1. What is a Contextual Link:
Contextual links are the clickable links, generally a keyword in the body of your blog or content.
These links can be linked to another website voluntarily or are linked to the pages of your own website, or can be a link in a guest post.
Linking to another website is known to be natural contextual links, wherein another site uses your post for reference.
Meanwhile linking to your own website or being part of a guest post is known as artificial contextual backlinks.
These are part of your SEO strategy, which can generate higher search ranking as contextual links are well liked by crawlers. This is also helpful in increasing popularity among the users.
2. Contextual link building elements:
Before you decide to build the contextual links for your website, it is essential to understand the basic characteristics of these links. Below are some factors that should be paid attention:
Trust:
To begin building contextual links, one needs to focus on the trust factor, because you will be linking your website to the external sources. It will depend on two main ideas:
• Is the contextual link in use is helpful to your reader or user?
• Is the writer of another blog an expert in that area?
Authority:
Your page, when linked to an authoritative site, adds lots of credibility to your own website.
Google PageRank also considers it as an advantage because there are so many fake or phishing sites that harm and damages the user experience.
Content:
As it is popularly said Content is King, it works here too.
Your site content should be relevant to your own vision and goals, how you want your audience to know your website as.
In fact, when linking to external sites too, it should have some relevance and connection to it.
3. How to Build Contextual Links:
There are various strategies that one can use to build contextual links effectively.
Depending on your requirements and needs, you can see which one works well for you. Or you can create your own testing methods to know which one works well and which may need some change.
Below are some of these strategies that can work well:
Using evergreen content:
Evergreen content is the topics which your audience will read at any given point in time.
They come back again and again to read them or new users might be searching for them because their content always remains relevant.
Meanwhile, the linkable content focuses on the audience which might be looking for some information, a gap, which you can provide them.
Therefore, the combination of evergreen and linkable content works well to build an effective contextual link.
Industry relevant linkable topics:
To get the links to your topic, they need not be purely based on a few keywords but it is good to find the amount of information your industry has.
It means that the number of articles or information is available online within your industry.
Example, If you are fashion e-commerce selling high-end fashion brands and categories like shoes, accessories, etc. So you can search for the content which may talk about topics like affordable fashion or runaway fashion.
You will find lots of information based on these topics, which will be available on some popular online fashion magazine, which can act as an authoritative site for you.
From here on, you can work on creating your own content keeping in relevance with the above examples.
Information:
Having the right and relevant information will increase by 90% chances of your success rate. Finding the right information which needs to be relevant to your website is equally important.
There are various ways with which you can find these relevant topics for your post. For example, you can find topics from Google Public data, which is the relevant sphere for online information.
You can ask influencers to take part in your blog and share their knowledge and experiences. Or you can invite your customers asking them to share their own experiences with the product and services.
These simple ways will help you generate good quality content but being relevant and fresh will make it easier for everyone to relate to.
Format:
Create an effective and readable format for your blog, which makes it easier for your reader to go through and are able to connect the information.
An effective format saves time and the other person or a blogger gets a clearer picture of they are ready to connect with the information.
Generally, the format has a good structure of heading. introduction, a body of the passage and conclusion. But it is good to add certain features in between to make reading more accessible.
For example, using bold and italic texts in between the content which you would like to highlight for the reader to read.
When clicking the external link, ensure that opens in the new window as the main page won’t get lost. It also helps in the fact that to reduce the chances of bounce rate, by clicking the back button.
Divide your larger content into interesting smaller pieces with good headings, for example, using “How to…” or “DIY tips for..” these are catchy phrases which have proven to work well.
Don’t forget to connect with your content creators:
Getting contextual link is more than just link building, it is more about establishing relationships and maintaining them over a long period of time.
It requires to reach out to people who you may not know initially.
Then trying to find an opportunity where you both can work together and share links, these are the requirements which benefit both the parties and helps in building businesses.
It also requires doing good research because you need to find the people who are experts and can add value to your website.
These are the people who you connect and learn more. They may be from any part of the world, which also allows you to expand your horizon to know more and more people.
Tips on how to build relationships to get good links:
- Find the mid-size or low sized blogs with a decent number of followers, because this increase the chances of them responding you back. If you reach out to the influential bloggers, chances are high they may not be able to respond you.
- Join different online communities, such as the Facebook community or other forum and discussion boards. Provide them with information, ask questions and answer few. This helps you to get noticed.
- Rather than just sending an email, tweet the blogger with whom you want to connect, this may give you an opportunity to find someone else who might be actually interested in getting in touch with you.
- Rather than waiting for someone to link you first, change your approach and initiate to link their blog first. This is the first step towards building trust among others.
Connect with industry experts:
Bringing industry expert onboard is one of the older and most effective ways to get trustable contextual links. You can ask them to co-author a blog with you or take an interview which posts in on your blog.
Reaching out to an industry expert and convincing them to be a part of your blog may seem like a real challenge but it is worth a try.
Techniques to get in touch with an industry expert:
- Send a pitch to the industry expert, explaining him or her the advantage to be a part of your blog. That is they get the exposure of reaching out to a larger segment of audience from your website.
- Share their content on your social media platforms, comment on their latest blogs or content. This is mostly to highlight yourself and try to build a rapport with them.
- You can also offer them some complimentary gifts or free access to some of your services, in exchange to be a part of your blog.
4. Can you buy contextual links:
Buying contextual links can be good and bad both, it depends on the fact how you are working with it. Here are a few ways which link transaction works:
Buying links:
It is a form of transaction that takes place, where you pay money to someone to give you a backlink.
The important aspect here is that you cannot ignore the importance of SEO in buying the link. But then the concern here is that bought link must offer good quality content, otherwise, it leads to hampering your own page ranking.
This may not be the best way to get the contextual links.
Paid links:
This system of buying links work because you are paying someone within your team or a freelancer to do the job with correct knowledge and information.
This is more about delegating the work to the concerned person, who will do the job ethically rather than buying the links from an external source like an agency.
Google does not mind the use of paid links because this ensures that you are putting your effort to achieve genuine links.
Meanwhile buying links might not be an idea you would like to go ahead with because it does not assure the best user experience which may hamper the long-term search ranking results.
5. Contextual links SEO:
The real benefit of contextual links that one can see is in while implementing it in SEO strategy.
- Contextual links are deep links with your web pages and these help in deciding the unique factor of your webpage.
- Increases the relevancy factors for the search engines.
- The larger chunk of information is divided into a fewer small section of information, these contextual links are keywords for the page.
- When contextual links are linked to authoritative links, like that of government or educational websites, then the trustworthiness of the website increases. Which further leads to higher search ranking.
- These links reduce the chances of bounce rates because the reader instead of leaving the page may click on a contextual link and gets redirected to newer content.
- Contextual links give a better experience to the user or reader on the website. Good user experience is highly liked by Google leading to higher search ranking.
6. Advantages Of Contextual Link Building For SEO:
Building contextual links in your website have lots of advantages to get better search engine ranking. Further, we will break down these benefits to understand how this works.
- Contextual links help in increasing the popularity and awareness about your website, which in turn brings in higher traffic.
- Once the popularity of your website increases, the audience will then share your content on various social media platforms, which will help in generating organic reciprocal links.
- The visibility of the site increases, wherein the other writers or bloggers would like to connect with you, hence, helps in networking as well as getting more backlinks.
- Once your site achieves higher traffic to your website, then the chances of higher sales also increase.
- Contextual links mainly create a platform wherein your reader or audience is getting more and more information about a certain topic.
Linking building is a tough competition in the online world. There are so many websites available, which increase the chances of a tougher fight to establish trust and relevancy of your website. But a strategic approach towards your SEO plan to gain links will work in long run.
Contextual link building is a simple science which needs some time and effort. Once you are able to achieve a good understanding of this subject, you will be able to build easy and effective links on every page of your website.
You will gradually develop an understanding of what will work and what might not work for you. These links will eventually generate high traffic and better conversion rates for the website.
Putting the right effort in the right direction in your SEO will give you better results.