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How To Use Link Building

– Contributed content –

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17 July 2020. Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. All business owners and marketing professionals should be looking to build links to drive referral traffic back to their website and increase their site’s authority.

Why should you look to build links? Google’s algorithms are complex and always changing, but backlinks always remain an important part of how a search engine decides which sites will rank for which keywords. Building links is one of many tactics that can be used in SEO, as links are a signal to Google that your site is a resource of quality worthy of citation. Sites with more backlinks tend to rank higher.

You know it’s important to do, but there is a right and a wrong way to build links back to your site. If you want your site to have long-term viability, then you should only engage in natural link building, meaning that you earn links, rather than buying them or achieving them through tactics that are manipulative (often known as blackhat SEO, which can get your site banned from search results).

Natural, organic link building is a difficult process that can be very time-consuming. Not all links are created equal. A link from a website with good authority, like the Financial Times, will have a bigger impact on your SERPs rankings than a link from a small or new website. However, high-quality links can be hard to come by.

To get it right, you need to build quality links that will improve your organic rankings without violating any of Google’s guidelines.

Why link building is important for SEO

Link building is very important, as it is a major factor in how Google ranks web pages. You can improve the rank of your site by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to your pages.

Imagine that you own a site that promotes event planning services. You’re competing with another local event planning business. One of the ranking factors that Google will look at when determining how to rank your respective pages is link popularity.

Having more links back to your site is a good thing, but is only the basic idea. There are other key factors to consider, such as:

  • The trust and authority of the linking pages
  • The SEO and content optimization of the respective sites
  • The anchor text of the incoming links

The more important concept to grasp is that as you’re more likely to have your content rank highly for keywords that you are targeting if you can get other websites to link to your pages.

Link building strategy: How to get other sites to link to you

There are a number of different link building strategies used to get external websites to link to yours.

  • Content creation and promotion. Create high-quality content that is compelling and unique, and people will naturally want to reference and link to it, and hopefully tell people about it. You will have to spread the word yourself first before you can expect anyone to find your content and link back to it, so go hard on promoting your content after you’ve published it.
  • Reviews and mentions. Put your product, service, or website in front of influencers in your industry. This could be popular bloggers or those with large social media followings.
  • Links from friends and partners. Ask people that you know and work with to link to your site. Relevant matters, so only ask those with relevant sites that are in the same general industry or niche as your site, which will have more value than any links from any random, unrelated site.

Building a lot of links can take a while, but you will get there if you’re patient. Don’t be tempted to engage in shortcuts like buying links. This is against Google’s guidelines and can be devastating for your SEO. Don’t take the risk. If you’re not sure where to start, bring in expert backlink services to rank your website.

Build links with internal link building

There is an easy but often underrated way to build links to the pages that you want to improve the search engines rankings for. It’s a method that you have total control over too. It’s internal link building.

If you’re attempting to get a web page to rank, there are a few key factors to consider.

  • Anchor text. One of the most important things that search engines take into account when ranking a page is the text in the link that the linking page uses to talk about your page. For example, a link for the event planning business that uses the text ‘event planning business’ will help it to rank highly for the keyword phrase, whereas a link that is just the name of the business used to link to the website won’t have the same ranking advantage for the more specific phrase.
  • Quality of the linking page. Another factor that will be taken into account is the quality of the page that links to you. Search engines allow links from high-quality, trusted pages to count more in boosting rankings than less trustworthy pages and sites.
  • Page the link is aimed at. In many cases, when people talk about your site, they will link to the home page. This makes it hard for individual pages to rank as highly, as it’s much tougher for them to generate their own link equity.

These elements are all things that you cannot control when trying to get other sites to link to you. However, you can control all of those things when you link to your own pages from your own content. You can:

  • Decide what anchor text to use
  • Decide which page to link to
  • Make sure that the quality and content of the linking page is high

Building external links to your site is very important, but if you focus some of your efforts on optimizing internal links, then you can build quality in-bound links with rich anchor text to appropriate pages, which give you a ranking boost for free, that you have control over.

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