Build Links With Strategy and Caution

If you are serious about driving traffic to your web presence, you need to get serious about link building. This is one of the fundamentals of SEO, and if you don’t take a proactive approach, you might find your website plummeting through the search rankings. Use this simple guide to learn more about link building and to get started with some basic strategies.

What is Link Building?

The algorithms that popular search engines like Google and Bing use are some of the most carefully guarded secrets in the world. But all experts agree that these search engines rely heavily on links to determine the quality and relevance of a site.

In essence, the more your site is linked to, the more useful your site is determined to be, and the higher it will be ranked in search results. Not all links are good links, however. Search engines use these criteria to measure the value of the link:

• Global Popularity – When a popular site links to yours
• Topic-Specific Popularity – When a popular site within a topic-specific community (e.g. dogs, gardening) links to yours
• Trust Rank – When sites are known not to contain spam link to yours
• Freshness – When you continue to build links over time without a slow period
• Social Sharing – When people share links to your content on social media

To summarize – link building is relevant, and getting trustworthy sites to continually post links to your content on social media, sites, and other outlets is key.

Basic Link Building Strategies

Before we walk through some basic link building strategies for beginners, it’s important to emphasize a few crucial points; link building is about quality, not quantity. There are ways to rack up tons of links, but if they are not good links, you won’t be helping yourself. That means you should avoid spammy link building strategies, because they often backfire, and they could even get you penalized by the search engines.

Approach link building thoughtfully. Here are three strategies designed for beginners:

• Editorial Link Building – This is when sites simply choose to link to your content because they like what you do. These links do not require solicitation, but they are also the hardest to come by. You can encourage this kind of linking by producing high-quality, relevant content that people will be eager to consume and share.
• Outreach Link Building – This strategy takes a little more hustle. It requires you to reach out to bloggers, site administrators, content curators, and other internet tastemakers and encourage them to include links to your web presence. This strategy works best if you can frame the arrangement as something that is mutually beneficial.
• Self-Created Link Building – The internet is filled with opportunities to post your own links, on discussion boards, blog comments, and user profiles for example. Self-posted links aren’t assigned much value by search engines, but they can still affect your ranking. Again, avoid being spammy, and try to surround your link with a thoughtful comment or a personalized observation.

Today is the Day to Start Building Links

Link building is probably the hardest part of SEO, and for beginners, it can seem like a baffling and time-consuming process. It definitely takes some practice and trial and error, but when you see your site rise through the rankings it validates the effort. Get help designing and implementing your first link building strategy by consulting with the internet-marketing experts at Studio C5.

Request a free digital marketing consultation.