The hard truth of SEO is that no matter how optimized your content is, it’s not always a guarantee that your website will be on the first page of a search engine. And as much as you have to accept this truth, you also have to learn to work around it.
One such way that you can work around it is by using backlinks to boost your website’s authority, as it has been shown to improve search engine rankings over time.
Backlinks are links on websites that don’t belong to you that direct the viewer back to your website. This can be vital to your marketing strategy because even if your website isn’t ranking as high on the search engines, one of the sites that have your link in it might be. And that will help improve your own ranking.
Some people take this backlinking strategy a step further though. And you may want to become one of these people because tiered link building, our topic of focus today, can be extremely effective if you know how to use it.
Benefits can include things like using less of your budget on backlinks, being able to easily erase backlinks that you feel are doing more harm than good to your website, freedom to try out new things without it directly affecting your main website, giving you a subtle way to self promote, and more.
So in this article, we’re going to share some of our top tips for creating an effective tiered link-building strategy so that you can unlock these benefits for yourself. Let’s get started!
The Basics Of A Tiered Link Building Strategy
First of all, since not many people are familiar with the concept, here is a brief overview of what it is and how it works.
The simplest explanation is that you’re building a chain of links across different places on the internet that connect to each other, and will eventually end up at your main website.
Typically you’ll have tier one links that will directly link to your website, tier two links that will lead to the tier one links, and tier three links that connect to the tier two links. You can add more tiers if you wish, but it could become quite hard to manage at that point.
Tier One Links
Your tier one links need to be of the utmost quality. This is because they are the ones that lead directly to your website, so they’re indirectly representing your site. You want to choose sites to host these tier one links that you can trust and ones that will reflect well on your brand.
There are two good ways to get tier one links up and running: find a respected site within your niche to host your links or allow you to do a guest post on their site, OR to host the backlinks yourself by creating multiple blogs that connect to each other.
Tier Two Links
You have a little more wiggle room in deciding where you want your tier two backlinks to be housed, but try to still get them into sites/content that follow all the rules and will receive traffic.
Ideally you’ll want to have several tier two links promoting each of your tier one links. A helpful visualization is to imagine a pyramid with tier one at the top and tier three at the bottom. And make sure that none of your tier two links are connected directly to your main site.
Some great sources of tier two backlinks include online directories, free-to-publish sites like Medium and Quora, online marketplaces, etc.
Tier Three Links
Your tier three links can be placed basically anywhere on the internet, and you should make sure that there are plenty of them. You can basically never have enough tier three links because their haphazard placement makes them less likely to be clicked on. For once, focus on quantity over quality.
But as with tier two, don’t break the hierarchy. Your tier three links should only be connecting to your tier two ones. You don’t want your tier three links anywhere near your main website, or even your tier one links, since they’re not of high quality. Some great sources of tier three links include forums, blog comments, profile pages, and web 2.0.
The Cons of Tiered Link Building in SEO
The saying “risk and reward” would be apt to use in this situation, because not only are there great benefits that come with tiered link building but there can also be less desirable effects.
And it’s only fair that you’re aware of ways this strategy could potentially go wrong. So here are some possible cons to keep in mind along with the pros.
- It could be a waste of time. There’s no guarantee that this scheme will work or end up driving traffic to your main site, so you could potentially waste a lot of time working on and implementing this strategy because it is quite time consuming.
- You could incur penalties. There are rules in place against link schemes, automatically generated content, and scraped content. So breaking any of these rules while completing your tiered link building could result in penalties from Google, such as your backlinks being ignored or your main site being deindexed.
- Giving you a false sense of security and forcing you to start from scratch. It is possible that the effects tiered link building won’t last for long, and may only benefit you for a short amount of time. So make sure you’re ready to start again whenever it’s necessary.
So even though this can be a beneficial SEO strategy to have, just keep in mind the potential side effects of it. And try to do it in the safest and most sustainable way that you can to receive the maximum amount of benefits and the least amount of ill effects.
