Search Engine Optimization: Authority Building with Links

It’s like high school.

The bad news is popularity still matters. The good news is that building your site’s authority, one lynchpin of successful search engine optimization, is a lot easier to manage.

Search engines factor in a lot of elements to rank your site’s content, and one of them is incoming links. Think of them as votes: every link from another site to yours is a “vote” for your site’s importance, relevance, and overall authority. Not all votes, however, are created equal. That’s where Portent comes in.

Build Authority—Not Links

What most folks think of as “link building” is no longer advantageous or viable. Google’s Penguin update has proven that those link building packages that seemed too good to be true were indeed just that.

Irrelevant directories, link wheels and link networks, widgets, link exchanges, and email spamming, to name a few unsavory practices, are like the former quarterback at the 40 year reunion: bald, divorced, and deeply sad. The jig is up—just ask any website owner that’s trying to regain his or her lost rankings and traffic caused by a few “fast and easy” link building strategies.

Portent believes that good authority building is really just good internet marketing. If you design a site that’s easy to use and offers unique, informative content, people will naturally link to you. It’s not always easy, and it’s not always fast, but it works.

Here are some of the ways Portent will build your site’s authority with regards to links:

  • Link Bait
    • We research what’s popular and important in your industry to help craft content that will attract the most attention and links.
  • Broken Link Detection and Repair
    • The best links to target are the ones you already have. Portent’s proprietary toolset allows us to find pages on your site that have links pointing to them but aren’t available (404 errors) in order to repair them and reclaim their lost authority.
  • Capitalizing on Link Rot
    • As the web changes, pages get moved, deleted, or otherwise become unavailable; however, the links remain—even though they point to “dead” content. This is “link rot” and it results in the familiar 404 “File Not Found” error. For most, this is an inconvenience, but for Portent it’s an opportunity. By finding abandoned pages on other sites, we have insight into content that is most likely to perform well and attract those dead links.
  • Link Profile Review
    • Another proprietary tool helps us monitor your site’s link profile to ensure it only has beneficial links from quality, legitimate sites.

Plain and simple, authority building depends on excellent content. Portent can make sure your site targets the right opportunities in order the gain links the right way.

On a budget? Portent now offers one-time search engine optimization review packages. If you’re looking for lower cost, one-time SEO packages, click here to learn more.