Links are still one of the most important ranking factors in terms of quality for search results. Remember the top three most important ranking signals revealed by Google? Links + Content + RankBrain. So here are few basic things of what you must know.
Tools to find backlinks
• Ahrefs.com
• SEOMoz / OpenSiteExplorer
• Majestic SEO
• SEMrush
Remember that not every link will show up in every tool. This is why it is important to have multiple data sources.
Fixing Redirect Chains
Fixing redirect chains can result to a boost in your site’s authority and your website’s loading speed. Find sites or pages that 301 redirect to your site and identify those redirect chains. For instance:
Page A –> 301 Redirects –> Page B –> 301 Redirects –> Page C
You can fix it by having Page A –> 301 Redirect –> Page C. Ideally mapping each original inbound URL to its final destination. Do NOT underestimate the power of internal links!
Tool you can use to find redirects: Screaming Frog
Change 302 Redirects to 301
302 redirect passes 0% link juice in most cases. In other means, no ranking power. Identify 302 Redirects and change them to 301.
Other Helpful Linking Strategies
Editorial Blog Posts – this is where you showcase your expertise on other blogs within your niche by writing posts to be published in their blog and eventually get a result of increased traffic from them. If you are a single person or a small business, aim to produce one quality piece per quarter.
Broken Link Building – finding broken links on high authority pages and giving its webmaster a solution to replace those broken links you found on their website with your corrected link.
Another Update: Changes
Google has just made a major change affecting the reliability of the search volume data. The information below was shared to us by SEOmonitor.
The Keyword Planner now combines the search volume of closely related search variants and shows the same aggregated search volume estimates on each keyword, instead of their individual estimates.
Before the update, “dresses”, “dress” and “dres” used to have different search volumes, whereas now they all share the same aggregated value. This is misleading, as we may now think that there are 900k searches for these three keywords, while in reality there are about 300k or less.