Link building is an SEO-based marketing activity of generating backlinks from a set of websites to your website in order to rank pages higher in search engines.
Why Is Link Building Important?
Sometimes considered one of the hardest SEO strategies, link building is also one of the most important.
With the introduction of the 2012 Webspam Algorithm Update, or Penguin Update, Google put more emphasis on quality links.
This is because quality links from relevant, reputable and legitimate sources increase the authority of your website.
A high level of website authority leads to a good reputation, and this means that your website will rank higher in SERPs.
Ranking higher in SERPs, means more people will see your website and more people will click, which means more traffic and higher conversion rates.
Link building also helps the Google bots to discover new websites.
What Are Some Link Building Strategies?
There are lots of ways to develop effective link building strategies, below are some of them.
1. Create a Blog Related to Your Website’s Content
Creating a good quality blog related to your website’s content is a great link building strategy. Think about your brand and your business.
Do you have the ability to write insightful blog posts about your industry? If you do, regularly update it with fresh and unique content, and establish your authority as a source of information.
Another old but gold link building strategy is guest posting/blogging. It’s both simple and effective.
Find a legitimate website related to your niche or industry and write a blog post for them. Then, link to your website within the blog post or article.
3. Reach Out
Every website is looking to build up a good network of backlinks. Therefore, seek out other websites in your industry, and tell them what you can offer them.
Reach out to websites that have a similar product, niche or target keyword in their content.
What About Buying Links?
Link building takes time, effort and money. So, it’s perhaps understandable that some websites would look for a quick fix.
But, buying links can get you in a lot of trouble and isn’t worth it in the long run.
Buying links is a form of black hat SEO and will see you penalised with a Google Penalty from Google’s Penguin algorithm.
This means your website will fall in ranking and lose traffic. Play it safe, and white hat, instead.
What Tools Are There to Help With Link Building?
Like with any SEO strategy, there are tools out on the web to help you with link building. These include:
SEMRush is a content marketing suite with 40 plus tools including a very powerful link building feature.
With its predefined outreach strategies, various parameters to monitor the outreach, and about 2000 prospects for any domain, it makes the tiresome task of link building easy and quick.
It offers link building in 3 simple steps:
research new backlink resources
get detailed information about websites and send personalized messages for link building, and
track your backlink profile.
SEMRush is also an excellent choice for SEO, advertising, social media, market research, and content marketing.
Hunter is an email-finder tool that offers 4 features: finding email addresses of company employees by simply adding the domain name, finding emails by adding names of professionals, finding email addresses of authors, and verifying email addresses.
These are amazing features to up your link building strategy.
Hunter also offers 20 email templates for link building. They have recently added a great “campaigns'' feature.
This feature allows you to start a link building campaign with scheduled follow-ups at time intervals of your choice.
SEO SpyGlass is a powerful backlink building tool. It’s a game changer for your link building efforts.
This tool has one of the largest backlink indexes on the web. It helps you apply effective link building strategies by offering in-depth analysis of key link building factors such as anchor texts and domain reputation.
SEO SpyGlass keeps track of your website’s backlink profile and also offers backlink comparisons of up to 5 websites at a time.
The task scheduler in this tool is great for automating all your SEO tasks.
Other tools include: BuzzStream, JustReachOut, Guest Post Tracker, etc.
How Can We Help?
Feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of effective link building?
You should get in touch and we’ll pair you with a team that will get you on the right track.
In the meantime, why not check out our training courses for the latest in SEO techniques that you could start introducing to your business today.
