To make the most out of your link building efforts, you must acquire links that will make the most impact in your search rankings.
Various factors affect the authoritativeness of a backlink, and one of them has to do with context.
The best types of links are integral to the content or page. If you removed the link from the content, it’s possible for the entire page to no longer make sense to users and search spiders.
This is the kind of link you want to build for your link profile, and this is precisely what contextual links are.
This post will give you a crash course on contextual linking, why you should focus on building more contextual backlinks, and the different link building techniques that help you acquire this link.
What is a Contextual Backlink?
As mentioned, contextual backlinks are relevant links inserted in the page’s content. They are mostly found as part of the sentence in a blog post.
In the example above, you can remove the contextual link from the passage and the content would still maintain its integrity. But having the link in the article makes the piece more valuable to readers, assuming that you’re linking to a page that provides additional information to readers about the article topic.
On the other hand, non-contextual links are links within a page that has little to do with the page’s topic. Since it doesn’t add value to readers and search engines, Google may consider these as spammy links, which could put a damper on your site’s authority.
Why is Contextual Link Building Important?
When building links for your site, strive to acquire as many contextual links as possible. These high-quality links help you create a link profile that will help you rank on top of organic search results faster.
The reason is that getting a contextual link on any page is very difficult.
To give you an idea, you must first produce high-quality content that people would want to link to. That means your written content provides reliable information about a sought-after topic in your niche that can’t be found anywhere else.
The second, and the most challenging part, is getting site owners to link to your web page in their article. Unless you’ve cultivated relationships with website owners, they’re unlikely to link to it since there’s no trust between you and them yet. Therefore, you’re banking on the content quality to convince them to link to it in their post.
Now, you can reach out to other owners related to your industry, asking them to link to your content as a resource page. Again, since no relationship exists between you and them, there’s a slim chance they’ll link to you or even read your email.
As a workaround to this issue, you can find as many prospects to reach out to with your content. Eventually, someone will find your content valuable enough to link back to it.
These are the lengths you have to go to acquire a contextual backlink, and Google is aware of the process. Because once you build a steady stream of contextual links, you can expect to increase your keyword rankings and generate more organic traffic in the process.
This process is what we at Linkplicity do for our clients. Our backlink packages for your site ensure that you get links found in the page’s content body for maximum results.
Types of Link Building Tactics Where You Can Get Contextual Links
To secure contextual backlinks for your website, you must develop a sustainable and scalable outreach strategy. With a straightforward process in place, you can extract as many prospects to reach out to.
And to help you build that process, you must employ the most appropriate link building tactics. By identifying how you can present your site as a suitable link destination to site owner’s readers, you increase the chances of them contextually linking to your post on their sites.
Below are two techniques you can use for acquiring contextual links to your website.
- Guest blogging – Identify sites where you want to submit a guest post. Then include a link to your site within the content, provided that it’s not against the site’s editorial guidelines.
- Broken link building – Find broken links in sites where you want to secure a contextual backlink from. Find the broken page on Wayback Machine, recover it, and publish a much better version of the page on your site. Then inform site owners that they have a broken link on their site and they can replace it by linking to the recreated page on your site.
These tactics are effective because they provide value to the site owner first. This helps foster trust and encourages them to reciprocate your goodwill by linking back to your site.
Contextual Linking Best Practices
To help you maximize the contextual links you will build, make sure to cover the other factors that determine the backlink’s strength.
Below are other variables you must concern yourself with when building links and optimizing for each.
Find Authoritative Sites
You can determine the authority of a website based on the quality of its link profile. The more links from authoritative sites it has, the higher its authority.
To find the authority of your link partners, use a tool like Ahrefs that shows you metrics like Domain Rating (DR) that computes for the site’s backlink profile strength.
You can also verify if the site is receiving organic traffic from here. A site may have a high DR score and non-existent traffic, which signifies that the site is part of a private blog network (PBN).
So, find sites with a high DR score and lots of organic visitors.
Ensure the Site Offers Dofollow Links
Regarding dofollow links, use the NoFollow Chrome extension and check one of the pages of your prospects. If it shows a link inside a dotted red box, that means the link is nofollow.
This means the site doesn’t pass link juice to your website. As a result, it won’t increase its rankings.
If all of the site’s outbound links are nofollow, there’s a good chance that all of the other outbound links have nofollow tags as well. In this case, you can deprioritize this site in your link building campaign.
Use Outreach Automation Tools
Setting up your outreach system using automation tools is vital if you want to scale the results of your campaigns and maximize the contextual links you’ll get from prospects.
The goal is to put the entire process on autopilot. With a few clicks of a button, you can set your campaign in motion while focusing on other vital things in your business.
First, you must use an email verifier tool like Hunter to scrape the domains for possible contacts you should reach for your outreach campaign.
Next, you need a tool like Mailshake that will automatically send out emails on your behalf. It also uses the email address and name you scraped using Hunter to send the emails to the right person. This way, you don’t have to send the initial email and their follow-ups manually.
Conclusion
Contextual link building is tough to pull off due to the challenges of getting site owners whom you don’t know to link to your site. However, once you secure them, you can enjoy higher rankings and more significant traffic, which is all worth the effort.
If you need help developing and launching your link building campaign, we at Linkplicity can help build you contextual links through our contextual backlink packages. In particular, we implement guest posting as our core link building strategy so you can get the natural links of the highest quality.
