Backlinks are one of the most crucial elements of any SEO strategy nowadays. They aid the web crawler in identifying other website’s opinions about your content relevancy and value. The ranking on SERPs or search engine results pages alters based on the backlinks. The higher the number of backlinks, the higher is your chance to get a better ranking on SERPs.
Employing a tiered backlinking strategy may give a much-needed boost to your SEO efforts. You can concoct a ‘link pyramid’ with links built to your backlinks.
The Basics
A tiered backlinking strategy means elevating the power of the original backlink with the help of other aided links.
To understand this let us consider a situation, say you have a cleaning services company in Ireland. During this pandemic, you have added a new service that helps your customers to have germ-free and disinfected washing for their apparel. The news of this service has coverage by a prominent digital news media agency of Ireland.
Now you build links to that specific coverage using a tiered link-building exercise to elevate the positive impact on your website. These additional links that you create will constitute tier 2 of the pyramid.
An SEO company in Ireland can aid you to further strengthen your efforts with the identification and mapping of links that have a higher Domain Authority (DA) score. It will give you a chance to add a tier 3 to your link pyramid that will increase the potency of tier 2. Thus, helping you to streamline your SEO efforts further and improve the ranking on SERP.
So your pyramid may look like this:
- Prominent Irish digital news media agency article with your website link - Tier 1
- Additional links directing to Irish media agency coverage - Tier 2
- The SEO agency recommended links with high DA - Tier 3
The main objective behind the ‘link pyramid’ formation is to improve the Tier 1 page authority. For the above example, it is the coverage article by the prominent Irish digital news media agency.
The Page Authority
A Domain Authority or DA refers to the probability of a website's ranking on the SERPs or search engine result pages. The Page Authority or PA refers to the probability of a particular page's ranking on the SERPs.
Any backlink that directs to your website will aid in improving the Domain Authority of your website. Page Authority will only recognize those backlinks that lead to a specific page.
To better understand it let us consider our earlier example. The Irish digital media agency website may have a high Domain Authority. But that does not necessarily mean that the individual pages will have a high Page Authority.
A news agency posts numerous articles daily on its website. While a few become viral and gain a lot of backlinks, most of them have negligible views or backlinks. The inference that you may draw from this is that your website may benefit from a select lot of news articles on the website that has a high Page Authority.
Hence the tiered backlinking strategy may help you improve your website’s ranking on the SERP. It will happen by artificially increasing the PA score of a particular page containing a backlink to your website.
The Link Pyramid
The build has to follow a top-down approach, which means you have to start from tier 1.
The first step is very crucial. Selecting a backlink, which is from a website with a DA score of eighty, will help build a stronger base. Then you may start adding tiers. The succeeding tears should have a higher number of backlinks than the previous tier.
For example, if your tier 1 has x number of backlinks then tier 2 should have 10x that number, and tier 3 10x of tier 2.
The type of links used and the content varies from one tier to another. Tier 1 and 2 are the key pillars of the tiered backlinking strategy. Hence, you need to carefully handpick what goes into these tiers. As denounced earlier Tier 1 is the most crucial portion of the link pyramid, and so it has to have the best of the backlinks. The tier 1 backlinks may include the links from
- Websites with high DA
- Websites with high-quality content
- Resource pages
- Web 2.0 sites
- Guest posts
- PBN or Private blog network
While tier 1 is all about the quality, tier 2 is more of quantity. You may be picky about the backlinks but choose more to increase the volume of the backlinks. The tier 2 backlinks may include the links from
- Social media pages
- Community or forum comment
- Blog comment
- Document sharing resources
Tier 3 is just about maximizing the number of backlinks, conjuring as many backlinks as possible. Here the goal is to reach a higher number, so quality is not that significant.
To sum up, a properly designed tiered backlinking strategy may help you unlock the SEO benefits that are still unknown to you. A good tiering and inclusion of pages with a high Page Authority Score will help you improve your ranking on the SERP.