In SEO link building is done to increase the traffic of the site and brand awareness. Link building is the process of taking the actions that will increase the number of backlinks pointing to the pages on a website. A good link, first and foremost, drives traffic to your site, that is why links are a very significant part of SEO. Hence, link building should be a part of your growth strategy.
Why is link building important for SEO?
1. Link building affects SEO: Your website ranking in search results is determined by the quality of links on your website. Keyword use in the content was the most dominant factor, before Google invented the PageRank algorithm, in the matter of ranking sites. This was very true for other search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo!.
With PageRank, Google looked at backlinks as a measure of a page’s importance, usefulness and trustworthiness on the web. People, in theory at least, tend not to link to bad web pages. So pages with a lot of backlinks would rank higher in search results because people had endorsed that page’s quality and relevance. Backlinks are still a significant part of a page’s search ranking. While the exact use of backlinks in search ranking has involved quite a bit – the quality of backlinks is the most important than quantity.
2. Link building makes your content more relevant and authoritative: This is the reason why backlink quality is more focused than quantity. People reading content on one site will see links back to your pages the same way.
Therefore, backlinks from high quality, well known and authoritative websites are more beneficial as they make your content better in the eye of new potential customers. As you consistently create more content with relevant links, your audience will begin to see your website as an authority in your field, and thus come back for more. This increased awareness will increase direct traffic and make users more likely to click a link to your website when it’s shown in search results.
3. Link building could help increase the time spent on your website: Backlinks from relevant content help attract a more qualified and engaged experience. Users that click through to your site from a link on another page will find, in theory at least, your content relevant to the need they are trying to meet when clicking that link. Engaged users spend more time on your website and are more likely to end up in a conversion. Audiences also find the content source more trustworthy the more they engage with it. Building relevant links will help you build more loyal website traffic.
How to build links for SEO?
Now you know what link building is and its importance. Let’s explore how to build useful links. Due to the penguin update, link earning has replaced the idea of link building and partially due to the link content marketing and focus on creating link bait content.
1. Creating link bait content: Only good or great content is not enough to build links, it’s still required. You need to research about what kind of content related to your site gets more links. Conduct an SEO link audit of your own site and figure out what pages of your site are getting the most links. The next step is to identify the content of other sites that the users find useful, unique, and accurate. Find the sites that have earned more links. Analyze their content because it’s the only thing which attracts the people to sites and earn more links. Identify the demand of users what type of content they look for.
To find the articles and content which the people find most share-worthy and useful, you can use the tools like ahrefs, Buzzsumo, and Majestics. These tools let you search by topic about different most searched article content. It can help you to build links.
2. Skyscrapers technique: When you have some ideas in mind that you think are useful and unique to people and people can like to link to these ideas, create your own content about these ideas. Do not try to rewrite the content as the search engine will identify right away that you are not adding any valued content to it. That means you will get less links and poor ranking.
A few steps that you can follow to create your content are:
- Remodel it: It is the easiest way to create content. You can turn your content into an infographic. Infographics are some of the best content on the web for sharing and linking. As it has visual components so it has a good influence on user experience and content consumption. You can add a new layout and new images to it which will lend it to have more links than before. It will improve the usability and readability.
- Enhance it: You can add more information to it. For example, if you are a shopping site you can add more offers and discounts to your content. On other kinds of articles, you can add examples, explanations, figures, links, and more details. THus these kinds of articles get more links as people like more detailed content explained with examples and figures.
- Refresh it: Posts that get a lot of links to fall out of date, sometimes quickly depends on the industry. You can refresh these types of posts by adding new points and useful points to the existing information.
3. Newsjacking: Newsjacking is the process of putting your brand into the stories and headlines of the day. It offers the following benefits:
- It can advertise your name and brand in front of a large number of people.
- It can illustrate your brand’s expertise on a specific topic.
- It can help you to give you targeted audiences.
How to perform newsjacking?
- Track the news: keeping up with the news is key to newsjacking. Use Google Trends and Google Alerts to monitor keywords relevant to your site. You can also follow relevant journalists on social media apps and follow certain hashtags.
- Newsbreaks: Newsbreaks are also important. News websites post breaking news and people will start posting about these stories on Facebook and Twitter.
- You can publish your take: Depending on your goal, the content you create will change. To build links, you can publish more articles and posts.
How to build high-quality links?
Once you are done with creating content, you are now ready to promote it to your audience and earn some links. Here are some techniques to build high quality links:
- Guest blogging: A good technique to build high quality links is to write for other sites. It is best to find authoritative sites. Contact the editor or content creator and request them for guest posts. There are sites that have some guidelines which you will need to follow before you can start guest posting. Some sites have a page titled ‘write for us’ or something similar. The other thing we can do is we can search for guest posts directly on Google and find the useful sites. There are some high authority sites like Forbes and Entrepreneur which can give you good quality links. There is one very important factor that the sites where you do guest posting should have a high ranking on search engines.
- Learn about your competitors: It is useful to know where your competitors are getting links from. To identify these sites, you can use the tool Serpstat. You can also get links from these sites or guest post.