You may have a great website with excellent content, but the competition is intense in the online space. If your website isn’t displayed in the first few pages of Google search results, the chances of your customers finding your business online are slim.
To up your SEO game and increase your website’s ranking, there are several key strategies you need to adopt. Link building is one of them.
What is Link Building
By definition, link building is an SEO method that helps you acquire traffic to your website from other websites. When other websites place a link of your site on their content, you gain a backlink—which is the ultimate goal of link building.
Think of it as a recommendation. It helps promote your website plus gain a higher ranking on search engines.
Getting backlinks from high Domain Authority (DA) websites is good practice. Google sees this as a sign of good credibility and tags your content as trustworthy as per search engine algorithms.
How It Impacts SEO
Similar to human cognition, a search engine uses an algorithm to help determine a website’s reliability and relevance.
To do so, it uses several processes to make an informed decision, one of which is using crawlers. A crawler is a way for search engines to navigate across the web through:
- Discovering new web pages
- Determining how well a page should rank in a particular search result
Once the crawler lands on your website or page, it will check the number of backlinks your website has generated.
Your own domain authority will depend on the DA of the site where your backlinks appear.
While the search engine also looks at the relevance of the content, the higher page ranking usually goes to those websites that have:
- The most number of backlinks
- Backlinks from trustworthy and high DA pages
- Optimised anchor text for links from these sources
How to Earn Quality Backlinks Online
Link-building for the website is a lot like marketing.
Once you have optimised your website’s content, it’s time to spread the word by earning quality backlinks.
An efficient and effective link-building approach is to reach out to other websites that aren’t direct competitors but credible names in your chosen industry. Here’s how you earn backlinks across various platforms:
Guest blogging or posting
Reach out to reputable and relevant websites to contribute a guest article. Guest posting on authority sites help you solidify your online credibility while also generating backlinks to your site.
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Promote your content on social media
3.48 billion people use social media—take advantage of this enormous opportunity. Having an updated social presence helps you to get in touch with your target audience and win them over to link back to your website.
Register your business to online directories
Business directories like Google My Business, Yelp, and Bing Places, put your business out there.
Listing on these platforms will immerse you to a wider audience. Not only will doing so add to your credibility. You’ll also earn backlinks from these authority sites, winning both users and search engines.
Partner with businesses and organisations
Partnerships get you featured on other websites. Collaborate with brands whose products or services complement yours.
Reach out and see if you can discover synergies to help each other. This approach will help boost your credibility and reach while winning the right allies.
Influencer outreach
Start by identifying the top experts, reviewers, and influencers in your niche and see if they’re interested in speaking about your brand. These people have a huge following that you can tap on.
Make sure to collaborate with those whose values and principles mesh with yours. It’s easy for influencers to preach about your brand, but it’s difficult to fool followers.
Create unique and compelling content
Content marketing and link building aren’t far off concepts, so it’s easy to implement both simultaneously. If your content has a strong appeal with the audience, it can help you get noticed and even featured on other websites or online publications.
Start by creating blogs, whitepapers, ebooks and other materials that will help establish your expertise in the market.
An effective link building strategy makes use of a combination of ways that fit into your overall content marketing, SEO, and brand strategies.
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Start building a strong backlink portfolio
Link building is one of the most effective SEO methods. It helps not only to improve your website’s ranking, but also ensure that your brand voice reaches a wider audience.
When done right, it increases your domain authority and ups your ranks on Google search pages. All the tech talk aside, it simply shows readers that your brand is worth trusting and engaging with.
But there’s much more you can do to improve your website’s ranking. Check out our Content Hub for more articles about SEO.
