What Is Link Building & Why Is It Important?
Link building isn’t a term you’re likely to hear in everyday conversation – unless that conversation is about improving your SEO strategy.
Link building isn’t a term you’re likely to hear in everyday conversation – unless that conversation is about improving your SEO strategy.
Quality link building is a crucial part of any SEO strategy if you want to increase your web traffic, build trust and authority amongst your audience and earn higher page rankings on search engines like Google.
What is link building?
Link building is the practice of building up the number of inbound links that direct users from external websites back to your own.
These links (also known as hyperlinks or backlinks) only go one way – they link from another person or company’s website to your own website.
The ultimate goal for link building is to increase your search engine visibility and create an extensive backlink profile.
The more legitimate the websites that are linking to you are, the more powerful search engines like Google will pay attention and favour your site in the search engine results pages.
Link building and SEO
Link building is a key factor in improving your SEO because search engines care about how many external websites are linking back to yours. The number of backlinks you have serve as a trust and authority signal to the search engines.
Search engine algorithms like Google understand that when more websites are linking back to a specific page or site, it holds more value than others.
These pages that have more value need to be made more visible and accessible to users, which is why search engines will bump up their page rankings for more people to see.
Link building strategies
Now that you understand what link building is, the next step is actually getting external websites to link back to your own.
Here are some strategies that you should try:
- Promote your content. By creating compelling content, you can peak people’s interest and encourage them to share, engage with and link back to your site.
- Reach out to relevant businesses. Reach out to businesses in your industry – not direct competitors, but those who can promote your business without it impeding upon their own – and ask if you could write a blog for them that then links back to your site.
- Get people to review your product. Contact influencers across social media and offer them a free product in exchange for having them review or mention your brand to their audience.
- Have friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances link back to your site. Ask the people in your network to support your business by linking to your website on their own. But make sure their websites are relevant to your business – irrelevant links will do you no good in Google’s eyes.
- Connect with your clients, customers, and industry partners. Where relevant, have those in your immediate business circle link back to your site in regards to the service you provided for them. For example, on each website Ven builds, we include a small hyperlink in the footer that links users back to our site.
Link building can make your business boom
When executed properly, link building has the potential to drive a much larger flow of traffic to your site. Though link building is a long-term game, it is one that definitely pays off in the end.
Once established, it can become a passive strategy that directs new users to your site without any further effort on your part, leaving more time and space available for you to focus on improving other aspects of the business.
Simultaneously, Google and other search engines will look at your site more favourably, which works to increase your rankings on the search engine results pages.