Second Tier Link Building: How Does it Work

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Link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. is the promotional strategy for websites that acquires direct inbound linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. to your site. Link building is an important website driver which helps your site to rank higher in the search engines and can also be instrumental in helping a business website to become more profitable. Second-tier link building, however, is a little more complex. This often ignored strategy is the process of acquiring links to webpages outside your domain that link back to your pages.

Promoting Your Promoters

Second-tier link building is not a new topic; in fact, it’s a tactic that professional SEO experts have been using for quite a while in order to build traffic and improve rankings. In a nutshell, second-tier link building is all about promoting your promoters by liking to pages that link to you. It’s important to keep in mind that second-tier link building is about bringing up your brand-relevant content which is hosted outside of your domain.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is an important part of second-tier link building and putting links to your site out there on websites which are separate to your own. A guest post is a piece of content which you write in order to feature on somebody else’s blog so that you can get the word out about your own site. Ideally, you should be looking to feature on blogs which have a good level of traffic. Some guest posts contain an ‘about author’ section which you can utilise to link back to your sites and projects. In return for the content which you provide to the blogger, you’ll get increased visibility and traffic from their blog audience.

Successful Second-Tier Backlinks

If you are using guest posts to link back to your website, it’s important that you do so in such a way that your guest post doesn’t end up competing with your own site in search results. Although by writing a guest post and linking to your own site creates a powerful link source to your own site, it’s vital to bear in mind that creating a post which actually competes with your own site could end up doing more harm than good. For example, don’t write a basic post about selling the products that you sell – come up with innovative post ideas which incorporate the product into them but include different keywords and terms to the ones which you are targeting on your own site.

How to Successfully Link Back to Your Site

When guest posting, it’s important that you know exactly how to link back to your site or profile in order for it to be effective. When you provide a guest post, you need to avoid linking to your home domain too much, as excessive self-linking can make you look link-greedy and therefore spoil your rankings rather than building them. Linking to brand-relevant pages outside of your domain such as third-party website reviews and social media profiles is a good way to link back to your site without looking like you are over-doing it.

When you do it right, second-tier link building can be an excellent way to drive more traffic to your site.

James Owen

James has been involved in SEO and digital marketing projects since 2007. James has led many SEO projects for well-known brands in Travel, Gaming and Retail such as Jackpotjoy, Marriott, Intercontinental Hotels, Hotels.com, Expedia, Betway, Gumtree, 888, Ax Paris, Ebyuer, Ebay, Hotels combined, Smyths toys, love honey and Pearson to name a few. James has also been a speaker at SEO and digital marketing conferences and events such as Brighton SEO.