“How Many Links Do I Need To My Shopify Site?” is a question most Shopify store owners are asking. Store owners are looking to get on the front page of Google or any of the other major search engines and are finding it hard to understand the principles of SEO.
Links are an important element of achieving success at the top of the search engines, but it is vital that links are built in the right way, to ensure they only serve to enhance the authority and profile of the website being optimised.
Why Build Links
Part of Googles algorithm assesses how many links a website has to it and the quality of the sites who are linking to it, Google also looks at other factors, such as the quality of the anchor text (the words that are clicked to follow the link) and the overall link profile of the site.
A good Shopify link profile will help a Shopify website move up the search engine results and is an important element of search engine optimisation.
Bad Neighbourhoods & Link Farms
It is vital that website owners thinking about building their own links take care to ensure they don’t get caught up in “bad neighbourhoods” and “link farms”, links from such sites have the potential to cause a detrimental effect in the search engine results, they are often associated with websites on the wrong side of Googles best practice and should be avoided at all costs.
Quality, not Quantity
When building links to your website, it is important to remember that it is more about quality than quantity, one good link from an authority website (for example the BBC or the Guardian Newspaper) would have more impact in the search results than hundreds of links from lesser quality websites.
That said, high volume link building also has its place and a mixture of quality and quantity is usually the best strategy to achieve results on the front page of the search engines along with stability, to ensure the site does not drop down.
Keep it Up
Remember, your competitors will all be busy fighting for the limited number of places on the front page of the search results, so it is important to consider link building as an ongoing project, don’t start it and then stop.
How to Get New Links
When considering where to find websites to link to you, it is worth putting together a plan, think about other businesses you work with, or clients and contacts you have, who may be willing to give you a link, then reach out and ask them if they would consider linking to your site.
Internal Links
It's also important to consider the internal links on your Shopify store. You should be using your blog and other pages to deep link throughout your site. A great way to do this is by using an HTML sitemap page. An app like our Sitemap generator will help you deep link throughout your site and allow Google to crawl the site easily to find all your pages.
Most people are aware that links have a value, so it is worth considering offering something in return for a link, maybe a discount or some other incentive, but try and avoid reciprocal (two way) links, you are looking for one way links back to your website.
As well as directly asking for a link, another great way of getting links to your site is to create press releases and articles, think about your business, the questions your customers or clients commonly ask, and answer them in a written article.
Articles can be published to the hundreds of free press release portals online, most of which allow a link back to the authors website, really good articles can become viral and result in huge numbers of new links back to your site, resulting in much more than a benefit in the search engine results.
Other popular sources of link creation come in the form of blog commenting and posting and forum signature links.