Getting traffic to your website, and gaining sales from that traffic, depends greatly on where you show up in the search engine results. Rank high and you’ll likely see your website flooded with visitors. Show up on page 23 and you probably won’t. Link Building is a critical part of SEO that every marketer should implement to rank on page 1 in Google search. Wise implementation of Link Building techniques shows search engines that you’re a heavy hitter in your industry and a trusted resource for Internet users.
Every business that has a website should have a solid SEO strategy that includes Link Building techniques. It doesn’t matter if you own a bed and breakfast or a car rental company, a catering business or a ticket sales website, if you want to get noticed on the web you need to rank high in search. If you want to rank high you need to show the search engines you’re a company worth ranking. Building links from other websites to yours, especially from popular websites within your niche or topic, helps you appear higher in search. Think of getting incoming links from big-name websites like having a celebrity friend, or a famous family member, who introduces you to those that matter and helps you network.
How Do You Start Link Building?
Marketers know that Link Building techniques are crucial to ranking high, getting traffic, and boosting sales. But the exact algorithms that Google and other search engines use for analyzing links between websites remain a bit of a mystery. Experience and careful study can absolutely tell a marketer many things about proper strategy for Link Building, such as the need to get backlinks from important websites and the necessity to avoid using spammy tactics to get links. But, the sophistication that search engines employ in link analysis still makes a marketer use best practices based on what’s currently known and it requires constant research because of the ever-changing nature of the Internet.
Link-Related Factors
Getting other websites to link to yours is a key part of good SEO, but not all links are created equal. The value of a link, and the weight it carries in propelling you to the top of search, depends on many factors and it offers varying significance in your ability to appear where your customers can easily find you ahead of the competition. As search engines analyze the web of links from one site to another, which are like streets connecting cities, they evaluate the strength of the path and determine whether it’s a worthwhile journey for a user. Websites that have a lot of backlinks from trusted and high-ranking sites are usually considered trustworthy and worthy of rank themselves. Sites with tons of spam links will likely be looked at as spam sites too.
So, without knowing the exact formula that search engines use to scrutinize links between websites, what can a brand do to build good quality links? There are some link signals that are recognized to be extremely sound and to within good expectation of producing positive results for a Link Building campaign.
Global Links Matter
Getting backlinks from huge, globally popular websites like Wikipedia can be one of the best things to happen to your SEO. Immensely popular sites usually have thousands of links pointing to it, making it rank well. You need partners like this to earn authority and trust with search engines. Brands should also look to major news websites as a potential Link Building partners.
Think Local
Just like Internet users hungry for dinner value local search results for great restaurants, search engines place value on local links. In terms of Link Building techniques, local means closeness in content or subject matter rather than physical proximity. A tour company, for instance, would see a huge boost in rankings if it had backlinks from leading websites also in the travel industry like Expedia or Priceline.
Keep Your Keyword Game Strong
In addition to focusing on getting links from top websites, marketer need to keep focus on keywords any given page. It’s not a zero sum game in SEO. All plays need to be strong, so key in on building links with websites who utilize keyword strategy successfully. They’ll potentially be a great teammate for you if they use anchor text that links to your website and you have solid keywords in use. Having inbound links from popular sites using top-ranking keywords for the anchor text will likely result in a jump in rank for the linked website in terms of that keyword.
This is just the beginning of building a strong link strategy. The amount of research that’s gone into building quality links has provided hours of study, should a marketer want to invest the time to turn this information into gold. Check back with us next week as we summarize more of successful Link Building strategies, and as we point out methods that you should absolutely stay away from.
