If you would like to know how a link building campaign can help your website then simply read on.
What Is Link Building and How Does It Work for SEO?
Link building is essentially getting other people's websites to link back to your own. This could be done by writing guest posts for popular sites in your industry, asking users to link back to you from forums or even paying directories for listings. The best links are generally editorial ones, where the site has given their stamp of approval on your content. The more quality links you have pointing back at your website, the more trustworthy Google will find it and let it rank higher in results. This means more traffic and potentially more leads or sales for your business! If done correctly, link building can be a quick and easy way to improve your search engine rankings. Today we're going to go over everything you need to know about the process, including how much it costs and when you should start doing it.
What are the steps involved in link building?
In the majority of cases, link building will involve three steps:
• Research: Before you can begin a link building campaign you need to know where your potential links are coming from. Using tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs it's possible to find thousands of high quality sites that might be willing to link back to your site. These are usually broken down into six main groups including blogs, directories, guest posts, infographics etc. Prioritize the list based on traffic potential and filter for sites that have good domain metrics (DA/PA) then save it for later use.
• Manual outreach: This is the most time-consuming aspect of any link building campaign but if done correctly can create extremely powerful links with very little effort. Writers are often required to write high quality articles that are relevant to their target market. This is usually done through a simple tool known as an article template where the writer can include relevant keywords whilst ensuring that the content is engaging and unique enough for publication.
The final step in this process involves manually emailing webmasters/content managers to ask if they would consider adding your link to their post. It's key to keep responses brief but positive so as not to damage any relationships you might have built with the site owner early on.
• Automated outreach: Automating this process has become much easier over time with tools such as Authentic Jobs, OutreachPlus etc. These services can show you which sites accept guest posts, who publishes them and how much they pay. Using these tools you can find thousands of high quality sites in minutes rather than spending hours performing manual research.
Manual outreach is still considered one of the best ways to get high quality links due to its personal nature but automation has definitely increased link building productivity over the last few years.
How does this process work?
A link can be defined as any connection between two pages that might help Google understand how the two pages are related to each other.
This relationship is often determined by looking at three elements:
• The nature/type of site linking back to your webpage.
• The relevancy of the content on each page (i.e. does it make sense for both pages link back).
• The anchor text used for the link (i.e. the phrase highlighted in blue).
The last point is particularly important as it helps Google determine what your page is about and whether or not you are relevant to their search query. This directly impacts how much traffic you will receive from a result appearing on the first page of Google so it's key to make sure that your anchor text is as natural as possible with no spammy links/text used anywhere on the page.
What elements impact a site's ranking?
There are four metrics that help determine how well a website performs in organic search:
• Domain Authority.
• Page Rank.
• Linking Root Domains.
• Citation Flow.
These metrics can be divided up into two main groups helping Google understand if a site has good quality content (DA/PA) or if it contains spammy sites that might be using blackhat SEO techniques.
As mentioned earlier, link building is about sending the right signals to Google which tell them what your site is about and who it's relevant to. You can do this in many ways but the most effective way is through article marketing. This technique was extremely popular in 2011/2012 when social media wasn't offering much of a benefit towards rankings (SEO).
What are the benefits of link building?
• The most obvious benefit is an increase in organic traffic. This depends on a number of factors including the quality of your content and how well you have targeted your keywords but getting good links has always been one of the best ways to get more people visiting your site.
• Creating brand awareness can also be considered as a link building benefit depending on the industry that you are operating within. If you're creating high quality content then this will not only generate more traffic, it will also help build authority which means that people start to take notice than if would be possible otherwise.
• Builds trust: Trust is arguably one of Google's biggest ranking factors so once again, if someone trusts you enough to give you their time/attention then rank #1 for one of their high-value keywords then you're likely to be rewarded. This is because Google want's people to find the best results when they perform a search and if your page has been voted as 'The Best' in the eyes of your peers then there's a good chance that it will appear above any other result in the SERPS.
What are the consequences of incorrect linkbuilding?
If done incorrectly they can cause a variety of problems such as:
• No backlink profile: Without an established history of links pointing towards your site, Google will consider your site a new or spammy website, leading to poor results and potentially even blacklisting.
• Unnatural backlink profile: Even if you have an active link building campaign in place it's possible that sites will refuse to link to your site if you don't play by the rules. All linking sites should be relevant to your business and industry, so any outgoing links from unrelated websites could get detected as unnatural backlinks and penalize your rankings.
• Too many backlinks: If you build too many incoming links it's likely that Google will detect them as artificial and penalize or block your site outright. It might not happen immediately and there may be some short term gains but over time it will catch up with you and cause serious problems.
• Poor quality backlinks: As Google gets better at detecting and penalizing sites with spammy link profiles it's becoming harder and harder to build high quality, natural backlinks. The most obvious signs of a poor quality site is one that uses adverts or popups (especially on the homepage), has little original content, doesn't have an about us page or let's just face it, looks like this.
Vix Media Group can provide you with these services and more to boost your brand. If you need assistance please contact us today and get started.
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