Link building is a pretty big deal in SEO. Websites with good, diverse link profiles are seen as reliable and authoritative and benefit from excellent rankings by search engines, including Google. Without backlinks and a link profile, your website is all but relegated to obscurity until things change.
There’s a lot of advice, both good and bad, out there about link building. Some will tell you link profiles are created organically and naturally, while others will tell you to hustle to get those links in your pockets. Still, others will promise that, for a small fee, you, too, can have a readymade link profile for your website in a heartbeat.
What is a confused business owner to do? Keep reading to learn more: we have a quick and easy guide to effective link building just for you.
Link Building: Back to the Very Basics
Simply put, link building is when you get other websites to link to your website. Why would anyone want this? You might ask.
Link building is a fantastic way to increase the authority of your website and domain in the eyes of the great lord Google. When Google sees your domain as a trustworthy and authoritative one, you can rank higher, and voila, you can score more traffic from searches! Neat, right?
The process itself is pretty straightforward and rather common sensical when you think about it:
- You create something cool.
This makes your page worthy of attention – and being linked back by others.
2. You show it to other people who have websites.
They look at your content and think it’s cool – and link to it from their website. And hey, presto, you have a link!
Why is this Important?
If it’s still not clear, it’s helpful to think of links from other websites to yours as votes of confidence. When other websites think of you as reliable enough to link back to, Google looks at you and thinks, hey, this is a reliable website! This allows Google to identify which website – remember, they’re dealing with thousands of them on the same topic as yours – should get a good rank and which should be booted to the bottom. Consequently, pages with backlinks get better rankings.
How Exactly Does Link Building Work?
Broadly speaking, there are four ways or strategies to get going on your link building. Please note that these are all not equally effective – or even recommended – in the process of link building for your website.
These are:
- Add your link – manually – to websites as a link back. This would include website and business directories, social media profiles, blog posts, etc.
Adding links, if done carefully, can be a great way to start out on your link building journey. However, you must be wary about leaning too hard on this method; it’s quite easy to be marked out as a spammer by Google.
- Ask other website owners to please link back to yours. This involves having an excellent and very compelling reason for other websites to link back to you.
Asking to be linked back to is an effective way to build your link profile, but it can be rather challenging to get off the ground. Why would other websites link to you? If you have phenomenal content, sure, this might be an easy ask. But generally, it’s a bit difficult to build a robust link profile this way.
- Buy links to link back to your websites – give some money, get some links.
Buying links is a dangerous game. It’s a waste of money and time; Google sees these links as inherently shady. At best, buying links for your profile does nothing for you, and at worst, you get identified as a spammer by Google, and your website gets penalised. If someone is offering you a quick and easy link building fix for money – run!
- Earn links organically – by letting people naturally link back to your website.
Earning links, as the name suggests, is when people link to your pages naturally, with no request from you. If you have great content, this will likely begin to happen on its own, completely naturally. However, even fantastic content needs to get out into the public eye for people to share it – they can’t share something they don’t know exists. If you are able to invest a little in promoting your content, as long as it’s good and compelling, you might find yourself earning links on your own.
This is the most effective – and organic – way to get links and build your link profile.
Best Practices of Link Building
Here are three basic ways of getting started on your link building journey.
- Competitor Links
See how your competition does it. By studying your competitors’ link profiles, you can get a clear sense of the strategies and tactics they use. You can use this knowledge to get similar links and even outrank them eventually!
- Create Linkable Content
Some kinds of content – think calculators, tools, infographics, rankings, awards, guides, etc. – are inherently more linkable than others. When you create unique and compelling content that people want to link to, scoring organic links becomes much easier.
- Promote Your Content
Great content is only useful when it’s actually discovered by its target users, and for that, you have to strut your stuff and promote your website! This can be done through advertising, outreach, and through your own communities.
The Upshot
Link building can be a tough nut to crack. There’s a lot of balancing to do and a lot to get right. If done carelessly, there’s a lot to lose as well! This is where content marketing agencies like AdLift come in. Armed with experience and the right know-how, they can help you figure out the best ways to build links for your website without breaking a sweat.
