first methods is to contact individual journalists, but the second one target the editors in your niche.
How does it work?
You should understand that famous editors or trusted editors will receive hundreds of emails each day to ask for publishing guest posts. Then, how to make your email with your guest post ideas standing out from the crowd?
Your email should grab editors’ attention without telling them your life story, and it need to be short, clean and come straight to the point. The editors are interested in who you are, what you are doing, what are your ideas, as well as the examples you made before.
Note: If you go to some big websites, you need be sure you have previous examples published from well-known websites already.
Beside, your pitch email also need to be personalized for each editor, otherwise your work is in vain. Of course, be persistent is another way that may work.
8. Use HARO
Haro is a service bringing bloggers and journalists together. If you do not want to go paths we listed above, you still have a choice to use Haro and answer journalists’ questions. How does it work?
First, journalists will post their questions related to different areas and topics, and they want to accept industry experts’ answers to their questions. In most cases, journalists will specify certain kind of answers they want and from specific group of people.
When you are sign up for Haro which offers both free and premium packages, you should choose the categories you desire for notifications. After registering, you will receive an email with journalists’ questions twice a day, and you need to reply back via Haro.
If your answers get attention from those journalists, your pitch will be published with a reference to your website and name. So, this is a good way to build your brand image and effectively attract more visitor to your site.
However, as we said, if you are lucky enough to get the attention with your extraordinary answers, this will be come true. It means this will be time consuming. Don’t worry. We have methods to increase your opportunities:
- Reply the questions you accept as fast as possible. It will increase the chance to make the journalist who posted the questions notice your reply.
- Your answers need to be specific and come straight to the point, but the precondition is to read their questions carefully. Also, reply in the format they ask.
- Don’t forget to leave your contact information, in case that they want to ask you further questions.
9. Purchase an Already Established Blog
This may be not suitable for small businesses because of costs, but it works. In brief, you need to find a content-rich blog with posts about to your niche and it has already set up good link profile higher rankings and abundant traffic, then you purchase it as your blog for your eCommerce website if possible.
You have several methods to deal with this already established blog: continue to maintain it and redirect it traffic to your eCommerce website via links; merge the good blog with your own blog by transferring its content to your blog.
If you use this method, you have to make the migration correctly with canonical URLs, 301 Redirects and others, so that this purchased blog’s links will be redirect or transferred to your pages or domains without any loss in page rank. If you have no idea where to find the blogs to purchase, we recommend Flippa, which is large market for blog deals.
How to Remove Bad Backlinks from Google
After checking our top 9 methods of link building for your eCommerce website, you may understand that link building is tricky. It is possible to go wrong ways to decrease your rankings. If you get wrong when doing link building for your site, then Google will penalize your site to lower down your site’s Google search result rankings.
To avoid the situation and protection your site and its rankings, you need to remove those bad backlinks which point to your eCommerce website. For this, you should instruct Google not to take into account these links when it is calculating pagerank. The following is the process:
- Firstly, manually or by using a tool such as SEMRUSH review your links and figure out the links that are possibly hurting your rankings. Note you have to trust the tool you are using or learn how to distinguish the bad backlinks from all links pointing to your site, because Google will not tell you.
- By using tools or manually you get a list of those bad backlinks, you utilize Google disavow tool to submit these links on list to Google.
- Finally, Google will deal with your file and then remove the links on your list from your backlink profile.
Conclusion
Link building is not easy as people think, which is not only time consuming but also requires good SEO knowledge. For eCommerce websites, link building is even harder when compared to gaining links for blogs. People always aren’t willing to link to product pages, meaning you have to be creative and take other effective methods to obtain those valuable links.
Also, remember not to build too many links in a certain period. And consistency and patience are both important.