The Importance of Link Building
Quality content, User Experience (UX), and backlinks are the top 3 ranking factors that help boost your website’s SEO. You might have learned about the nitty-gritty of creating quality content and enhancing users’ experience from some of our previous articles. And today, we want to share with you another important factor that can supercharge your SEO while boosting your website’s authority and link-building. Let’s start with some must-knows about link building before you start building them.
Getting other websites to link to your page is known as “Link Building”. In a way, when other websites (especially sites that have lots of followers or visitors) place a link to specifically lead the users or visitors to a particular page on your website, it means that they are confident with the quality of your content, which helps build trusts amongst the users. The links you get are similar to “testimonials” or “votes of confidence” for your website, which Google and other popular search engines take into account for ranking your website. In short, the more high-quality backlinks your website’s pages gain, the higher your site can rank.
4 Essential Ways to Gain More Backlinks
A “web resource” may be in the form of a website, web page, or web directory. A “backlink” refers to a link from another website to a particular web resource. A “backlink” is similar to a citation or reference link. Hence, you will definitely need to do some backlink-building tasks for your page to gain a high ranking in Google search results. There are 4 fundamental ways to acquire more backlinks: add links, ask for links, buy, and earn links.
A) How “Adding Link” Works
“Adding links” simply means that even though a website does not belong to you, it allows you to place your link there manually. Some of the most common places to add links include:
Building links through the above platforms are pretty straightforward. However, popular search engines like Google think such links have a lower value. Under some circumstances, these links may even be labeled as ‘spam’ by Google. In short, these type of links offers minimal competitive advantage. Why is that so? If you can manually place your link on a website, your competitors can do the same.
Why shouldn’t you ignore “adding Links”?
It is because “adding links” can be beneficial for your online business for non-SEO-related reasons. For example, suppose you are creating SEO content for a restaurant’s website. In that case, you need to add your links in some of the most popular Business Directories (e.g. Yelp, GrubHub, Tripadvisor, etc.) as you might get some actual customers from these directories. Another example is adding links in Industry Forums. You can add links in active forums or communities where your target customers are gathered. You certainly should be active on these platforms too. However, DON’T spam your links without adding value to conversations or comments, as you may easily get banned from these platforms.
B) How “Ask for links” Works
When you reach out to the owner of a particular website and request a link from the website’s owner with a convincing reason, the “convincing reason” is a vital success factor. Before you ask these websites’ owners to link to your web pages or sites, you should let them know. “What’s in it for them?” In a nutshell, it means what benefits you can offer to the websites that link to your site.
Some “Convincing Reasons” to Ask for Links:
- You can help create helpful content for their website (e.g. guest blogging)
- You can show them a better resource than the existing one they are linking to.
- You can show them a resource with more information from topics they have briefly discussed.
- You can mention their products or services in your content from a positive angle (e.g. positive feedback about their product or service).
- You can offer them a backlink if they agree to link to you (in short, you link me, and I link back to you).
- You can help fix a “dead” link on their sites with a replacement.
- You can provide images and request to get credit for posting your images.
- You can give them a piece of hot news or a story to cover.
C) How “Buy Links” Works
When other people voluntarily link to your website’s pages without you asking them to do so is known as “earning links”. This will only happen when your content has something unique or remarkable that attracts the owners of other websites to mention the link to your content. Regardless of how splendid your website’s pages may be, it would help if you promoted them to increase traffic and exposure to more users, which will increase the chances of them wanting to link up to your web pages.
D) How “Earning links” Works
When other people voluntarily link to your website’s pages without you asking them to do so is known as “earning links”. This will only happen when your content has something unique or remarkable that attracts the owners of other websites to mention the link to your content. Regardless of how splendid your website’s pages may be, it would help if you promoted them to increase traffic and exposure to more users, increasing the chances of them wanting to link up to your web pages.
5 Quick Tips to Successfully Build Links
- Post link-worthy content with a broad appeal that sits at the top of the marketing funnel.
- Achieve better outreach with personalized and unique messages while keeping it simple and straight to the point when explaining what other websites’ owners can gain from linking to your site.
- Earning links from news’ websites where publications have large followers or readers which may be driven to your web pages. What’s more, most publications are authorities in their field, and a backlink can be an “important vote of confidence” for major search engines such as Google.
- Replace broken links by sending the correct link to the site’s editor and clearly state the value it adds to their site.
- Leading expert in a particular field or industry who consistently posts new content and new ideas about his/ her related industry build trust and authority. Hence, being a leading expert in your industry offers many advantages which help your rankings in Google. The more people point toward your content as a resource, the more Google will look at you as an authority.
In a nutshell, focus on improving the quality of your content to gain trust, and citations and hence, get more backlinks from other websites. And bear in mind that 77.2% more backlinks are gained for long content as compared to short content. In addition, although you perform link-building tasks independently, 60% of businesses outsource their link-building strategy to SEO experts.