Website today is one of the most critical marketing aspects. Even if you promote your business on social media or via newsletters and web push notifications, you should probably link to the content on your page. When potential clients search for products and services, they usually look in search engines. A page needs to be responsive, intuitive, aesthetic and attract clients. It’s some kind of business card nowadays, and based on it clients can make decisions crucial for cooperation.
For example, if contact information or product description is hard to find, a customer can leave the page and check out its competitors, as it can be frustrating to spend a lot of time on such things and Internet users are used to instant answers. That’s why user experience is significant to interact with potential clients.
OK, let’s say you already have an excellent page. Now you’re probably wondering how to make it visible? How to get traffic to your website? How to deliver your page to your audience? The answer is link building, and you’ll find more on that just below.
What is link building?
You probably heard of it if you work in marketing, but you need more details. Here they come. Link building is a process of acquiring hyperlinks to a company’s website on other pages and portals.
Actually, links between pages are the fundamental aspect of the Internet, as they created a web with connections. Search engines also operate on the links. The point is to implement your link on other pages. It should be placed in the code so that on the website the visitors only see the anchor, which is clickable and direct them to your site. It’s the best of the anchor is also a keyword popular in searching, so that Google crawlers can identify it. There are many techniques of link acquiring, and we’ll explain some of them later in this text.
How does link building help SEO?
SEO managers use a metaphor of votes when it comes to explaining the magic behind backlinks. Every link to a page is a vote of confidence for your website, which proves that it’s relevant and authoritative, so search engine crawls will value it more. That’s the point of SEO activities – to get a website as high as possible in the results so it will be more visible for potential customers and easy to find. Why do you need votes? Search engines push up websites which brings value for the Internet users so that the ranking of pages can be the most relevant to search queries. Google’s algorithm is designed in the way to favour the best results from the human perspective.
It’s only profitable for your website when your links are high-quality. Otherwise, they don’t give you any additional value, i.e. from the Google perspective. High-quality links come from pages which are relevant and valuable for the audience. They can be cited a lot, also by other high-quality pages, provide helpful content etc. Such a link will pass some of its „power” to your website; it’s called „link juice”.
Internal links on your website also help SEO. You shouldn’t overuse this technique, but it’s good to navigate between different subpages. For example, in one blog post, you can refer to another by the context as well as a hyperlink.
Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking signals so that search engine strongly pays attention to that factor. It’s an assumption that valuable website is probably a source for many other pages. If someone links to your site that means that it’s trustworthy for visitors. Remember not to acquire low-quality links, because they won’t be helpful for you; moreover, you can be banned by Google for using such techniques to get better results in their system.
What are the types of links?
You already know there can be high and low-quality links and the difference has been explained above. There are external and internal links too. But there’s also another distinction – dofollow and nofollow links.
The first type is every link implemented in the code. Dofollow means that it’s relevant for search engines – their crawlers follow those links and recognise them as votes of confidence mentioned before. So if they are high-quality links, they help a website to be placed higher in rankings.
Nofollow links work as the opposite. They’re not following by search engines, which means they have absolutely no influence on the rankings. The difference is in the code (rel=”nofollow” appears additionally next to the backlink). That doesn’t mean that nofollow links are harmful or useless. They just don’t help in link building, but they still refer to your site.
Moreover, search engines check what types of links you publish on your page. If you only have dofollow of nofollow links, it’s not seen natural. You should have both of those types.
How to check if your link on not your page is dofollow or nofollow? With a right click open the examine window and look for a „nofollow” phrase. A dofollow can be implemented, but this phrase in the code is not necessary for a link to be dofollow – every link is a default a dofollow link. Make sure that links your partners publish on their websites are dofollow as you established.
What are link building strategies?
Like in every other area, there are many ideas and techniques with the same goal. Here you can find a list with brief descriptions of some suggestions that you can take into account while planning SEO activities.
Blog on your website.
You should create articles that are highly valuable to your audience. Take a moment to look at your product or service, a brand from your customers perspective. What would they like to know about your company? What are their problems and how you can try to solve them? What kind of content is desired by them? Don’t produce only texts about your products, think more extensive about your industry and so on. Then, distribute this piece of content via social media, e-mail marketing, web push notifications etc. Maybe someone doesn’t know yet that he/she needs your product. Remember to optimise your posts in the SEO context. Add an appealing title, relevant keywords and high-quality links. If your blog posts are valuable, they can become a source for other pages which will link to your site. Go viral!
Guest posts.
It’s an unpaid exchange of the articles between pages. It’s a win-win situation because you deliver valuable content and you get a link to your site. Depending on your business you can offer free access to your tool in exchange for guest posts etc. There are many ways to cooperate between companies. Obviously, direct competitors usually don’t support each other, but collaborating with a firm working in the same industry but which specialises in a different aspect could be vital. I.e. two (or even more) companies which offer solutions for marketing automation campaigns can create together a toolbox and use joint forces to distribute such article.
Sponsored articles.
Similar to guest posting, but you have to pay for publishing an article. It’s also called native advertising. It can be highly effective, as it supposed to be unintrusive and not annoying as ads could be for the readers. The most significant advantage is that you can find your audience on the chosen portals, as they match your company’s interests. How to find such website for sponsored articles? Online tools come as a support (i.e. Whitepress.net, Linkhouse.co, Markerly, PRnews.io). They’re the platforms which help marketers to look for the most accurate publishers. You have to specify your requirements like a topic, trust flow, number of viewers, localisation and price. In a few seconds, you get the list of the best portals, that you can contact via the system. Manually that would take ages to get such results.
Automatic backlink builder.
You can create backlinks automatically thanks to tools which are designed for that. Usually, they are free if you want to exchange links with the same number of sites, but you can also buy more backlinks for a fee. Using this tools can be risky, but their providers claim they check if links are valuable enough. There are automatic measurements like MozRank that are taken into account but also manually they look up those links. You need to set up a few requirements; the most important is the topic of the page – it should be relevant for your business. In return, you need to publish some links too on your website. You can eliminate some of them if you for some reason don’t want them on your page. The system automatically publishes those links on both yours and another website. So basically everything’s happening without your effort. Be careful and take some time to choose a trustworthy tool that other SEOs recommend.
Forum activity.
Successful can be an interaction with your audience. Take advantage of the forums and groups on social media (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn) where your target group seek for information. Answer helpfully and link to your page or blog posts. A particular social network for such actions is Quora – a Q&A platform. It characterises high-quality of answers as moderators can ban users for advertising. Moreover, you can comment on forums, online shops, other platforms. Always try to bring some value to the discussion. How to find where Internet users talk about your products or industry? Use Internet monitoring which will list those places and keep you updated.
There are a lot more techniques then presented before. Don’t hesitate to try many of them (preferably all of them) and analyse results to find out which one works the best for your business. No matter which strategies you’ll choose focus on the quality of links. SEO effectiveness doesn’t only depend on backlinks. It’s essential to proceed several on-page activities to maximise your traffic. Only complex SEO strategy can be fully effective and results in increased traffic and finally – revenue. Otherwise, individual SEO actions can turn out to be a waste of time and money. Combine paid and unpaid methods to achieve success and make your website visible for your audience.
