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You can grow your business with digital marketing. One of the key passive ways to generate leads, a website, cannot function by itself to draw potential customers into the sales funnel. Once you decide to begin digital marketing for your business, you need a marketing plan. Some businesses wait until they have a website to create their marketing plan, but others create the plan first. The latter is recommended.
The Basics of Link Building
While the strategies used in marketing plans vary, one must have, link building can quickly help a website build traffic. It provides one of the leading methods of search engine optimization.
Link building refers to the process of hyperlinking to and from another website. When search engines crawl the web, they follow each link on each website and catalog them. They also analyze the connections. When a search engine like Google crawls a website, it also analyzes the quality of the websites connected via backlinks. Backlinks to high-quality sites raise the search engine rank of your website.
Benefits of Backlinks
When search engines crawl and extract the webpage’s content, it indexes them. If the page exhibits high quality, the search engine ranks it for relevant keywords. While that’s a key enough benefit alone, six other reasons exist to use backlinks.
- Using backlinks improves search visibility.
- Links are a necessity.
- Using backlinks increases your brand’s exposure.
- Backlinks help with other online marketing strategies.
- Using backlinks fosters new link relationships.
- Link building sends search engines positive signals.
How Search Engines Look at Site Links
When you link to a website or a website links to you, search engines consider that a vote of confidence. In essence, you are saying you consider that site a good resource.
Since optimizers began trying to manipulate page ranks with excessive links, Google and Bing began constantly updating their algorithm. They decreased the value to links in business directories and increased the value in high quality blogs and businesses that link to one another.
How to Get Started with Link Building
If you’re handling the marketing for your own small business, you may not know how to get started. It’s easier than you might think. You have a number of techniques you can use to link build, and most are free. The free options are actually the best ones to use.
- guest blogs,
- engaging videos,
- directory submissions,
- blog comments that encourage the following,
- infographics,
- publishing high-quality content and informing bloggers,
- bookmarking submissions.
With respect to guest blogs and getting your blogs referenced by other bloggers, you can leverage tools that help. Get started with link building with PureLinq, a tool that helps you find and locate appropriate bloggers to contact for link exchange. While you can buy links, search engines have begun incorporating methods to recognize purchased links.