Link building is an essential component to any SEO strategy. To be successful in the long run, however, you should understand why this is an important tool, so you can better manage them moving forward. Today we’re breaking it down and sharing five tips for understanding the importance of link building.
First, it’s valuable to know why we use link building as a part of SEO strategy. Google pays favor to sites with high authority (as we mentioned in our blog last week), and links are connections between pages that make up the Internet. This is how people find new websites and products, and also how Google discovers new content to push to its users. The more relevant links you have on other sites, the more likely you are to be found higher in a search. Brightlocal (our SEO strategy software) likes to think of them as popularity votes. With that in mind, let’s go over our five industry secrets for link building.
Tips for Understanding Link Building:
- 1. Google looks at the quality of links rather than the quantity of links. Adding relevant sites will increase your chances of ranking higher in search results.
- 2. If you’re building links with the right kind of content (that matches your brand), they should be coming from other relevant sites with similar traffic, so the users of those other sites are likely to click through to your website.
- 3. Links don’t have to be just text, you can also link through images on other websites.
- 4. Relevance doesn’t always mean the same industry or field of work. For example, an orthodontist and a dentist. Relevance can also mean proximity. A link can still be relevant if they share the same/ similar location. Example, a cafe down the street from a shoe store. These links weigh heavily on local search pages.
- 5. Do not purchase backlinks! This is important to remember. While it might be tempting to buy links to get your numbers higher (meaning your site on multiple sites), this can cause a penalty to your business’s webpage. In 2012 Google cracked down on the purchase of backlinks and now punishes websites that practice this method.
👆 PIN IT
Phew… that was a lot. Link building is an important part of any successful SEO strategy, and this is just a small dent in the plethora of tips out there to help. We suggest you start by finding a link research tool (there are many out there, or we can help as well), and seeing out what other websites your site is already listed on. From that baseline, you can start to build out your backlinks to relevant websites and start bringing in that traffic!
As always, we are here to help with any questions! Now go forth and get those links! Huzzah!! (too nerdy? Oh well).
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