How to do international link building

The use of search engines has increased exponentially in everyone’s day to day work as well as life. Dependability over search engine is so high that on average approximately 3.5 Billion searches are made daily on Google. If a person is standing on a street, he can look only at the shops on the street but in the case of the internet, for each single search query made, search engines generate millions of results. The number of results will keep increasing all the time because each day over 500 thousand new websites are hosted over the internet.

Search string

    As a business owner, the above scenario is an opportunity for you. An opportunity to have a platform from where you can reach out to customers anywhere in the world. This golden opportunity comes with a catch that you need to be on the first page of the search result. Most probably in the first three or five search results. In the early 2000s, the search was quite simple on search engines. People would simply enter the keyword and the search string is generated based on the keywords and all the web pages containing that keyword were displayed. Later, it was realized that this feature is misused by keeping all the trending keywords in the irrelevant websites so that they can appear on the top of the search result. 

Link building

    To achieve more relevancy in search results, Google’s co-founder Larry Page decided to eliminate those irrelevant web pages coming on the top of the search results. The principle applied here was, the most relevant documents are the most cited. To search relevant and appear on top of the search results, now the websites must have E-A-T which is an acronym for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. To achieve this, you need to have references and validations from several other websites which can be done using link building. Link building is a process that gets other websites to backlink to your website. With the new methods to provide search results, link building is one of the techniques used to enhance the SEO of the website.

Why International Link building?

    Suppose you have a business selling premium Darjeeling tea. You promote and sell your quality tea using a website in the UK. After some time, you realized that tea is getting popular in Europe and people would be interested in your Darjeeling tea there as well. Although you have a website that is hosted over the internet, it cannot catch directly the tea-lovers in different European countries. Now, you need to understand how you can expand your business to such a place where language is different from your region and so is the culture of the area. You would need to have websites in different languages to appear relevant to the natives of those countries. For translation, an automatic translator won’t work as effectively to transfer your thoughts as articles are written by experts of that language will do. So, link builder will connect your website with some popular websites of those regions that are popular in your domain. In the upcoming sections, you will find some best practices to boost your international link building.

Identify Audience

    Before looking for popular websites in the region for backlinks, you should understand one straight fact – your link building might have a global reach but for the customer, it should give him the local feel. Though European countries are geographically close to each other, language and culture are quite different for each of the countries. To completely enter some different region there are 2 key components-

• Customer Preference
• Popular Keywords

    Your audience mood can be easily quantified with the above data. So, you would need to gather as much information about the preference of your potential customers and frequently used keywords of that particular location. For customer preference you might need to do polling, collecting answers to questionnaires, etc. Popular keywords can be easily tracked by tools. Though several tools provide a global keywords list, some tools provide a regional breakup of popular keywords. Google’s Keyword tool is capable to narrow down the search based on language and location. This enhanced filtering based on the composition of language and location provides you with a detailed analysis of frequent keywords of the target region. This is quite essential as if you filter only based on language, you will get keywords from all over the world. Moz, SEMrush, Soolve, Jaaxy are some other popular keyword research tools widely used.

Customize Website

    Over the internet, you will be finding people from different parts of the world so it’s better to have a multilingual website. It can be achieved in several ways. The fastest one is to set up your website with pages in different languages and display pages based on the language of the user accessing your website. To identify what will be the language of the user who is trying to access your website, you can use cookies. However, this is not the best way. You will not be able to make an impression to search engines because the native language of the website will be different, and keywords of that language will be noticed. Also, it adds a burden on the header content and your website will be slow at loading.

    The better and popular choice is to have a separate URL for each of the region or language for which you are creating the website. You might have noticed if you open the Amazon website in the UK, it will come up as amazon.co.uk while in India the URL that works is amazon.co.in. You can have a single database for all the websites, it will help you with centralized modifications. When people from any country will connect to local DNS, they will assume that your business is running in that country. This establishes a sense of connection with the customer.

Avoid Auto-translator

    Apart from DNS, valuable contents with popular keywords are also important to make your consumer feel connected with your website. Do not use automatic translator applications to translate your native language content into the target language. The reason to avoid automatic translation is that they translate the words literally. However, there are many instances in your content where you might have written some metaphor in your native language whose literal translation could destroy the essence of it. It’s better to hire some good native writers who are bilingual and utilize their brilliant writing skills to deliver your idea multilingually.

Backlinks

    Link building is dependent on backlinks, which makes it the core of the entire process. You should do as much research as you can to identify from which websites you are going to ask for backlinks. Below are some important points you should look for while selecting a website for backlinks-

• The website giving your backlink should be trustworthy among its own customers.
• It should have an organic user base.
• The area of business should be like your field of work.
• Backlinks from a spam site will harm your reputation.
• The website chosen for backlinks should be popular with SERP(Search Engine Result Page) of that region. It should appear on the first page of results when the keyword related to your business is searched on any search engine.
• Few qualities of prominent websites-
  • Their traffic will be high due to quality content
  • Their earning will be good
  • and their articles will be referred at several other websites as well

Guest Posting

    Webmasters of popular websites are contacted for guest posts. You can approach them as well. Like tough competition in the market for a job, you need to outshine in front of webmasters. On the other hand, webmasters are quite cunning so send your content in picture format. Remember, each webmaster gets numerous requests daily, so you should reach 3 or 4 simultaneously. Once you have a response from any of them, you can discuss the terms and share the content in word format.

SEO Companies

    If you are new to these things or do not have enough time from managing your business at your location, you can outsource the work to SEO companies. There are several SEO companies in all the regions that charge for your link building. It depends on the level of work provided to them and varies from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars for a month. They will work tirelessly for you and create quality content oriented to your area and they have contacts with high authority sites webmasters. They also offer social media marketing campaign to increase your presence in the target region.

    Once you target to start link building internationally, you need to have the patience to get a recognizable position over search engines. The time to get ranked well varies with the type of product. If your product has less or no competition, you can get a good rank on Google in about 2-4 months. On the other hand, if you are launching a product that has too many competitors in the market, you might be looking for a longer time. Keep following the above techniques and you will be able to achieve the same success you are enjoying at your location.