Profile link building: A low-effort, powerful technique in SEO

‘Google rewards those who constantly publish quality content.’

You’d probably hear this old-age advice from SEO experts and digital marketing agencies if you ask them how to rank high on search engines. One way or another, your content will appear somewhere on the results and earn you a couple of clicks.

However, the million-dollar question is this: can you snatch that number one spot by posting great content alone? What can you do to appear on the first or second page of search engines? 

This is where SEO strategy becomes useful, especially profile link building. Along with quality content, you have to establish authority by earning good website links to outrank your competitors. 

Let’s start with the basics first.

What is Profile Link Building?

Profile link building is an SEO strategy used by businesses to promote their products and services. It is considered an off-page backlink creation technique where you include your website’s URL to your personal, social and professional pages. 

Let’s say you plan to create accounts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. These sites will allow you to include a link to your project or business website on your bio. In this way, you can boost your search engine rankings since Google search results highlight websites that are linked to popular social media sites.

Taking advantage of profile link building sites can also give you the upper hand. Create a profile, drop a link and gain link juice from the profile creation site back to yours. 

If you happen to choose a profile creation site that’s high quality, creating an authoritative backlink becomes a lot easier. 

Benefits of Profile Link Building

The digital world is constantly evolving, which means that search engine algorithms can change every so often. So, as a digital marketer, what can you do to keep up with the trends and remain on your audience’s radar?

Using profile link building is one way to stay on top of the game. Making sure that your professional accounts and blogs link back to your website has the potential to greatly impact your SEO performance. Take a look at its benefits below:

Help with Brands Promotion

If you’ve been in the digital marketing field for some time now, then you know how challenging it is to establish a loyal customer base. There are lots of competitors that you have to outrank, so raising brand awareness takes extra effort.

Luckily, profile links will help you get on a great start when it comes to brand promotions. When you post regularly on profile creation sites, you are more likely to get noticed by users and widen your target audience.

Bear in mind that every website caters to different viewers and readers. This means that when your website is linked to another platform, you get the chance to expose your business to thousands of users.

It now becomes mutually beneficial for you and the publication website. Since you get referral traffic from the platform, you can promote your brand without spending your hard-earned money.

Chance to Get High-Quality Backlink

There are several off-page SEO strategies that can help you earn high authority backlinks. However, if you want to travel the easier route, profile creation sites may just do the trick. 

Just make sure that you choose dofollow profile creation sites to help you build a natural backlink and increase your SERP rankings. 

Improve Your Website SEO Score

The main advantage of profile link building is that it improves your overall website SEO score. Since Google’s ranking algorithm evaluates the quality of inbound links on your website’s backlink profile, your SEO performance will likely propel your platform to success.

Your site metrics will include domain rating (DR), PageRank (PR) and URL rating (UR), to name a few. 

For example, PageRank counts the quality and quantity of links to roughly determine your site’s relevance. Whatever their calculation is, it will be used to place your site in search results. Domain rating, on the other hand, will determine how authoritative a site can be, running on a scale of 1 to 100.

How to Do Profile Link Building

Profile Creation

There’s no denying that businesses have reaped the benefits of profile link building, helping them gain quality backlinks on high authority sites. What’s more, Google considers this as white hat SEO, so you don’t have to worry about crossing any lines.

For more tips, you can consult an SEO agency to make your profile linking strategies more rewarding.

How do you exactly create a profile link? Let’s take a look at these tips below:

Things to be Included in Profile Creation

Once you’ve found a profile creation site you prefer, make sure that you only include what’s necessary. Here are some of them:

• Enter valid and true information – Some people make the mistake of faking the information they input on a profile creation site. They want to make things more diverse and earn more backlinks, so they end up sharing the wrong details about their brand. If you think this won’t harm your SEO performance, think again.

This is also used as a form of clickbait. Sure, you may get more clicks and attention in the long run, but it’s not worth the risk. 

• Choose a decent profile picture – Keep in mind that people will associate your profile photo with your brand and personality. So, make sure that you choose something professional and presentable, not a dummy picture. It should reflect the authenticity of your site!
• Use branded anchor text – It is recommended that you use branded anchor texts instead of optimised ones. Just make sure that your anchor texts include descriptive keywords that perfectly match the page you’re linking to. 
• Write a short bio – There’s a saying that goes, ‘First impressions last.’ This goes the same with building your profile links. Your readers will always remember how they first viewed your page, so writing a short but straightforward bio is key. 

Describe who you are as a person. What exactly do you do? What are your education, history and past experiences that connect you to your field? Think of it like you’re writing a resume, but a lot shorter. 

• Link freshness – Aside from getting backlinks from authoritative websites, ensuring that your links are fresh should also be your priority. 

Things fade away—this goes the same with SEO, especially with backlinks. Since link freshness is connected to page freshness, Google evaluates the page it indexes through page creation dates and how often the updates are being made. 

• Create custom tabs – This tip works best if you want to highlight additional content, making your profile more content-heavy and increasing engagement. You can add links to your other social media profiles such as Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest.
• Let the indexing process come naturally – Indexing refers to the process where Google crawlers categorise information to display in SERPs. Unfortunately, some people fall into the trap of forcing this process.

To give you a warning, Google has improved its algorithms over the years. Tricking it will just damage the web rankings that you’ve worked so hard for.  

Also, don’t forget to press the save button. The process isn’t usually automated so save your progress manually.

Profile Submission

Once you’re done creating a profile link, it’s time to submit your information. However, remember that just because a platform has helped you earn quality backlinks doesn’t mean that your job is done. 

Contribute to the platform in any way that you can. Try publishing great articles and answering questions posted by your viewers to maintain your presence on the site. 

If you plan on posting promotional messages on the platform, make sure that they are spaced out well so they don’t feel like a page for advertisements. 

Also, don’t forget to verify your account using the email address you used during the registration process. If you fail to do so, your profile creation will remain incomplete.

Dos and Don’ts on Profile Link Building

Profile link building gives you the best results when it’s done effectively. Just like any other link-building strategy, it rewards users with a boost in SEO when they know exactly what they’re doing. This means that when your mistakes pile up, they can damage your brand and credibility.

If you’re just starting in the digital marketing world, this is the last thing you want. 

To help get started, let’s discuss the dos and don’ts of profile link building.

Things to Do 

Make Sure The Company Info is Up to Date

When you begin creating a profile link, put the most updated information about your company or brand. Making regular updates guarantees that you’re sharing the most accurate details with your potential customers. 

Some platforms may even follow strict procedures, avoiding user accounts from making inaccurate changes.

Since it’s not easy to keep your profile links up to date all the time, we highly recommend that you share the responsibility. Add another manager to keep your online presence fresh and finely tuned.

Make Sure The Submitted Information is consistent

Before submitting your information, make sure that everything is connected and consistent. What you want to avoid is confusing your readers, which can put a strain on your online credibility. 

For instance, what you write on your bio should match the records stated on your website. Consistency creates authority and trust, so verify everything first before clicking the button. 

Choose Link Submission Site Wisely

In the ever-changing world of SEO and digital marketing, it’s quite easy to get outranked by your competitors. You might feel desperate to improve your overall SEO performance, and without meaning to, this desperation might end you up in subpar profile creation sites.

When you start searching for these sites, you’d notice that some of them look spammy and unreliable. However, there are also platforms that look so well-designed and sophisticated but are not recommended for link building. 

To pick a good link submission site, use a backlink checker to evaluate its quality. This tool will show you important metrics, helping you determine if a site is worth getting a backlink from. The above image shows the domain rating and the number of referring domains for Gravatar.

The two backlink quality metrics you need to focus on are trust flow and citation flow. Trust flow, for example, is a metric used to analyse how trustworthy a website is. It is measured by the number of clicks a certain page receives from a seed set of verified sites.

On the other hand, citation flow is a score ranging from 0 to 100. It depicts how credible a site might be by looking at the number of sites linking to it. 

Let’s say that you’re a professor that has been published in a well-recognised journal, for example. Your work has garnered so much attention that other scholars mention start mentioning your article in their works. In this case, you’d be hailed as an expert in your field, right? This is how citation flow works as well.

The rule of thumb here is to avoid following sites with a citation flow and trust flow with a score lower than 40. But of course, this will still depend on your SEO needs. Sometimes, it works when you make a profile on a relevant niche site, even if has low metrics.

Things to Avoid 

Spamming Submission Without Checking the Website Authority Score

There’s always this dangerous notion that more is always better. The bad news is, it’s not. This is especially true when it comes to creating profile links. It is much better to sign up for a website or two with high authority domains, rather than create multiple profiles on platforms that are spammy.

Bear in mind that just because you have several profile links on your end doesn’t mean you’ll have better results. Always check the website authority score and make sure that you take advantage of metrics so it meets your expectations. Quality over quantity!

Besides, creating multiple profiles may not be demanding, but it’s exhausting when it becomes too repetitive. You may end up wasting money just to hire someone and let them input the data of your brand to several sites. In worse cases, you’d be disappointed that having 15 profile links did not improve your organic search rankings as you expected.

Do it slowly but surely. Even the most impressive architectural sites were not built in just a snap, so don’t put so much pressure on yourself. Plan your approach, and the rest will follow. 

Not Monitoring the Submitted Link

To make sure that your profile link is performing well, run a quarterly link audit. Download a link profile from online SEO tools or Google Webmaster Tools. Take some time to assess them one by one so you know your good and bad links. Doing this will help you keep an eye on links that can do more harm than good in the long run.

List of Websites to Do Profile Linking

If you’re determined to take a holistic approach toward link building and include profile linking in your strategy, then choosing a good website is the first step. There are several types of profile creation sites you can choose from, such as:

1. Classified sites

Classified sites are mainly used by business owners to raise their brand awareness by selling their products and services on the platform. They are now excessively used to create backlinks, increase exposure and generate more traffic on their business site.

A good classified site is Must Dial. You can post ads without breaking the bank under several categories such as electronics, automotive and jobs, to name a few. Since it has a global reach, you can reap its benefits and watch your SEO performance grow. 

2. Social media platforms

Social media marketing is one of the most popular strategies when building profile links. You just have to create a profile or a page and insert the URL of your website on your chosen platform like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, among others.

However, you can also consider other social media sites like Quora or Reddit. They allow you to post links, although they are typically ‘nofollow’. The good news is that you can still pick up content mentions and referral traffic to boost your rankings.

Let’s look at Reddit. If you post engaging content that would catch the attention of thousands of users, it’s likely to appear on the front page. Some readers on this website are acclaimed journalists, bloggers and marketers who might link to your content

Another profile link creation site you can take advantage of is Pinterest. This is highly recommended for marketers who publish infographics and other visual content. What makes Pinterest ideal is that you get referral traffic along with natural links. This is your chance to be mentioned in ‘best from Pinterest’ articles! 

Other types of profile creation sites also include e-commerce sites and article sites for profile creation.

Here is the list of recommended profile creation sites to help you build backlinks:

• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Listly
• Letterboxd
• GitLab
• Goodreads
• Reddit
• Unsplash
• Gravatar
• Wix
• TripAdvisor
• WordPress
• Instructables
• Amazon

Final Thoughts

Now that you’re pretty well-attuned to the ins and outs of profile link building, are you ready to include this in your link-building approach? Although it belongs to the low-reward category of link-building tactics, it’s low risk and considered a white hat SEO. So, if you don’t have a hefty budget, this is right up your street.

However, if you’re still in the early stages of building natural backlinks, creating profile links is not something you should entirely focus on. 

It should not be the foundation of your link profile. This only works for companies and brands with an already established backlink profile, and they only aim to diversify their links to improve results. 

Link building as a whole will take some time before you get it right, so don’t rush to avoid dealing with issues in the future. If you need help in launching a killer marketing campaign, our agency is more than ready to help. 

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