Link building campaigns are a fantastic way to improve your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO). Strategically placing links around the internet that will lead your audience back to your website draws attention to your site and presents your company as an industry leader. But you can’t just stick a link anywhere you choose. Going about your campaign the right way will help you stay on Google’s ‘nice’ list and keep your website moving up in the rankings.
What Is Link Building?
Link building uses different marketing strategies to create hyperlinks that lead to your website. The purpose of the hyperlinks is to improve your website’s search engine visibility so your customers can easily find your site on the internet. Common marketing strategies are content marketing and blog posts, leveraging social media platforms, and broken link building.
Why Is Link Building So Important?
Link building is a crucial factor that Google, and other search engines, use when ranking your web page. The more high-quality links that are linked to your website, the higher your site gets ranked and the easier it is for your audience to find.
It sounds simple enough, but it isn’t as easy as asking your friend to put a link on their website for you. Google will look at items like:
- The authority of linking pages. Are the pages that are linking to your site relevant in your industry? And are they trusted by other businesses and consumers?
- SEO optimisation. Does the site that is linking to you have a solid SEO strategy of its own? Do they understand how the internet and ranking of webpages works?
- Anchor text. Is the text that contains your link relevant to what it is being linked to? For example, if you are linking to a page selling electronics, does your text have words related to that product?
Ensuring you have quality links is just as important as having the links stretched across the internet.
Finding and Creating Quality Links
Using a variety of link building strategies will get you the quality links you need to move your webpage up in the search engine rankings. It can be time-consuming, but natural link building will keep your website near the top of the rankings and keep you in good graces with the search engines. Here are a few ways to start creating the quality links you need.
- Content creation & blog posts. Create content that people will enjoy reading and sharing, and then tell people about the content. Peers will naturally start sharing your content and linking to it so others can find it.
- Social media. Look for the influencers that can help you. Start creating content that will interest them and get their attention. Respond to their posts and chat them up. Find ways to answer their questions by linking to your website or blogs.
- Broken link building. Install an extension that will help you search for broken links, like Check My Links. Then scour the internet for pages with quite a few links. The installed extension can tell you if there are any broken links on the site. If so, email the person who runs the page, create a relationship with them, tell them about the broken links, and suggest a replacement link — like yours.
- Links from partners and peers. Ask your colleagues and peers to link to your site. You can often return the favour for them and create links that work for both companies.
Putting together a well-thought-out link building campaign takes effort. Don’t use shortcuts, like buying links, or you will destroy all your SEO efforts. Stick to Google’s guidelines and be smart about how you work through your marketing campaign. Work with an SEO company to train your marketing team on the right way to find quality links. Don’t take chances you’ll later regret.
