Your Marketing Agency’s Guide to Link Building
As an SEO expert, you understand the importance of link building. However, you need to employ the right strategies when building links to drive the right traffic and increase your website’s rankings.
The concept behind link building is simple: If you have a website and want it to rank, you need links from reputable, authoritative websites. Through links, users can navigate from one page to another page or website. These links can either be internal or external, but when it comes to link building, external links that point to your website are crucial.
Link building is one of the most essential strategies website owners need to undertake if they want to improve their search engine rankings. These tasks are usually handled by an SEO agency on behalf of their clients. But, it’s important to understand that SEO agencies follow different techniques to build links.
Why is Link Building Important?
Links can be helpful in searching for new web pages and determining how websites are ranked in search engine results.
When search engines crawl a website, they extract the content of the page and add it to the index. Based on the index, they determine how to rank the websites. However, search engines look at more than just the content of the page; they also look at the links coming from external websites. In addition to the number of links, the quality of the links also weighs in on ranking a website. So, if you have a good number of high-quality links pointing to your website, you’re likely to rank higher on search results.
How to Build Quality Links
There are no hard and fast rules that specifically define the good links from the bad ones. However, a few tips and strategies can be helpful in many ways.
High-Quality Content
“Content is king.”
If you can publish high-quality content, you are likely to get links from authority websites. But, how do you ensure your content attracts high-quality links?
Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Make sure your content has great visuals. Add images, infographics, videos, and charts to your content. When someone shares your visuals on their page, they end up sharing your page.
- Listing posts are another way of getting high-quality content. Create a list of items; this can be anything – tips, techniques, myths, or suggestions. Lists can help you enumerate points that answer the questions of users. Moreover, this provides easy-to-digest information for your target audience.
- Provide new information. Statistics, for example, can provide users with useful information. If your statistical data is relevant to a specific industry or business, they may even link back to your site as a reference.
If you are an SEO agency working on client websites, check different link-building services that provide effective strategies for link-building and quality content.
Email Outreach Secrets
Email outreach is an essential step in getting quality backlinks, but many overlook this step. When you send an outreach email for link-building purposes, your goal is to elicit a response rather than end up in their spam folder.
Here are a few tips to help you be successful with your email outreach efforts:
Reach out to contacts who are likely to link back to you. There are several techniques for finding these contacts, such as using a link analysis tool to find potential guest post sites.
Once you have your list of guest post prospects, retrieve their email (from their About page or using tools like Hunter.io), and send them a personalized email with the intention of guest posting on the site. Make sure you have gone through the target website and its content, so you can use this information for creating better email outreach.
Use Resource Page Link Building
Resource pages can be one of the effective options to get a few high-quality links. In fact, these pages are built explicitly for the purpose of linking back.
Finding resource pages is a task you can do in a few simple steps. There are a few keyword strings specifically designed for these resource pages. Once you get a list of resource pages, make sure getting a backlink from these pages will be worth the effort.
Match the resource page with the type of content you plan to send them. Your content should be relevant to the topic of the resource. Make sure that you have gone through the target website and know the tone of its content. You may need to change the tone of your resource to suit the tone of the target website.
Check for Broken Links
There are a few tools that can help you find broken links on your target website. When you find a broken link, determine if you have relevant content that can be used as a redirect. If you do, you can use this for email outreach.
How Does Link Building Help Your Business?
But, does link building really help your business apart from just getting higher rankings?
Let us explore some of the other benefits of link building:
1. It Helps to Build Relationships
Link building involves email outreach to high-authority websites. While the primary purpose of outreach is to get backlinks, it can also help you develop relationships with industry authorities and influencers. These relationships can be helpful in making you appear credible and extend your personal network.
2. It Helps to Build Your Brand
Effective link-building can help you achieve the best results in terms of creating awareness about your brand. This can go a long way in promoting your website as one of the authority sites in your niche.
High-quality content creation can showcase your expertise to your audience and other experts in the industry.
Link Buying – A Strict No-No
Buying links falls under black hat SEO techniques. This goes against Google’s Quality guidelines and can get you penalized.
As stated in Google Webmaster guidelines, link buying can be defined as the following:
This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links, or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
Buying links is risky. Most companies do not want to invest in something that can put them at risk. Of course, there can be a few short-term benefits. But we do not recommend such techniques that can easily put your business on Google’s bad side.
Final Thoughts
When building links, don’t just think about rankings. Think of the value it provides to the business as a whole. Follow the tips above, and you can start building links on the right foot.
