Within search engine optimisation, link building is an extremely important tool that can be used to drive traffic towards your website through the most common customer avenue, search engines. This is especially true in competitive industries where other websites are vying for the number one spot on a google, and as such, a strong focus on building links is essential.
In fact, when combined with strong technical SEO foundations, great on-page SEO, excellent content, and a good user experience, link building can be one of the most effective for driving more organic traffic to your website. So lets dive in and see exactly how link building strategies can help you take your website to the next level!
What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks that lead from other websites to your own.
A hyperlink, usually just called a link, is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet.
A search engine use links to navigate the web, moving between the individual pages on your website, and across to entirely different website thanks to links.
Links are intended to be used for a range of reasons, such as a journalist covering a news story and linking to a source, or a blogger who loves their new coffee machine so much that they link to the retailer who sold it to them.
In the simplest terms, this means that building links is essentially getting other sites and web pages to link to your website, increasing the chance that a reader will be redirected to your site. This is known as an external link and is the most basic from of link. Not only will it naturally attract more traffic to your website through increased exposure, external links will also boost your website’s backlink profile, making it rank higher on google and other search engines .
Internal links are another facet of link building where site owners will interlink pages within their own website, in order to boost their search engine visibility and make site navigation easier for uses. Whilst this does not drive more external traffic to your website, it does make your website appeal to users more actively whilst also increasing the chances they stay on your web page as you are ensuring that they will find all the information they require within your site through links. As such, while not being as great a tool as external linking, internal link building strategies are still an effective tool to utilise when designing and maintaining your website.
SEO services use links in a similar style, linking relevant pages, but doing it an strategic way that develops your authority and increases your chances of ranking well and getting traffic from a search engine by boosting the score of your content. Boosting a content score through link building is known as creating ‘link juice’, a term used for describing the benefits that come from inter-linking within and outside of a website.
Why Link Building Is Important For You
The ultimate goal of gaining link juice through external and internal links is to not only raise a website’s search engine ranking, but to also gain links that you didn’t ask for.
This involuntary exposure is a highly sought after outcome when you build links, as it is effectively free marketing for your website, something that you should be striving for and building towards over the long term.
As such, quality link building strategies are essential to the long term health and prosperity of your site, and are akin to great marketing, with the organizations who understand and utilise them being the ones who win long-term.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a technical aspect to building links or that all techniques need to revolve around your product.
In order to fully understand the benefits of link building, it is important that we dive in deep and give you a full grasp on the technical aspects of the process so you can understand exactly how link building strategies can be used to benefit your website.
How Link Building Impacts Search Engines
Links as a ranking factor is what allowed Google to start dominating the search engine market back in the late 1990s.
The link ranking metric was used as part of the overall ranking algorithm, and became a strong signal of website’s quality, as by incorporating links into their algorithm, Google was able to deliver much more useful and relevant search results than their competitors at the time.
Their strategy was so effective because it was based upon the idea that a link could be seen as a vote of confidence for a page.
The theory is that when someone links to another website, they are effectively saying it is a good resource, otherwise, they wouldn’t link to it, much in the same way that you wouldn’t send a friend to a bad restaurant.
This is the premise that link building rests upon and us such, by taking part in the link building process you become more likely to rank well in search results.
Why High Quality Links Matter
Not all links are made equal, and not link building efforts are effective at boosting a website’s search engine rankings. In the early days of SEO Google was open to manipulation because it wasn’t very good at telling the difference between a high quality link and a low quality link.
As such many companies began using a link building strategy which focused on including more and more links to a page, regardless of quality, in an effort to boost search rankings.
Eventually Google caught on and started to actively penalize the rankings of websites who have attempted such overuse of these techniques, often referred to as over-optimization, in their link building.
Despite not knowing the exact structure of the Google search algorithm, the general consensus among the SEO community is that, if all other factors are equal, the volume and quality of links pointing to a page can make the difference between rankings. This directly impacts SEOs, as you need to make sure the link building techniques you choose focus primarily on quality.
In the current web marketplace, the need for quality, relevance, and authenticity of links has never been more important. Some SEO companies will attempt to provide low-quality, spammy link building techniques thatcan work but ultimately only provide short term gains and have a detrimental impact on the web as a whole.
These types of link building tactics shouldn’t be the main strategy for an organization who is building for long-term organic search success. In order to achieve the best results from link building, an SEO link building service will use a combination of high and low quality links to create a natural link ecosystem where external websites link to and from your website for genuine and naturally increased views.
How Should You Begin Building Links?
By Building Relationships
Link building can often involve outreach to other relevant websites and blogs in your industry. This outreach frequently relates to the promotion of something that you’ve just created, such as a piece of content or an infographic.
A common goal of outreach is to get a link, but there’s much more to it than just this: Outreach can help you build long-term relationships with key influencers in your industry, and these relationships can mean that your business becomes highly regarded and trusted.
“link building is essentially getting other sites and web pages to link to your website, increasing the chance that a reader will be redirected to your site”
Linking Externally
We’ve talked about the impact of links on your rankings, but what about the impact of links on referral traffic? A good link from a highly visited website can lead to an increase in traffic, too. If it’s a relevant website, chances are that the traffic is also relevant and may lead to an increase in leads or sales, as well.
In this situation, the value of a link isn’t just about SEO — it’s about customers. If you can place links to your website in front of people who are genuinely interested in what you do, they may well click through.
“if all other factors are equal, the volume and quality of links make the difference between rankings”
Brand building
Good link building can help build your brand and establish you as an authority in your niche. There are some link building techniques, such as content creation, which can show people the expertise of your company, and this can go a long way toward building your brand.
When you do outreach and try to get links to the content, you’re showing your expertise and asking other people in your industry to help spread the word and show others the same.
Forms of Positive Link Building
White hat link building, known more broadly as positive link building is an approach to search engine optimization that aims to drive traffic to a website through ‘organic’ means that enhance users’ experience by boosting the quality of content, broadening its scope through relevant links and so forth.
Unlike the spam-oriented tactic of low quality building, which attempts to drive traffic to a site without adding value to content or enhancing user experience, white hat link building aims to educate users.
Unlike black hat tactics, white hat link building can be labour intensive, requiring website designers and content writers to focus on quality content, then interspersing links to bolster the SEO value of the page.
As such this is a more expensive service due to the increased workload, however the costs more than pay off in the long run.
What is Broken Link Building
One of the most common forms of white hat, high quality, link building is broken link building. An effective, scalable, content-focused link building strategy, broken link building is a great way for SEO organisations to boost your website with link juice, whilst also enhancing the user experience for those who come to your site. This strategy is performed by finding broken links, recreating that broken content, and helping webmasters replace broken links with the corrected links.
Broken link building may perhaps be the most effective, white-hat link building strategy in for any website. In particular, broken link building is appealing because the success of the campaign is directly proportional to how much good you do for the web. You profit only if you create good content to replace lost or abandoned content that webmasters still want to link to. This is the type of strategy that marries high quality link building strategies with the broad appeal and large reach of other, lower quality backlinks, making a cost effective link building strategy that is guaranteed to benefit your website.
So Where Do I Go Next?
If you aim to boost the effectiveness of your website through search engine optimisation then selecting a service that provides link building strategies and services is imperative.
As it can be clearly seen, link building is an extremely important tool that can be used to drive traffic towards your website through the search engines, and if you hope to have any form of improved success with your website then link building is a must.
The best provider of link building services will offer a combination of low quality and high quality white hat link building tactics, that will create a natural ecosystem of links around your website.
This will not only allow it to rank higher on search engines and direct search traffic towards your site, it will also naturally increase the amount of traffic you get coming from external websites that link to your site as it has a reputation for providing a high quality service.
At the end of the day it boils down to the simple fact that link building is the way the web works in today’s algorithm dictated market, and if you wish to have a successful website, then you’re going to need to start building some links! Contact EFOUR digital marketing today on 1300 263 806.