What is Link Building?
Link building is essentially working on increasing the number of high quality websites linking to your website. I say high quality because back in the beginnings of SEO any link would do and SEO companies spent their days getting huge numbers of links for a website to improve their organic listings. Those days are gone and Google is smarter than ever, which means your website needs to be high quality and relevant and those sites linking to you should also be of a high standard and relevant.
Relevancy is important here, as people coming onto your website and leaving immediately have a negative effect on your SEO, therefore there would be no point having a link on a website where their audience would have no interest in what your site was offering.
So how do you build links?
- Publish a blog
This is such a popular and valuable link building strategy that it is one of the few recommended personally by the engineers at Google – so if you haven’t got one, get one! Although maybe think about the content you will post on it first! Blogs have the unique ability to contribute fresh material to your website on a consistent basis as well as generate conversations across the web and earn listings and links from other blogs. We can happily add a blog to your website and help with the content plan if you would like.
- Earn the attention of the press
Reaching out to press, bloggers and news media is an effective way to earn links. This could be by offering something for free, releasing a great new product or stating something controversial – although you might not get the attention you want using the controversial angle!
- Partners and Customers
Depending on your business model, you might be able to gain links through partners or loyal customers. You could send out partnership badges or offer to write up testimonials of their products. Both of these offer things they can display on their website along with links back to you.
- Reuse popular content
You can use Google Analytics to see which of your website’s content earns the most traffic, converts the most customers or retains visitors for the longest amount of time. Why not take this content and refurbish it for other platforms? For example, could you create a slideshow and share it on SlideShare or make a video and add it to YouTube? If you need some help navigating Google Analytics we can set up an automated monthly report showing you where people are coming from and what they are looking at and more…
- Set-up profiles on directories
Use directory sites like Yell and 192 to create free listings. I would recommend you run the directories through Moz or similar to check it is a good quality site in the eyes of the search engines.
Overall you should look to build up your link profile slowly, going from 0 to 1000s in a matter of days might actually get your website penalised by Google. If you would like help creating an SEO strategy or improving your website’s visibility on Google we would be more than happy to build you a marketing package. Get in touch to get your marketing boost.
Or if you prefer to learn yourself, you could attend our forthcoming SEO workshop.
