Post Menu and Details.
- What Is Link Building?
- How to Earn Backlinks
- The Don'ts in Link Building
- How Does Link Building Help My Business?
Words: 874
Reading time: ~3 minutes
The past few decades have seen exponential growth in the digital world. Nowadays, business owners have to adapt their business practices to fit the digital world to reach more consumers. When learning about digital marketing, the terms SEO and link building are thrown around a lot. But what are link building and SEO specifically? And why is it so important for your business?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of improving a website’s visibility in a search engine’s unpaid results. Websites try to rank at the top of organic results for certain keywords in search engines like Google by going through this process.
Generally, pages that rank higher in search engines will have more organic traffic that potentially translates into sales. Next, we’re going to explain what link building is and how to approach it.
What Is Link Building?
First and foremost, the most important factor to consider when going through the SEO process is link building. Why? Because it helps you rank for competitive keywords or phrases.
But that’s not all! Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page back in your website. It is both a scientific and creative process. These hyperlinks are also known as backlinks.
While there are different backlinks, such as created and purchased backlinks, the main focus is on earned backlinks. Earned backlinks are usually acquired by contacting other website owners and asking them to link to you.
How to Earn Backlinks
If you wonder what the best way to earn backlinks is, you have come to the right place. Earned backlinks are the hardest method of link building, but it is the most rewarding type. There are two categories you should look at when considering earned backlinks: relevance and authoritativeness.
The first category to look at its relevance.
Choose Relevant Sites
When creating content for your website, you want to link to other relevant websites to the topic you are writing about. Likewise, you want websites or pages relevant to your topic linking back to you.
For instance, if you have a blogpost reviewing an amazing air fryer, you want a page with a related topic such as “Best Kitchen Appliances to Have” versus a webpage that focuses on the topic of shaving products to link with.
Find Sites with Authority
According to Chris Bower, CEO of an SEO agency, Detroit Internet Marketing, “Always look for authoritative websites. Authoritativeness represents the “link power” a webpage has. It is better to have a webpage with a higher link power link back to you than one that does not. Even lower ranking sites in Google might have a ton built up authority and send great signals for Google to interpret.”
Google does not provide a website’s authoritativeness score. Still, other organizations such as Ahrefs TV came up with metrics such as domain rating and URL rating to determine the level of authority a webpage has. They do a great job explaining the metrics and how they help build a webpage with strong authority.
Now that you learned the categories to consider when choosing a web page to link with, let’s consider what your content needs to be considered linkable.
1. Must-Have Attributes in Linkable Content
The 3 attributes listed below are essential to check off if you want your content linked to other websites.
2. Non-Commercial Content Goes a Long Way
If you are exclusively trying to sell something, people are less likely to link back to you if there is no compensation. Commercial content focuses on product features and overselling the product versus answering the questions potential customers have.
3. Content needs to be helpful
Content that is easy to read and with factual information from trusted sources is more likely to be linked. Always be sure your content is helpful to the audience you are targeting!
4. Have a Personalized Pitch for Domain Owners
Focus on how linking your webpage to their own will provide them with value. This mutual value-added and strong relationship building increases the chances of strong link building. Think of it as a digital Business-to- Business Word-of-mouth.
The Don’ts in Link Building
There are many ways you can successfully achieve link building, but there are also several actions you should try to avoid. Here is our top list of DO NOTS when it comes to building links:
- Excessive reciprocal linking
- Reaching out to all possible domain owners or editors
- Including links with over-optimized anchor text
- Adding a link to a web directory to get a backlink
- Buying links
So, why should we avoid these small actions? Even though they may seem small and harmless, these DON’Ts can have a very negative effect on your ranking in search engines.
How Does Link Building Help My Business?
Now that you learned how to improve your rankings through link buildings, it is important to answer the question: why does it matter?
As previously stated, the exponential growth of the digital world is making a big chunk of consumers hard to reach if the company does not invest in digital channels. This growth has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic, with consumers doing most of their purchasing online.
Search engine bots will rank your website better if the tips outlined above for proper link building are followed. With a better ranking in organic results, consumers are more likely to visit your website, trust it, and turn prospects into customers.
Thank you for reading!