Introduction
Link-building, as we all know, plays a vital role in your search engine optimization or SEO. It’s also essential if you want to make your site or blog a reputable and authoritative source of information. Fortunately, there are many ways to build links that can improve the authority of your established website or brand.
What is Link Building?
Creating links to your website is the key to ranking well on search engines. If you want to rank well on search engines, you need to have a web presence.
The more sites that link back to your site, the higher your site will rank in search engine results. People will only link to your site if it has something of value for them. That value can be substance or style.
It’s a pretty simple concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Building high-quality links can be a very time-consuming job and it often requires a lot of knowledge about how search engines work and what makes them tick. In order to get this done right, you’ll need both time and patience.
Start with a good foundation (internal link structure and crawlability)
Link building is the process of earning links to your site from other websites. It’s a good idea to build links to your site in a natural way as if you are just another person linking to the world.
However, there are other things you can do to attract links naturally. One great way to do this is with content marketing. But there are other things you can do too. Here are five tips for getting more links:
Start with a good foundation
This means having a strong internal link structure and making sure your site is crawlable by search engine bots so they can find all of your pages. This also means having enough content on your site. Search engines will give more weight to sites with many pages of content versus those that have only a few pages.
Build relationships with influencers and other webmasters.
When you become an expert in your niche, people will come to you for advice and information. When someone links back to your blog from their blog, that counts as natural link building! One way to build relationships with influencers is through social media, but you can also reach out directly by email or even phone if possible.
Create content that is unique and valuable
A website will not link to someone else’s duplicate content (content that is nearly identical to something else). Make sure your site has original, relevant content. Not only will this help you in the search engine rankings, but it will also increase the number of people visiting your site.
Internal linking
Internal linking should be done when you’ve written about multiple topics on a single page. It’s also important if you’ve written about multiple pages on a single topic. The internal linking structure ends up looking like an outline. You can use h2 headings and subheadings as anchors for internal links.
External linking
External links are links that point outside of your website. They come in all shapes and sizes, but in general, more external links pointing to your site is a good thing. Search engines take the number and quality of external links into account when ranking sites.
Crawlability
Your internal link structure should allow search engine bots to easily visit every page of your website. They don’t want to spend their time on a website that’s hard or impossible to navigate. Make sure all of your pages are accessible by both human visitors and search engine bots by using text-based links rather than images, Flash, or JavaScript (as much as possible).
Build links out from your website to high ranking websites in your niche
There are many ways to build links. The first way is to look at your site and see if you have any incorrect or broken links. You can also use a tool such as MajesticSEO or OpenSiteExplorer to see which of your pages are linked to the most. These high-ranking pages can be a good place to start building links.
Your next option is to look at the websites that rank on the first page of Google for keywords that you want to rank for. Chances are that they have a link back to them from somewhere else, so you can use that in your favor by contacting the owner of the website and asking if you could include their link back in your article.
Another option is to look at forums where people talk about topics related to your niche and get involved in discussions. When someone responds with a question, give them an answer and then link back to one of your blog posts in your response.
Be wary of automated links tools, especially if you are just starting out
There are a lot of automated link-building tools out there. They promise to help you quickly build a link profile for your site, but most of the time they are built by people who probably know less about SEO than you do.
I have personally used these tools, and yes, they helped me get some links from sites that I probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. But most of those links were useless and Google noticed it.
As soon as I stopped using these tools my rankings started to improve. The lesson is simple, do not use any automated link-building tool, especially if you are a beginner in the SEO world. Instead of that, focus on getting manual links from sites relevant to your niche.
Conclusion
To end this article on a good note, you needn’t be an SEO expert to get some good results. In fact, there are plenty of SEO newcomers that have succeeded in building high-quality backlinks.
The best advice we can give is to stick with it and learn as much as possible about search engine optimization. This will allow you the freedom to experiment and see how search engines react to your efforts, which is a critical part of the link-building process.