The current world situation is having a vivid impact on consumer intent and behavior which is why many businesses are shifting their focus online. Dominating search is becoming a priority and SEO is turning into a coveted strategy, for good reason. It’s the most cost-effective way for your business to stay afloat and thrive through an economic downturn.
While most Local SEO strategies focus on on-page efforts, one technique that isn’t really hoarding the spotlight but has a heavy impact on building up website authority is Link Building.
So, what is it?
The whole point of link building is to increase search engine visibility. It does this by building hyperlinks or backlinks from one website to yours. While optimizing your on-page content is crucial for your website to be easily digested and ranked by Google, Bing and other search engines, it isn’t enough.
Google developed another way to measure the importance of a website by releasing Google PageRank (1998) and Google Penguin (2012), these algorithms work by counting both the number and quality of links to your website or page –the result is then used to judge how important your website is. This initially translates to the search engine logic that because many high-quality websites are linking to your website, it means it’s important, therefore, should be placed higher.
Another way that search engines use links from link building is for them to discover new web pages and they prioritize high authoritative websites for this.
Now, it’s not just about your content but how many high-quality websites link to yours. How do you determine a high-quality website? Here are the important factors that will let you know if the website linking to you will help you build online authority:
1. Website Authority or Domain Authority
The quality of the site that’s linking to your page is important because not all sites are weighed equally by Google. For example, a link from nypost.com isn’t the same as a post from a random website. Naturally, if a website like nypost.com links to your website, it will have a major impact on your search rankings. In a sense, it’s like how a high authority website will vouch that your website has high authority too.
There are many online tools you can use to measure a site’s authority like Moz’s Domain Authority tool. Moreover, it will also be obvious in most cases if they are popular sites, review sites that are commonly used, and if they have professionals or experts in the field.
The page connecting to your website also plays a huge role in adding value to your rankings. Moz also developed a tool that will allow you to know how high a specific page ranks on the search.
3. Relevance to your website
How relevant the content of the page is to your website is also important. Google also pays attention to this so make sure that the site that’s linking to you is related to your business or the content that you’re promoting.
Well, SEO services are becoming more popular because high-quality links are not that easy to acquire, and high-quality content is not that easy to produce. These two are the key factors that will boost your link building program.
How do you get other websites to link to yours? To be honest, there isn’t any easy link building tactic out there. Here are some link building methods you can start with today:
- Content marketing. This is a method where you create content that has value to people or a certain niche and that other people can link to.
- Outreach. One of the most common link building tactics out there. The process involves reaching out to people who can link to your content or website. The key here is to contact people who are also targeting the same audience as you or who frequently use keywords that you use. The page, content or product that you’ll be linking will be automatically click with their audience too.
- Broken link building. This is an effective tactic that aims to reconnect or relink broken links or links that you already had in the past but no longer works. Essentially, you’re replacing broken links with a new one.
- Blog commenting. Most probably the simplest form of link building. This is posting blog comments that will drive traffic to your website. There is a subtleness and art that you should adapt when commenting for link building. It’s important to not bombard sites with comments since it will be seen as spamming and your account can get penalized or terminated.
When posting comments, write ones that add value. Make it at least a paragraph long and sign it with your name. This way, it will be seen as legitimate, adding in an email will let people contact you if they need to.
- Reviews and mentions. You can write a review about a product or service that’s related to your business and send them out to a site through an email explaining your intentions. Not only will this drive traffic to your website but will also boost your credibility.
- Mentions. This is any kind of online reference to your brand or product. It can be through social media posts, blogs, articles, product reviews and even forums. For this kind of tactic, you should have a brand monitoring plan that will let you create more link building opportunities, as well as find and detect unlink mentions which will then build you more links.
If you’re not too savvy with SEO, that includes link building and other potential digital marketing services that go along with it, there are agencies you can partner with to ensure that you’re doing the right thing.
At this point, you should already have an idea of the value that link building can bring to your online efforts, that makes it a crucial addition to your SEO strategy. The main goal here is to build relevance and increase traffic to your website. So focus on sites that not only have high authority but more on having the same audience as you do. With link building, the key is to always have useful and relevant content, this way, you’ll catch the eyes of your target audience — eventually driving traffic to your site.
