Link Building Strategies for SEO

Link building isn’t easy and most of the people struggle for this. A backlink strategy is extremely effective way to strengthen your website’s SEO performance.

Let’s dive into this to learn how to implement this strategy and increase traffic.

What are Backlinks?

A backlink is a link directing from another website to your site. The other terms used for backlinks are inbound links or incoming links. They may seem small, but they hold a great SEO power since they help you establish as a reliable source and make your content valuable too.

To know why backlinks are so important? Look at the Google’s mission statement.

The above statement makes google objective clearer. Google’s goal is to give its user the information they need and further offer them to read on other sites for better understanding. Each backlink that you add to your website acts as a vote of assurance. So more links you have makes your content more credible.

Backlinks are essentially authorizations that can’t be bought without Google penalizing. Having to earn these naturally means your content must, by nature, be of very high quality, informative, interesting and, overall, add value.

Why are Backlinks Important?

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. And it also offers many benefits in regards to organic search. The more popular and authoritative you appear to Google, the more you will:

• Improve search engine visibility
• Increase traffic to site
• Directly influence your rankings
• Strengthen your brand’s reputation
• Build credibility for your website
• Improve EAT

What Is A ‘High-Quality’ Backlink?

By definition, high quality backlinks redirect (link) page visitors to a website through the use of keywords. However, “high quality” gets a bit more in-depth in SEO. In order to evaluate a backlink’s validity and caliber, Google takes several factors into account before putting the HQ crown on a backlink.

Backlinks play an important role in search engine ranking. Google’s page ranking is a formula that measure the importance of a page based on the links pointing at the domain. It doesn’t only consider the volume of links to a page, but it also analyses the page that shared the link. Pages that are seen as more important and hold more authoritative value will cast a stronger vote, so the backlink will mean more. These links are seen as ‘high-quality links’.

There are many aspects that are taken into consideration when cracking what it means to count as a high-quality link.

1. Relevance of the Site

The most important thing is what sites are linking to your website. The relevance of the site that you link to your content is the key point.  For example, if you published content about ways to care for your indoor plants, which was then shared by botanist bloggers and other websites related to nature and gardening, Google would know that your content serves a purpose in your industry’s monarchy and the links are legit.

However, if the links pointing at your content were from a technology website and a blog about food, Google would know something was inappropriate and feature less value to the links.

2. Authoritative and Trusted Source

Without a doubt the utmost quality of a high-quality link is the trustworthiness and the authority of the site. Just like we trust the news channel instead on believing a random guy. Similarly Google will trust sites with higher domain authority than those with low ones.

For example: BBC News has an extremely high Domain Rating and has an incredible total of 6.77 billion links pointing to it. If your site receives a backlink from the BBC, your link would hold a great power as BBC is a trusted site.

3. Link Placement

Where you have placed your link? It matters a lot. You will want your link to appear naturally in the main body of the text rather than in the footer or sidebar. You want the link to places editorially and naturally.

The main point of link building is sharing your page with people who have a genuine interest in it, and so the person placing the link should genuinely want to, and see that it adds something to their content.

4. Anchor Text

Anchor text is the word which includes the link to your site. Google also consider anchor text hence, if your link text is over optimized with keywords and looks spam this is not a good sign for Google and your reader too.

Though, if one of your target keywords appears naturally in the anchor text, this can be beneficial. Overall, you want it to be descriptive and relevant but not stuffed with keywords.

How Do You Get Backlinks?

Up till now you must have understood why backlinks are important. Backlinks are time-consuming and difficult to obtain. In fact a study shows 94% of all the content online doesn’t have links at all. Luckily there are tried and tested strategies and techniques you can adopt so you can add backlinks and enjoy the success that backlinks bring to your site.

Before anything you need to conduct some homework to understand your audience. You’ll have to get answers to some question like; What websites do they currently visit? and What content do they engage with?. Then you can carry out a backlink audit of your competitors’ websites, and find a list of sites who are in your niche and already have linked to websites similar to yours.

If your competitor is a very well-known brand with a big following, and you’re just starting a small business, it’s unlikely you will be able to match their success of link quality immediately. However, you can work your way up by starting with lesser-known sites and blogs that are still highly relevant and have decent domain authority.

Link Building Techniques

Let’s discuss some link building techniques to make your content strong.

1. Linkable Assets

Creation of linkable asset is the most well-known and well-received method. This is the content that you created which is shareable and an interesting content will add value as a result it will be naturally shared on their websites.  A linkable asset should offer further understanding into your industry and will help to reaffirm the expertise of your site.

Linkable assets can take many forms. Including (but not limited to):

• Blog posts and Surveys
• Infographics and videos
• Tools
• Case studies
• List Posts
• Statistics
• Original Research

To create your linkable asset, you’ll need to consider what is currently missing in the content of other sites.

2. Link Outreach

Once you have your list of target sites and linkable assets, it’s time to get your content out there. It looks simple, contact your target site and ask them if they are interested in sharing your content.

At this point it’s important to understand that you just don’t want a link off them instead you are willing to build a relationship with them. Therefore, you need to create a personal message to the owner of site or someone who is looking after the blog to convince them how interesting your content is and what value it can add to their site.

However, you can use a similar script to reach out to each site, but take the time to understand who you are messaging and to find reasons and opportunities where your content can be shared on your site, and why the site’s audience will enjoy it.

3. Link Round ups

Link roundups are a powerful method of networking and a great link building strategy. A roundup post is simply an article which features a recommended list of products or websites with a link to each one. It’s a link building best practice because it goes beyond the links.

4. Guest Posting

Many people use guest posting to quickly build up backlinks with offering anything in the form of quality content and real value. A guest post should be a very high-quality piece of content and posted on a website that is highly relevant to yours. Guest blogging maybe a great way to get links, but if you do it in the wrong way, it can lead to the search engine penalizing your blog. Before writing a guest post for a specific site, first you should:

• Study the blog’s audience
• You should study the popular posts
• Also, study the blog’s user experience

It’s important to understand the audience that you are willing to write for as it makes easier to create the content that will earn you links from that audience.

5. Link Reclamation

The easiest of link building techniques is to contact the website and ask if they can include a link to your site. As their content already mentions you, chances are they’ll be more than willing to include a link. Just ensure it’s a link and that follows the best practices in regards to high-quality links.

How NOT To Get Backlinks

Backlinks are important to SEO. There are many people who have tried to manipulate Google’s algorithms in order to gain more. However, Google will reprimand these methods, which can result in your rank falling or even can be removed from Google’s index altogether.

These Methods should be avoided:

• Paying for links. This includes in terms of money and free products in return of a write-up which includes a link.
• Excessive link exchanges, i.e. don’t incorporate an “I’ll link to you if you link to me” style scheme into your backlink strategy. Google will see through these as merely linking for the sake of it.
• Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links.
• Automated services that create links to your site.
• A large scale marketing campaign including guest blogs with keyword-heavy anchor text.

Conclusion

It might be crystal clear now that “How much link building is important”. They are fundamental in any website’s SEO strategy and success in search result pages until and unless you build your links in the correct way.

Another important part is getting trusted and quality links because it’s no longer about the number of links –  it’s the quality that matters, and one natural link after another will add up to achieve that quality. Keep Google’s mission in mind and follow our tips carefully.

Hope this article will help you in link building strategies for SEO.