Link Building for SEO: A Beginner's Guide to Getting Your Business to the Top of the Rankings
Link building is a fundamental SEO technique that can be difficult to master. If you’re new to link building and want to learn the ins and outs, this guide is for you.
Think of link building as your virtual friend network—without those contacts, it’s almost impossible to get your business on the map.
But don’t be scared; with the right strategy and execution, you can build links that positively impact your search engine rankings. This article covers everything you need to know about link building as an SEO technique: its history, types, best practices, and more. Keep reading to discover everything you need in order to start developing a link-building strategy today!
What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of getting valid links back to your website from different websites. This is beneficial for SEO because search engines take links as votes for your content (and site).
When someone links to your site, they’re essentially saying, “We like this site enough to direct our readers to it.” Search engines interpret this as a positive signal and rank your site higher as a result. Note that you can’t just ask someone to link to your site.
Instead, you have to earn the links by becoming an authoritative resource in your industry.
Why is link building important for SEO?
links are essentially votes for your site. They tell Google and other search engines that your site is valuable and that people should visit it.
They’re also a great way to get brand exposure and drive new leads—people who click on those links are sent directly to your website.
There are other SEO factors that link building plays a part in, including:
- Ranking for long-tail keywords: When you’re trying to rank for long-tail keywords, you need to build more links on more sites. When you do, Google will consider you an authoritative site in your niche, and reward you with a higher ranking.
- Getting more traffic from Google: If you currently get most of your traffic from Google, you need to make sure that your site is optimized for the search engine. One way to do that is by building links using link building techniques.
- Driving better customer conversions: When you rank high on Google search results, you’re likely to get more leads. However, if your site isn’t optimally designed for conversions, you’re going to lose out on those leads.
- Increasing your brand’s authority: When you rank high on search engines, you increase your brand authority. This makes it easier to convert more customers and scale your business.
Types of Link Building
When most people think about link building for SEO, they only imagine one type of link building. It’s actually a technique that comes in many shapes and sizes—and a few of them can help you earn links from high domain authority sites in your industry.
Here are some Types of Link Building:
- Guest Posting: Guest blogging is when you write a blog post for someone else’s site, and they link back to your site. This can be a great way to get your name out there and earn a few links for your own site.
- Inbound Link Building: Creating your own content and linking to places where you either want more links or need to replace bad links is called inbound link building. It’s a great way to build your SEO and traffic.
- Internal Link Building: When you link to internal pages on your own website, you’re doing internal link building. This is a great way to improve SEO.
- Link Reclamation: Link reclamation is the process of getting bad links removed from your website. This can either be through outreach or by going through the source.
Best Practices for Link Building
Before you start building links, you should have a game plan in place. Otherwise, you may be doing more harm your website than good. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when building links:
- Research Your Links: Before you start building any links, you need to do your research. You want to make sure that you’re linking to sites that are relevant to your industry and that have a good authority.
- Avoid Building Links for the Wrong Reasons: You want to avoid link building for the wrong reasons. When you build a link for the wrong reasons, you’re essentially hurting your site’s credibility.
- Focus on Quality Over Quantity: Quality over quantity is always the better option. While it might be tempting to get as many links as you can, it’s not worth it if they’re from low-quality sites.
- Use the Right Techniques: There are many ways to build links, but not all of them are worth your time. Focus on the techniques that are proven to work for your industry.
Read More: Service SEO: How to Optimize Your Website for Better Rankings.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, link building is an important part of an effective SEO strategy. If you want your business to be successful online, you need people to click through from Google.
This means that you need links from other sites that send people to your site. If you want those links, you have to earn them by developing link-building strategies.
The best way to do this is to make your website as authoritative as possible, also use link building techniques that can get your website high on Google's results page.