Featured article by Dan Radak, Independent Technology Author
No matter how long you’ve been on the web, you’ve probably heard about link building. It’s the process of getting sites to include links that lead back to your site on their pages. This tactic is most often used in order to enhance your SEO efforts. The popularity of link building lies in the fact that Google uses these external links as signals that your site is a quality resource worthy of a good search rank. Therefore, the more quality backlinks you have, the higher your ranking is.
The problem is, organic link building is pretty difficult and time-consuming. That’s why you should learn how to create quality links yourself and use them to enhance your website’s search ranking. And that’s why we’ve come up with a guide that’ll teach you how to start building links successfully.
Create quality content
First of all, it’s extremely important to mention that if you build links only to increase your rankings, you’re going to get penalized. However, if you decide to build links using quality content, you should be able to give your rankings a boost. But what is quality content exactly? Basically, it’s any type of content your audience finds valuable.
In order to provide your audience with quality content, you’ll have to come up with topics that people on the web are going to find interesting. Even though you won’t be posting your articles directly on your website, you’ll need to think of topics that somewhat relate to the work your business does. The goal here is to have Google recognize your content appropriately. On top of this, you have to make sure your content is well-written. This is the case because Google’s search bots can recognize the unnatural use of language, and can tell whether you’ve outsourced your writing to poor writers. So, when creating content for your link building campaign, you’ll have to double check all of your writing for syntax and spelling mistakes.
When it comes to sending out your content, you have to be very careful about how frequently you’re posting. Generally, you should never get too many links at the same time. Even if you’re done with writing all the content you want to share, spreading out the publication over a few weeks or months might be a good idea. Of course, the number of articles you send out depends on how big your business is. For example, too many external links for a brand new business is always going to seem a bit out of the ordinary.
Understand the concept of link neighborhoods
Once you start building links, you’ll be guaranteed to hear a lot about link neighborhoods. And if you’re new to SEO, you might find this concept quite confusing. Basically, a link neighborhood can be described as a community, in which websites are houses and links are the streets that connect them. And if one house is in a poor condition, it automatically decreases the value of the other houses in the neighborhood. What this means is that if your website gets associated with websites that have no value, it won’t do your business any good.
Try picturing your website as a home with a fresh coat of paint and a beautiful yard. Now there are a few homes in your neighborhood that look as good as yours. It’s pretty obvious that you’ll want your home to be associated with them. So, in order to avoid having other websites pull you down, you’ll have to be very careful when choosing websites that link to you. The best way to do this is to do a thorough research on a website before you decide to have it link to you. This is especially the case when building your first links for your new website. And if you already had a website link to you but you’re no longer happy about the other websites it links to, you can either ask them to remove the link or use the disavow tool to remove your links. What this means is that it’s up to you as a business owner, not only to keep your website clean, but to ensure that your link neighborhood looks nice as well.
In order to find websites where you’ll want to get your link from, you’ll have to do some link prospecting. We recommend using a link prospecting tool that’s going to make identifying good websites you should try to get a link from much easier.
Do keyword research
Of course, if you want to be able to build links to your website, you’ll have to figure out what people type into their search bars. This means you’ll have to identify your keywords and use them as the focus of your SEO campaign. But if you want to establish a strong keyword strategy, you’ll first have to do some keyword research.
The first thing you’ll have to do when researching your keywords is think about the topics you want to rank for. You should be able to come up with at least 5 of these and use them to identify your keywords. So for example, if you’ve went for a topic such as “marketing automation” you should be able to come up with keywords such as “marketing automation tool” or “top automation tools.” The keywords you think of at this point won’t be your final keywords, as you still have to research them more thoroughly. This means you should do a Google search for the keywords you came up with and take a closer look at Google’s suggestions related to your original input, as this might give you some ideas. The last thing you should do before you make any final decisions is check how your competitors are ranking for the keywords you like best.
We also recommend using tools such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner which might help you narrow down your list and identify the best keywords for your SEO campaign. This tool is one of the most popular options among markets, but there are other free tools out there you might want to take a closer look at as well.
The bottom line
Link building isn’t easy, but if you put enough time and effort into it, there won’t be any reason why you shouldn’t make it. Just bear in mind that it can take time for link building to start showing results when it comes to your website’s rankings in Google’s search results pages.
Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is currently working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies. He is also a coauthor on several technology websites and regular contributor to Technivorz.
