Which Pages Should You Build Links To? The Essential Link Building Guide For Businesses

Link building is one of those things that most businesses and website owners who have started doing a little bit of SEO self-education know is important but often don’t know how to approach. 

In our experience, what ends up happening is people just go out and build links haphazardly. The end goal is simply to get as many links pointing to their website as possible. Very seldom are small business owners and startup companies trying to strategically create a diversified backlink profile. 

This is why we’re dedicating this article to going beyond the concept of mere link building and delving into the pages you should actually be building backlinks to. At the end of the day, search engines care about how you build links more than how many links you have. 

Link building as a concept

Just to drive home the point before we start discussing things like target pages and internal link structure: link building is important. Backlinks and the external authority they provide are still among the most important Google ranking factors. 

You neglect backlinks at your peril (i.e., the long-term viability of your site as an organic traffic lead generation machine), especially if you are targeting highly competitive keywords with a lot of industry competition. 

That said, good (or even useful) link building is far more sophisticated than simply “more links = better.”

Let’s get into some of the more refined parts of link building. 

The different parts of your website

One of the most important concepts in link building and one to have at the forefront of any link building campaign is that of website structure.

For most for-profit businesses online (especially if you’re selling a product or service), your website can generally be broken down into your home page, your informational pages, and your commercial pages. 

Home page

Your home page probably doesn’t require much explaining. It’s the main page of your site (its foundation) to which all other pages ultimately link. 

Links to your home page are extremely powerful and they are a good way to distribute external authority to the rest of your website. Homepage links can be built, but they are very often acquired naturally, making them even more powerful in the eyes of Google. 

HARO link building is often the best way to actually build links to your home page and it has helped us secure some pretty impressive links for ourselves and our clients over the years. 

A good, natural backlinks profile will include a significant number of high domain authority home page links. 

Informational pages

Informational content tends to be found in a site’s blog. These are deep pages that are not directly involved in selling anything (at least not blatantly). Take the below page on our blog, for example: 

Here, we’re not trying to explicitly sell you the link building services we provide, but inform anyone searching for information on internal link building.

Of course, we want to showcase our knowledge and expertise, and any good informational article is going to include a call to action (or multiple) throughout (and particularly at the end) to inquire about or find out more about the commercial purpose of the site/business. 

But we ultimately care about two things above all else here: 

• First, we want to create content that is going to satisfy the search intent for the keywords we are targeting. 
• We want to use the page to distribute link juice to the commercial internal pages at the bottom of our sales funnel where we ultimately want our site’s visitors to end up. 

Creating linkable content

The first of these two points is fundamentally important because in order to build backlinks to this content (that provide the link juice we want to distribute to our more important commercial pages) we need content that other sites won’t mind linking to. 

This goes for both backlinks we acquire naturally (i.e., from people arriving at the content, finding it useful and wanting to include it in their own content) and those that we build (via link building tactics like guest posting and niche edits). 

Distributing the link juice/link equity

Ultimately, what we want to do (for ourselves and for our clients) is get links pointing to those informational pages and have strategically placed internal links that distribute the external authority coming from the referring domains to strategic commercial pages. 

Commercial pages

Your commercial pages are where you sell your products and services. 

In our case, our most important commercial page is our pricing page. 

This is the bottom of our sales funnel; where people who are interested in doing business with us find out more about our pricing. 

Our link building service page  is another commercial page. 

If we were a full-service digital marketing company offering other SEO services, paid advertising, etc., we would likely have a page for each of our digital marketing services. 

Your 3 main pages

Depending on the kind of website you’re running and your website/business maturity, you might have other page types, including category pages, your about page, your contact page, and perhaps even one-off landing pages for specific products or services you offer. 

By and large, however, these above three page types are where you want your backlinks pointing and will constitute the majority of the links if your backlink profile. Contact pages and About Us pages, for instance, tend not to generate the kinds of links external links your other pages will. 

So, which pages should you have links pointing to?

Ultimately, if you’re a for-profit business, you want to direct as much of your website’s traffic to your highest-converting commercial pages as possible. That means building links and distributing link juice with that in mind. 

Of course, a conversion might mean different things to different businesses and in different scenarios. 

We had a client who wanted to increase the number of visitors signing up for demos of their HR software. We actually put together a case study on that client. 

Basically, our link building efforts took them from essentially zero monthly traffic to 40,000 monthly visitors and 50 demos booked per month: 

Whatever your conversion metric, you want to direct both traffic and link juice to certain pages. 

Where can you realistically build backlinks? 

Where you want to build links and where you can build links are two very different things. In an ideal world, you would build a ton of high quality, high domain authority backlinks to your most valuable commercial pages and see them rocket up the Google rankings. 

Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to build quality links to commercial pages and product pages. Most websites don’t want to link to another site’s commercial pages because, at the end of the day, that link is both an endorsement of the product/service and a conduit through which that website’s traffic travels. 

Sending your visitors to unsolicited commercial content is usually not a good idea. 

Most links are built either to your home page or to informational pages. This is the most natural type of backlink, and it is how we approach most of our link building strategies. 

Alright, so how do you choose from among those pages? 

In a nutshell: value and keyword opportunities. 

Value

The two main criteria to consider when choosing which landing pages you should build links to are the value of the page(s) you are considering and the keyword opportunities for the page. All websites have pages that are more valuable than others and you definitely don’t want to waste SEO efforts on pages that don’t provide much value. 

Your valuable pages are those that lead to a purchase. Keep in mind, however, that those valuable pages don’t have to be product and service pages. What’s more, it is increasingly difficult to actually build links to those pages because most high quality websites don’t want to send their traffic to a product or service page. 

Your blog posts can provide top, middle and even bottom of the funnel value by building or finalizing a user’s interest in your product/services. 

After you’ve determined which are your valuable pages and which aren’t, you then need to determine which of those pages have good keyword opportunities. They can be keywords that a page is already ranking well for and for which you think you can increase the ranking, or keywords that a page isn’t yet ranking for that you would like to rank for. 

Choosing keywords

This article isn’t really supposed to be about keywords and keyword research, it’s about choosing target pages you want other websites to link to. 

That said, knowing how to evaluate keywords and their viability is an important part of page selection. Whether you are already ranking well for a keyword and would like to increase your ranking and authority for a particular keyword or would like to rank for a new one, you are likely going to want to use one of the big SEO analytics tools–Ahrefs, MOZ, SEMrush to help you decide. 

What you are looking for is search volume and your ability to compete for a certain keyword. Ask yourself, based on the websites that are currently outranking me, do I have a reasonable chance of outranking them in the search engine results page based on the authority and backlinks required to do so? 

If you believe you can, and you believe that you stand a chance of ranking well for a keyword that gets a lot of search traffic and would work well as a piece of content from which to funnel traffic and distribute link equity, then go for it. 

Internal linking

You can attract links all you want to a page, but if you haven’t set up your internal linking structure to send that link equity to the pages on your site that actually make you money, you’ve wasted time and money. 

We’ve put together quite an in-depth guide to internal linking on our blog, if you would like to do a much deeper dive into internal linking best practices. 

For the sake of choosing landing pages and distributing link equity to commercial pages, however, all you really need to know is, where do you ultimately want to direct traffic and link juice? 

Link position and number of links

Two additional important sub-concepts of internal linking, especially for the purposes of passing on link juice and boosting the ranking of your site’s main commercial content, are link position and number of links. 

Link position refers to where on a page an internal link is placed. Where you place a link in a piece of content affects how much authority it passes on to the target page. A link near the top of a piece of content passes on more link equity than one at the bottom. 

The number of links you have on a page is another consideration. If you have four links on your distribution page, the link equity from a link built to that page will be spread across those four links. 

The more links you have on a page, the more the link equity from a referring domain is subdivided. 

Nofollow links vs dofollow links

One last concept to touch on when it comes to choosing your target pages is that of nofollow vs dofollow backlinks. If you aren’t already familiar with both terms, a nofollow link is one that passes on no link juice to the target page. 

Websites can choose to “nofollow” their external links for a variety of reasons–relevance, editorial policy, the domain authority of the target site. Just know that if you’re building backlinks, a nofollow link confers no link equity, so you will want to avoid spending much time and effort (and money) pursuing nofollow links. 

They can be a good source of referral traffic and aren’t, by any means, worthless, but their ability to improve ranking and organic traffic is limited, if not non-existent. Dofollow backlinks are what you are after. 

Wrapping up

How much easier would it be if you could simply build links to your commercial pages, Google was fine with it and other websites were happy to oblige? 

As SEOs and link builders, however, we don’t live in that world. We live in a world of strategy and link equity. This makes increasing conversions more time consuming, but if you know what you’re doing you can still move your commercial pages to the top of the SERP. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about how an industry-leading link building service can help you build those rank and traffic-boosting links, get in touch with dofollow today and let’s chat.