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Mastering the art of link building, i.e., obtaining hyperlinks from other websites to your page is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, it is also not impossible, and all it requires is a keen focus and sheer diligence on the doer’s part.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a novice or have been doing link building for quite a while because this blog post is for anyone and everyone with even an iota of interest in link building.
The world of SEO is dynamic, and the concept of link building is always
changing in terms of techniques. In this digitized age, building high-quality
links has indeed emerged as the topmost priority. It is crucial to get
familiarized with this concept if you wish to compete, survive, and succeed in
the online world.
You need not fret because we have got everything in this guide covered for you.
This guide will make you sufficiently capable of kicking start and getting it
going in the right direction. Everything might seem a lot to assimilate in the
first place, but we, to the best of our abilities, have tried to present
everything in an easy-to-read and comprehensive manner.
Let’s begin with understanding what exactly is this concept we all call link building.
Link building refers to the practice of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to that of your own. These hyperlinks are a source for users to be able to navigate between or through the pages on the internet. It is important to note that there are several techniques to do link building. The difficulty level in each of them varies. However, SEO experts have a unanimous stand that link building, by far, happens to be the most tedious and challenging part of their jobs. Many SEOs spend a big chunk of their time in pursuit of executing it well enough. It is because of this reason that link building is an art and whosoever masters it gets to lead at the front against both the SEOs and rivals.
An effective link building is a reflection of
social and communication skills, determination, persistence, and of course, the
creative streak. One who does it well means that they have a sound knowledge
when it comes to marketing, sales, and psychology combined.
How did link building become an
essential component?
A business includes links solely for the sake of bringing their brand name at
the top bar. As and when they incorporate links, they are trying to battle and
emerge victorious against their competitors in terms of Google ranking. It is
all because links are precious in search engine optimization (SEO), and they
serve as quite a significant factor in Google’s search algorithm.
Other than this, links play a tremendous role in garnering an audience’s attention. In other words, it helps immensely in audience development. How so? Well, securing a link on another website paves the way for referral traffic as it gives another audience exclusive access to your site. It is how link building helps in engaging and broadening up the scale of the audience.
Furthermore, this linking building, in a
sense serves as social proof as it happens to be a sort of vote of confidence
or you can say, an endorsement, from one website to another. Every link you
secure reflects positivity and helps in developing a healthy relationship. It
is how link building aids marketing and expansion your business and establishing
your brand as the market leader.
Now that
we know the benefits link building brings in let’s explore the strong
relationship that links and search engines seem to share.
Links and Search Engines:
The game of links is stronger than you can think. Read on to know why is that so!
There are two ways in which search engines make use of these links. Firstly, it helps in coming across new pages. Secondly, it helps in determining how well a page should rank in the results.
Links and search engines have a direct link as it is a search that primarily attracts traffic for businesses online.
A search engine extracts the content once it has managed to crawl over pages on the web. Subsequently, it then adds it to its index and decides whether or not its quality is up to the mark to put it at a high rank concerning relevant keywords. A search engine does not determine to rank solely based on the content present but also pays attention as to how many links from external websites are pointing to that particular page under consideration.
In general, the higher the quality of the sites linked to you, the higher the probability of your business of ranking well in search results.
Fun Fact: It was Link Building which helped Google emerge as the top Search Engine and dominate its market back in the 90s. It proved to be super useful and efficient as the link campaign reflected the “vote of confidence” factor we discussed earlier.
Any agency offering link building services and enjoying a decent reputation within the market will school you about how quality speaks for itself when it reflects in the links included. It is because quality should always be over quantity and also for the fact that Google has begun penalizing those websites who seem to resort to low-quality or spammy links.
Speaking of this, let’s delve deeper into what makes a link good and evil in terms of quality.
“Natural” editorial links:
This is the most popular choice amongst the SEO experts. To put it accurately, it is the “holy grail” for most of the professionals in this field. Typically, you do not have to make efforts to get them as they are editorially given by website owners to specify resources. Precisely, it is a citation on the web, which refers that the link will take you to the destination from where the content, data, or idea has generated. This type of connection is somewhat more efficient than having requesting someone to link to you.
Manual “outreach” link building:
This is also quite a common approach to link building and practiced by most SEO experts; especially if you are someone who is kick-starting a business or are relatively new and a small startup. It is one active process of manually reaching out to website owners, bloggers, and influencers to have them a link to you. Make sure you reach out to the ones relevant to your niche and industry for maximum output.
The non–editoriallinks:
Non-editorial links are also known as self-created links and are quite deceiving sometimes. It is looked down upon as it is deemed as fake linking to fool the search engines into believing that a particular piece of content is legit and relevant when, in reality, it is entirely the opposite.
To be able to choose a type of link, it is essential to go through your existing profile. However, we highly recommend opting for the links given in a publication, if you want your website and business to project authority and value.
Link building strategies:
The
following are some strategies that we are going to discuss which you can employ
to get external websites to link to yours.
Create and Promote: First and foremost,
you must have content so compelling that people naturally would want to
collaborate. There is no shortcut to it, and you have to put in effort and time
to churn out the best content to attract viewership.
Reviews: Next, you should pitch your
product or service to bloggers and influencers relevant to your niche and
industry, preferably with a large number of followers and request them to speak
about it on their respective platforms:
Links from friends and family: Lastly,
reach out to people you know within your circle to have them link to your site.
These people could be your friends or even your professional
acquaintance.
To sum up, the sky is the limit when it comes to link building. It demands a
great deal of determination, skill, and patience as it can take a little time
to see the output. Just remember not to lose your calm and do not, out of
desperation, fall for tactics like buying links that stand against the Google
guidelines.