Contextual link building is the process of creating links from within another website’s content that then links to your own website. As an example if we were looking to rank a website for a phrase such as “link building” a very effective technique for quickly reaching Google’s front page would be to convince as many other websites as possible to find any mention of that phrase on their site and then to link these to our site.
The Benefits Of Contextual Link Building
There are a number of factors that affect the “value” of a link to us in terms of SEO. That is to say that not all links are created equal and some links have far more ability to push up the search engine rankings for our chosen keyword phrases.
Over time SEO experts have fond repeatedly that links within the content of a website are some of the most valuable available when it comes to giving your site a boost in rankings. There are a number of possible reasons for this.
Firstly contextual links, when done right, help to create value for website visitors by providing additional high quality resources which may well prove of interest to visitors reading a specific article.
Secondly by default the pages of a site that typically have the highest “value” to visitors – and hence search engines – are those with plenty of high quality content. Generally-speaking pages such as sitemaps, links pages, contact pages and so on offer little real value. People visit to read the content and so these pages receive preferential treatment by the search engines. Thus getting a link from content pages is particularly useful.
Lastly it is far more difficult to “game the system” and to be caught out by the search engines as someone who is trying to artificially generate links to their website with the aim of inflating their search engine rankings and hence traffic. Websites naturally link to other related resources and interesting articles and so contextual link building, when done right, can look entirely normal and can be virtually impossible for the search engines to track.
When you combine the power of contextual links with the fact that generating them is almost “risk free” you can see why contextual link building can be so powerful from an SEO perspective.
Contextual Link Building In Practise
Whilst I’m sure you can see the value in contextual links the actual process of contextual link building is rather more problematic. After all, where does one even start? We’re looking for open-minded individuals with related content that uses the specific keyword phrases that we hope to rank for in the search engines.
We need to convince them to either turn that phrase into a link pointing to our site or to create brand new content for the sole purpose of linking to us. And we need that link to remain up and active for as long as possible – ideally for ever more.
Clearly this is not a simple process whichever way you cut it.
Fortunately there are a few strategies that we can use to make contextual link building far simpler and more efficient without giving up any of the typical benefits of this link building strategy.
Internal Contextual Links
The first option for easy contextual link building is to actually use the technique on your own website. That is to say you can set up your website in such a way that when important keyword phrases are mentioned they automatically link to the page you are trying to rank for that phrase.
Whilst internal contextual links aren’t as powerful as those from external sites they can still be beneficial in many cases and having recently implemented this strategy on one of my own test sites I saw a jump of over 50 positions in Google in a matter of days.
As always though you don’t want to go filtering through all your content looking for specific keyword phrases and then manually turning these keywords into links so the best shortcut to implementing this SEO link building strategy is with the use of software.
For example most of the sites that I build these days rely on WordPress and there are a number of free plugins that will help you achieve just this though the one I have had the greatest success with myself is Related Posts.
Contextual Link Exchanges
The next contextual link building strategy involves actually swapping contextual links with other related, high quality websites. Essentially you select a range of pages you would like to build links to combined with the keywords you’d like your partners to link to these pages while your partners do the exact same thing.
Then the software involved reads through the content of both sites, finds any instances of the selected keyword phrases and then automatically turns these into hyperlinks pointing to the relevant page.
The potential downsides of this technique are that very few websites really partake in such activities so finding partners can be difficult and furthermore because you are exchanging links rather than building one-way links this form of contextual link building is often less effective for increasing your search engine ranking than some other techniques.
Buying Contextual Links
One way that website owners can leverage their site and earn money from it is by actually selling contextual links. That is to say that a number of advertising platforms exist where you can find literally thousands of websites willing to provide contextual links to your site in exchange for a small monthly fee. And while there are regular costs involved in the upkeep of this type of contextual link, the costs can be reasonably low, the effort is minimal and the results can be truly jaw dropping when you do it right.
Hiring A Contextual Link Building Service Provider
The last real option for building contextual links is to invest in a professional SEO contextual link building service. These professional link builders will use a variety of techniques to create permanent one-way, contextual links to your website.
Whilst these contextual link building services are the most expensive solution initially they do offer a number of significant benefits that, in my opinion, still makes them truly worth considering despite the initial investment.
Firstly you’re not “hiring” links as you would with buying contextual links through a link-selling program. Once the links that a contextual link building service have been created then they are yours forever more – and without a monthly cost – so there are really no ongoing fees involved with this method.
Secondly these professionals understand that repeat business is everything and so the type of links they build are really of the highest quality. From convincing other websites to place links to you, to going out and actually creating brand new articles from scratch – each containing a contextual link back to your site – for other “target websites” to publish, the providers of these services know what they’re doing and build links that get big results.