International link building: attracting quality backlinks
One of the best things of the Internet is the fact there are no country borders. Your company is only a mouse click away from its customers all over the globe. But how can we make sure your international target audience will actually find you ? International link baiting is an essential ingredient in ranking your website well on the major search engines around the globe.
Quality one-way links should be considered as votes in favor of your website. Every link pointing to your website from another site lets the search engines know that your content is seen as valuable by someone else. The more votes you have, i.e. the more backlinks you have, the higher ranking you get in search results. A great website receives a lot of traffic from incoming links. However, unlike voting, where all votes have equal power, in multilingual search engine optimization, not all sites have an equally strong vote to give to your site.
Since Google launched their Penguin algorithm update, millions of websites have been falling down the rankings like losing soldiers in the battlefield! Google has been cracking down on “spammy” websites like never before. This update has indeed been very effective at knocking down spam sites.
However,the success of an international SEO campaign still relies on the same factors: a careful optimization of the source code, the creation of quality and relevant content on a continuous basis, and quality backlinks from quality websites located in the targeted country .
Changing from “build” to “attract”
From an SEO viewpoint, the interest in great content is to attract links, where as a lot of what Google is looking to eliminate are examples of where content is used to build links: articles, spun articles spammed across thousands of directories, blog posts spun across networks, networks that dragged in content form places like Youtube, Yahoo Answers and article directories to create mashup posts, blog comments, spun blog comments using scrapebox so you can hit thousands of sites at a time, web2.0 link wheels made from spun content, the list could go on and on and on. What’s being sold as “Content Marketing” – is truly great content that people want to share and link to. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature. Today’s international marketers must go for a quality content marketing approach to gain and attract quality links.
Attracting local links is key
What Causes the Search Results to Differ in Local Search Engines? Some country-specific aspects help search engines easily determine if it’s relevant enough for the local search query. The major aspects:
– Top-level domain (TLD) (i.e., domain extension).
– Language of the content.
– Additional robot instructions (meta/Webmaster Central).
– Location of the hosting.
– Source of incoming links.
– Incoming links provide the right signs
If you’re looking for an international brand locally and it has a multilingual website, you’ll most likely get the website on the local ccTLD (country code top level domain — .nl, .de, .fr, etc.), instead of the international website on the gTLD (generic top level domain — .com, .net, .org) domain. This result is preferred because of the matching ccTLD, language, and hosting — especially because there will be a lot incoming links with these similarities. Good local links have relevance, and authority.
Discover our international link building tips
At Openvalley, we provide high performing international link building campaigns that, through websites, articles, press releases, directories, blogs, or even social medias, clearly support your website purpose. Call us know and meet the Openvalley team of experts to convert your website in an international success.