What is Web Mention in SEO?
Link-less mentions have the potential to be the future of link building. Since the past days of Google, it has always used links to judge the relevance and reputation of web pages. But as time passed by, the web and search engines have developed better ways to gauge a website’s authority. Since it has the potential to dominate the future, it is important for us to understand web mention in SEO, web mention links, web mention backlinks, web mention links benefits.
Web mention links have become an important SEO strategy, with Search Engine Optimization tools doing everything possible to buy, win, and gain links targeting towards their website to boost up the rankings of the websites. This turned out to work best for the SEOs than it already was.
What are web mention links?
Do you know there’s a super-easy way to get probably thousands of backlinks? Backlinks are any inbound links, or incoming links coming from one website to another. Google and other popular search engines depend on the backlink votes on a specific page. This means pages with the highest number of backlinks are bound to rank high in the search engines. Now, the easiest way to gain thousands of backlinks is through web mention in SEO. Web mention links are online mentions of your website or anything related to it that link back directly to your site.
Let us understand web mention backlinks with an example:
Now, let us assume you own Ahrefs. You come across a blog talking about your product.
Though there’s a mention of your website here, there’s no link that could help any reader to navigate to your website quickly. With such unlinks, you’re only halfway towards earning inbound traffic. With this mention, you already know that the author is familiar with your website and trusts it enough to mention it in their blog. So, it is quite easy for you to approach and convince them, hopefully, to have that mention converted to a link.
Now, let us see how web mention backlinks would look like:
With this, users there is a high probability that a reader would be interested in clicking the link and visiting your website, which could increase traffic to the website. This will also help your page rank high in the search engine, the amount of traffic usually calculates the page ranks to the site.
How does it work?
Previously, Google used the “voting” algorithm to determine a page’s popularity. Votes are calculated based on the number of links pointing to a particular website. As a page in the website gets more votes, it ranks higher and is important. There are plenty of other factors that Google uses to determine the ranking, however, this voting system remains to be the most popular.
In 2016, Google officially removed the PageRank from its site, just to avoid confusion among site owners on the importance of PageRank. However, it still widely uses PageRank to determine a site’s authority. There are shreds of evidence because both Google and Bing use web mention links to rank a page high and trustable.
How to build a high-quality backlink?
If you want to increase the focus on your website, creating a quality backlink is very important. One quality backlink can be more effective than thousands of low-quality ones. How do you build a high-quality backlink?
- The source where the backlink is associated should be trustable, and authoritative. If the website where your backlink is mentioned is authoritative, Google puts a lot of weight to which might increase traffic to your website.
- They should include all the possible target keywords in the website address’ anchor text. The correlation between high-ranking and keyword-specific anchor text is quite affirmative. To build the right anchor text that is rich in keywords, you can make use of Google’s ‘Google Penguin’.
- The website with the backlink to your website should be related to your site or page. Google always looks for the relation between the two links whenever a backlink is added to a site. For example, if there’s an article published on running a marathon, then Google will put on a lot of weight on sites related to fitness, running, etc.
- The link should be the ‘dofollow’ one. Any search engine, including Google, will not consider links with ‘nofollow tag’. If your site is tagged with a nofollow, then it wouldn’t be ranked in the search engine.
- The fewer the number of links from the same website, the more the advantages. If you link your site through a backlink to a website once, the links that are made later from the same website are much less powerless. In shorter words, you can get more returns from 100 different websites than 100 links on the same website.
Tools to track your brand mentions
If you’re now convinced to build your website using the link strategy, it is always optimum to invest in some good analysis tools that would help you find the different mentions of your site. This way you can attain most of the web mention links benefits. These are some tools that will help you track the mentions.
- Google Alerts – Google has a free tool that will alert you whenever there’s a mention of your website or a keyword related to your site. You can also use this to monitor the backlink opportunities.
- Talkwalker Alerts – This is considered being the easiest and the best alternative for Google Alerts. This provides data for sentiment analysis, demographic data, information about the actions taken as part of your brand mention, and insights about various influencers promoting your brand.
- Awario – This is yet another tool for tracking web mention in SEO. They have a ‘Reach’ metric that will allow you to view a commentator’s authority. In other words, this is for checking if the site where your website link is mentioned has low or high authority.
- Mention – It provides you with live updates about different mentions of your website, from across the web, and also lets you filter them by language, sentiment, source, etc. Apart from this, it provides insights into your competitor’s data which could help you plan your web mention in SEO in a better way.
Final Thoughts
Link building is not just about building links. Let us discuss a few other factors involved before we conclude.
- Reviews – Track and encourage and customer reviews and feedback for your product and please respond to all the reviews, especially the negative ones. There are a lot of platforms that will help you track the reviews, like Yelp and TripAdvisor for restaurants, G2-Crowd for Software as a Service Application, etc.
- Social selling – Social media is the best place to market and increase your brand awareness. You can increase sales to a larger extent if you make the best use of the platform.
- Competitor monitoring – It is also important to track and monitor the backlinks of your competitors to understand and learn their tactics, which you can later for your business.
I believe this article helped you in understanding how web mention in SEO works and the different ways to use it to make the best out of it for your brand.
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