As a digital marketing expert, you must be aware that one of the most challenging aspects of SEO is link building, but it also has a huge impact on where your site ranks in the SERPs. Backlinks are a backbone of the web, but not all are created equal. While the right kind of links can enhance your online reputation, the wrong one can totally tank it and it can take a long time to recover.
Here in this guide, I will explain link building strategies to boost your search ranking and take your business to new heights.
However, before moving onto the strategies, let me explain what link building is.
What is Link Building?
Link building in SEO is acquiring hyperlinks from other sites back to your own site. Hyperlink or Link is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Links are the top SEO ranking factors and Google uses them to measure the authority and relevance of your site for particular search terms. There are various techniques for building links and each varies in difficulty. Even the top SEO companies tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts. Many SEO experts spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can put you ahead of other SEOs as well as your competitors.
So how do you build links for SEO? Well, don’t go rushing out to buy some links, that won’t help.
There are two kinds of links you should build. First are earned links, which are links where external sources choose to cite you. Second are created links, such as the links you get in content or your bio when you have a guest blogging strategy.
What Do Links Mean for Search Engines?
There are two ways in which search engines use links: To discover new web pages and to help determine how well a page should rank in their results.
Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. This helps them decide whether the page is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords. Search engines do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites as well as the quality of those external websites. The more high-quality websites that link to your website, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.
Search engines also look at the freshness of the links meaning, links from sites that haven’t linked to you before tend to be more valuable as well as links from sites by unique entities tend to be more valuable.
What Are the Most Important Links you Need to Create?
There are 3 types of links that are important:
- Internal Links – Links on your site to your own content
- Outbound Links – Links from your site to other sites
- Inbound Links/Backlinks – Links from other sites to your site
Links are also categorised as Dofollow – Normal links that pass link authority and SEO rank to the target sites.
Nofollow – Links marked with HTML code to indicate that the website’s owner doesn’t want to pass authority and rank to the target site.
You need to create such links to boost the search rankings.
That said, here the strategies you need to follow to create high-quality links.
Write Guest Posts
Guest posing is the practice of contributing free content to another website or blog in exchange for a link back to your own site. These links can be placed in the author bio section or used to cite information within the body of the post. This has been a popular link building method for long since it’s a win-win for both sites: One gets free content to share with their audience, while the other earns a high-quality link. However, some site owners use this tactic by using poorly-written, unhelpful content to earn links to their site. But, it shouldn’t be that way, you need to follow some guidelines such as write posts for sites related to your niche, check the reputation and credibility of each site, write the guest post for the people and try to connect with them, guest post should have a strong headline and body, add links to your own site using the anchor text of the keyword you want to rank and share the guest post with your audience via social media in order to grow the impact of the post.
Public Relations
To digital marketers, PR might sound more like a traditional marketing strategy and in a technical sense, it is. However, in the context of link building, the term simply refers to the practice of using the same methods to get backlinks that you might use to get press releases. One of the best ways to get that is to get refer as a source in a news article or other online content.
If you choose to use this strategy, remember that do not over-optimise anchor text. This is the practice of stuffing keywords into anchor text unnaturally and it’s one of the factors most likely to trigger a penalty. SEO services company says that when you write press releases, only incorporate links where they make sense, and write your anchor text in a way that flows naturally.
Build Broken Links
Even reputable and well-maintained websites suffer from broken links. Each link on a website originally links to a different page online. However, websites often move their content around, some of those links will eventually break, or point to pages that no longer exist. This not only provides a poor user experience however makes it troublesome for search engines to efficiently crawl and index websites. Broken link building fixes this and is a good way to create valuable links. The strategy involves finding broken links on other websites, identify the content they originally referred to, then offering the site the chance to replace their broken link with a valid link to relevant content. With this strategy, everyone wins and the site owner will have fewer broken links. The visitors will see a lot of updated, useful content and fewer 404s and you’ll get a high-quality backlink.
Replicate Competitors Links
A good way to build quality backlinks in a hurry is to steal them from your competitors. That might sound sinful, but it’s actually not. The word stealing does not refer to any wrongdoing. Rather, it is a description of a way to find opportunities for backlinks by analysing what your competitors are doing and capitalizing on the data you find. The first step to analysing backlinks is to do a simple Google search for an important keyword. For the purposes of this exercise, SEO agency says you should start by writing down the URLs of the top ten websites that appear in response to your search and then choose the ones that provide high-quality links.
Link building remains one of the most effective ways to rank better and drive more traffic that’s also more accurately targeted and by following the above-given strategies you can boost your search ranking.
Author Bio:
The author of this guest post is a lead digital marketing strategist at One Stop Media Agency, one of the leading SEO agency with an experience of over 3 years and likes to write on various topics like Web Design, Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click Advertising, Online Marketing Campaigns, Social Media Marketing Strategy, Link Building and Online PR for B2B professional services. His passion for helping people in all aspects of online marketing flows through within the expert coverage he provides. In his free time, he likes to do fishing and loves to travel exploring the nature.
