What is Link Building?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the hottest topic in digital marketing today, especially with the billions of users that navigate the online space each day. Nowadays, having an established online presence is crucial for businesses to stay competitive and gain an advantage over other industry players. Ranking high in the search engine results page (SERP) can help you widen your customer base and tap into so much more users, leading to potential increases in conversion rates and sales.
When utilizing SEO for your marketing strategy, it is imperative that you make use of good SEO practices. Part of this includes having high-quality backlinks techniques that allow your site to be recognized as credible, trusted, and reputable. Even with proper keyword optimizations and good quality content, you still need to have good link building techniques in place to establish authority.
Link building is perhaps one of the more technical aspects of SEO, as doing it wrongly can lead to detrimental effects like getting your site banned or delisted. Natural and organic link building for SEO takes time but can have compounded benefits for your business once it takes off. The benefits include improved brand reputation, a wider audience, higher conversion rates, and so many other advantages that will help your business grow and thrive.
What is Link Building?
Before delving into the specifics of this practice, you may be wondering what link building is in the first place. As its name suggests, this technique involves building backlinks or one-way hyperlinks that direct from one site to another. Ultimately, your goal is to have the link to your web page posted on another credible and relevant website. SEO marketers thus have to work on link acquisition to get as many high-quality links as possible for a company’s content.
Link building is a crucial factor in the Google ranking algorithm, making it an integral aspect of SEO strategies today. The more popular your links are, the higher the chances of ranking better than your competitors. Essentially, if you have more external sites linking to your pages, you will likely rank higher for your content. This technique is often what differentiates a business and its SEO strategy from another.
With that said, building and acquiring backlinks must be done correctly for a business to reap its benefits. One of the main reasons why Google prioritizes it as a ranking factor is because it helps establish your site as trustworthy and reliable. However, this will only happen if your links are coming from credible and reputable sites as well.
What Are The Benefits of Link Building?
Link building offers several benefits to any business, more than you may realize at first glance. Aside from the fact that it can help you rank better on SERPs, it can also:
Help You Build Credibility
High-quality links can lend authority and reputation to your site, making it a valuable tool to build your brand and credibility. Google takes into account how authoritative a site is when delivering search results to users, so having more quality links will lead to better overall credibility.
Boost SEO Metrics
Incorporating link building into your SEO strategy can lead to better key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics, such as conversion rates, page ranks, click-through rates, and the like. The more links you have, the higher the chances that users will stumble upon your content from another site and the higher your rank in an SERP. These two can lead to a significant increase in site traffic, which then translates to improved metrics.
Potentially Increase Sales
Link building allows more users to visit your site, thus leading to greater chances of higher sales and returns. The more customers you attract, the more opportunities you get to generate new revenues and profits. There are various methods that you can employ to measure your backlink ROI, so once you have your strategy in place, you must monitor your results continuously to see if it is generating substantial returns.
Lead to Long-Term Benefits
You may have heard about how SEO is a long-term strategy that generates gradual results, and the same principle applies for building links. Again, the process may take time before you start seeing results, but unlike other marketing strategies, you need not shell out continuous investments. Once you have high-quality links, your site traffic will continue to increase over time, allowing you to gain more and more potential customers.
What Makes a High-Quality Link?
By now, you may be aware of the importance of getting high-quality backlinks for your site. However, the question now is: What exactly constitutes a high-quality link? Knowing this before you do anything for link acquisition is crucial to ensure you do not get any bad links.
- Authority: One important consideration to make is the authority of the site that is linking to your page. Naturally, you want to get inbound links from authoritative sites as this lends more credibility to your content. Users are more likely to trust a reputable site and click links found in them, so make sure to be selective when choosing where to place your links.
- Relevance: Another important consideration is the relevance of the site. Say, if your business is related to health and wellness, then you may want to look for sites that promote nutrition, fitness, or other similar things. Even if you end up getting an authoritative link, it may not be as effective if the site linking to your page is not related to what you do or what you have to offer.
- The number of Other Backlinks: When assessing the suitability of a site for link building, you can also check how many other external links the site contains. Ultimately, you want to find an authoritative and relevant site that does not have too many other backlinks, as this can lead to competition. The more backlinks there are, the less focus is placed on your link, leading to users potentially clicking other links instead of yours.
Link building can do wonders for your SEO strategy and business as a whole. Having an effective strategy in place can be a game-changer for your marketing efforts as it can differentiate a good strategy from an excellent one. If you have yet to employ this strategy to your SEO marketing, now may be the time to do so! That said, being strategic is crucial to building quality backlinks, so it is worth familiarizing yourself with the process before you get anything done.
How Can My Content Help Link Building?
You can utilize many strategies to build external links, and though the process takes time, the important thing to remember is to be patient and consistent with the practice. One of the most valuable strategies you can use is content marketing, which comes with loads of potential to build some of the best backlinks. However, publishing just any form and quality of content will not help you with link acquisition. As with any other marketing strategy, content marketing strategies have to be planned and executed well.
To ensure that your content can unlock quality backlinks, you must first ensure that your content is value-adding, informative, and high-quality. It has to be compelling enough to hook your readers, get people to talk about it, and give them an impression on your expertise in your field. If users click a backlink, get directed to your content, and find it interesting enough, they will likely tell this to other people and stick around to check your site for other content in the future.
When it comes to creating content, you need not limit yourself to textual content as you can also opt for visual formats like infographics. Similarly, the topics you write on can range from research articles to blog articles to many others. Whatever strategy you choose to pursue, the important thing is to have rich content that is worth reading.
What Are Some Good Link Building Practices?
Link building can be tricky to navigate since it has to be planned strategically to work in the way that you want it to. In essence, there is a right and wrong way to do link acquisition and link building, and utilizing the wrong practices can have damaging effects. Spammy links, for instance, must be avoided at all costs as these can lead to Google penalties and similar issues. Take note of some of these link building techniques to ensure that you get high-quality links for your site:
Incorporate Internal Links
The common assumption with link building is that it is limited to inbound links, where other sites link to your page or site. However, an equally effective yet underrated strategy is to build internal links, which are links that connect to other pages on your site. Like inbound links, internal links can also be of significant help with your page rankings as Google can use these to discover new pages from your site.
How Google interprets this is that the more internal links that point to a particular page, the more important that page is perceived to be. Thus, establishing that reputation with your web pages that can be critical to your link building strategy.
Find Influencers
Depending on the industry your business operates in, you may be able to find leading influencers who can help promote your company. Having influencers to endorse your products or services can be highly beneficial as the backlinks can boost site traffic and increase brand recognition. Making influencers who have a large following of users part of your target market can be key people who can fuel your link building strategy.
Use an Outreach Strategy
As its name suggests, an outreach strategy involves you reaching out to users in your target market and linking them to virtually anything that you can offer. Naturally, the link has to be high-quality and valuable or something that is worth looking at, so it can be a brand, business, or product and service.
See our post on SEO Link Building Tools for additional helpful information.
Think Link Building Could Help Your Website?
Most websites would benefit from acquiring more high-quality backlinks. So if you have questions about link building, please call our SEO experts here at 1st on the List at 1-888-262-6687.
