The Importance of Link Building for SEO

Having a fantastic website is one thing but to help build your SEO and please the big search engines, you need to be seen to be popular and to do this, you need to rank well. Links are a powerful signal that shows search engines how popular your site is and they use links as a key indicator in determining rankings. With a high-quality number of links pointing to your website you can significantly improve your position in the top search engines and be found easily by potential clients. 

What is Link Building?

Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. Links are the most common way for users to navigate between pages on the internet and search engines use links to crawl the web and this is how they help to determine your website’s ranking and positioning in their results.

Link building is a process that many SEO professionals find the most complex and difficult and mastering the art of building high quality links is a real skill.

Why is Link Building important for SEO?

Once search engines have crawled a website they are able to extract content for that website and add it to their indexes for ranking. From the index they are able to decide whether a page is of high enough quality to be ranked for relevant keywords and the determiners for ranking are not just the content, though it is of high importance that the content you’re putting out is of high, engaging quality, they also look at the number of links pointing to a page from other sources and the quality of those sources linking to your page. The general rule of thumb with Google and the other search engines is that links from higher quality websites give you a better chance of ranking well in search results.

Strategies for Link Building

There are many strategies for link building which may have varying degrees of success dependent upon, as mentioned, the quality of the websites who link to you. Here are five different strategies you could consider.

Customer Links

If you have partners or businesses you work with on a regular basis or even loyal clients and customers who would be willing to champion your brand than capitalise on this. You could put together partnership badges which link back to your site, or brand ambassador badges for loyal clients. It is very similar to giving away a branded t-shirt or mug, you are getting links back to your site from people who really do want to promote your brand.

Company Blog

Your company blog is a powerful tool for link building and it is actually recommended by Google’s engineers. Blogs allow you to constantly put out fresh and engaging material and if you’re on the pulse then you’re going to be more engaging and you are naturally going to get more people linking to your website and content, as a means of sharing it or commenting upon it or simply highlighting it as a valuable source of information. A blog may also earn you a position on other websites blogrolls and directories, creating more links.

Inspire Viral Sharing for Natural Linking

This kind of content is very clever and takes some skill to put together. Known in the SEO world as linkbait, content which manages to bridge the gap between usefulness and humour or usefulness and truly informational can break the viral barrier. Users see this kind of content and want to share and technically minded users will do the same but through posting links on their own sites rather than simply directing people to your site. High quality, editorially earned links are highly lauded and Google and the other search engines respect them greatly as they help to build trust, authority and rankings potential in your website.

Keep it relevant

The more relevant, newsworthy and up to date content you can offer, the better. Earning the attention of the press, other bloggers and news media can spell real success and earn some high value links with ease. It could be as simple as offering a freebie, an exciting new product or speaking out controversially. The latter of these should be done with care as there can be repercussions and it should only be done in line with your core brand values.

Website visibility is key to ensuring you get the hits you need and then are able to convert these clicks and hits into customers.

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