In today’s world, with everything and everyone turning towards the internet and working online, the importance of link building is now more evident than ever. All kinds of professionals and business owners use link building strategies to increase their market value. Link building helps drive online traffic to your website whereas quality links are an indication that your site is a resource worth citing. Websites with more links have a higher search engine results page (SERP) ranking. Search engines use links to discover new web pages and determine how high or low a site should rank on their results pages.
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In order to rank a page or a site, the search engines take into consideration the number of external links redirecting to that website from other sites as well as the quality of the sites providing a link to your page, among other factors. The higher the number of high-quality sites linking to your page, the higher your SERP ranking will be. To help you attract more traffic, generate quality leads, and improve your SERP ranking, you must adopt a strong link building strategy. Here’s how to know if your link building strategy is really working.
Assessing the Quality of a Page
In the 1990s, Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, invented PageRank, which is a tool that was used to assess the quality of a page based on the number of links that pointed to it. It was quite a successful method of determining the ranking and quality of a page. That success was mainly based on the ideology that another site will only link to you because it trusts you and considers you worthy of being mentioned on their page. Unfortunately, though, like everything else, this too had a flip side, as some sites learned to manipulate PageRanks.
How is Link Building Beneficial to Your Business?
As we’ve already established, the most prominent advantage links have is their ability to increase the SERP ranking of your page. Having a greater number of high-quality links leads to a better ranking. Apart from that, your link building strategy can provide you with many other advantages as well.
Building Relationships
Links will help you reach other sites and blogs in the industry. This wider outreach can get you more links and help you build long-term relationships with influencers and other business owners, and these connections can have a very positive influence on your business, making you appear trustworthy to your prospective clients.
Referral Traffic
Links also help in increasing the referral traffic to your website. Good, high-quality links will attract more viewers to your page, which, in turn, can help you generate more leads, convert those leads into sales, and increase your profits.
Brand Building
If your page has high-quality links, it will boost your image in the market and build up your brand name. Content creation is a very effective link building technique that can help you make a good name for your brand. It reflects and highlights the expertise of your company and helps spread the word about your products or services in the industry.
Link Earning
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Before you start building links, you have to find some valuable content to link to. In most cases, certain keywords are linked to some specialized blogs, research studies, or other relevant websites. However, sometimes website owners build resources specifically for the purpose of building links instead of using already existing sites.
Link Building Services
There are many companies that are in the business of link building. Hiring one of these companies takes a lot of pressure off you. Evidently, this last from Matthew Woodward explain that you need to know exactly what to look out for before enlisting the help of link building services. For example, you don’t want to hire a company that shares its site lists. While this can seem reassuring at first, it actually puts you at risk. You should also avoid cheap services because when it comes to SEO, you get exactly what you pay for, so if you want high-best quality links, you must be willing to pay for them.
Good and Bad Links
It is not the number of links that matters, it is the quality. A high number of links does not guarantee you a higher ranking, high-quality links from high profile pages do.
Natural Editorial Links
These are more effective because you don’t have to ask for them. These are given to you for free by other websites. In order to earn such links, you need to provide bloggers with some very good reasons as to why they should link to your page. Your best bet is to create unique, engaging, and informative SEO-friendly content that other influential bloggers would want to share. This can result in many more people becoming aware of your page.
Manual ‘Outreach’ Link Building
This most common kind of link building performed by SEO specialists involves directly getting in touch with bloggers and asking them to link to your page. The people you get in touch with need to have a tempting reason to link to your page.
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Moreover, they should be people who belong to your industry. Asking random bloggers who are not familiar with your industry to link to your site will not be of any advantage to you because their audience probably wouldn’t be interested in your products or services.
Self-created, Non-editorial Links
These links are not recommended because they tend to trick the search engines. It makes bloggers and search engines believe that the content is relevant and useful when it actually isn’t. Whether a particular type of link will work for you or not depends on your existing link profile.
Links can be acquired in a number of ways. It is always advisable to take into consideration the resources you have at your disposal and the industry that you are in. companies that are well established and part of a competitive market should have a more aggressive approach to link building. New and growing businesses, on the other hand, can seize the numerous opportunities they have to engage with bloggers and build up a community for their page. Quality links will definitely add to your business and give you a good brand name if used in the right way. Follow the advice given above and you are sure to see your business soar to new heights.
