Content marketing is a complex process that includes many unique factors to help your site get hits and conversions. However, contextual links are not discussed enough when creating great content strategies. As a link building service, we focus a lot on backlinks, but these links bring more attention to your site and give it more authority. Here's what you need to know about contextual links, including integrating them on your site.
What Are Contextual Links?
A contextual link is an inline website link that provides a context within a web page or helps explain more information about it. These links help to connect you to various authoritative websites that bring more viewers to your site and expand its scope. These contextual links may include:
- Sites Explaining Your Information: When sharing data that isn't commonly known, such as important statistics, it is important to put in a contextual link. Doing so helps share your sources and gives your site a higher level of authority to readers.
- More In-Depth Data: Great contextual links are those that better explain the information you have shared in your article. For instance, an article discussing proper dog grooming habits may need a link that helps to explain the health benefits of these steps more fully.
- Editorial Content: You may add contextual links when producing editorial content. These links help explain an editorial position and give it more authority. It may also help readers better understand your topic and ensure that they walk away feeling comfortable with your information.
These links are all part of a broader push towards contextual advertising common in the market. This idea states that all advertising exists within a strict context, one that must be fully understood when creating strategies. In this way, you can more easily build links and produce better content.
Benefits of Contextual Backlinks
Contextual backlinks can provide your business with many benefits and advantages that make them well worth pursuing. Understanding these benefits can help you better plan your linking strategy and do what you can to stand out in the market. Just a few benefits that you might receive include how it:
- Improves Authority: We've talked a bit about building authority with your links. Put simply, authoritative sites from trustworthy companies, such as educational or governmental bodies, show readers you've done your research and also improve your authority in Google searches.
- Increases SEO Presence: When your website has a more authoritative presence, Google automatically ranks it higher. Its algorithms and search processes will quickly analyze each link's quality and either improve or decrease your ranking based on the quality of your links.
- Raises Brand Awareness: As you share links and other people connect with you, your site may increase brand awareness. For example, creating a backlink with another business constantly sends readers back to you when they click on a link and make your brand better known in the market.
It is important to note that you get these benefits if you focus on quality and not quantity. Linking to dozens of sites may seem authoritative, but if you're linking to nothing but blogs or personal sites, your authority will suffer. Instead, consider scattering several higher-quality links that make your site read better and more effectively.
How To Handle Contextual Link Building
When deciding on a contextual link building strategy, it is important to take a few simple steps to ensure that you get better results. You can't just throw links in without a skillful strategy that takes into account multiple factors. Instead, it is important to take several steps that pair your content with links that make sense for your marketing strategy. Here are a few steps that you can take to get better results.
- Choose Relevant Sites: Always carefully research your sites when choosing links. For example, the site should be relevant to your particular business model and likely to build a backlink with you.
- Pick Professional Sites: Stay away from blogs with zero authority and focus on high-authority sites, like professionally edited content and anything with .edu or .gov tag.
- Pair Links With Content: Make sure that your content contains relevant information to your site, such as linking a dog-grooming article to a veterinarian explaining the health benefits of grooming.
- Find Appropriate Link Text: Don't just link to generic terms like “click here” but pick meaningful text. For example, linking to “grooming health benefits” lets viewers know what to expect.
- Create Backlink Opportunities: Reach out to companies that you link in your content to get backlinks from your content. Doing so creates an effective linking strategy.
The biggest takeaway here is to always make sure that your links fit with your content. The content should always come first and include meaningful keywords that help expand your strategy. Then, you can add contextual links to the appropriate text tags within your content. Keep track of where you get information when researching, save these links, and consider adding them as you work. Doing so can ensure proper context and ensure your links do their job.
Getting Help With Your Contextual Links
Now that we've answered “what are contextual links?” and have provided contextual link examples that can help you direct your marketing, it is essential to identify relationships with companies that may provide you with links - even if you wish to buy contextual links. Getting a backlink on a website is an enormous deal, and if you can handle it properly, you might find your company's site getting far more attention than expected. Contacting a contextual link building service may be the way to go.
Written by Vazoola