Why Should You Invest In Effective Link Building For SEO

Link building is essential as it enables other websites to link back to your site. It is highly useful and effective for business owners and marketers to build links that drive referral traffic and increase their website’s authority. Ultimately, link building is one of the most powerful ways to improve site and page ranking, bring in new customers, and enhance the sale of products or services offered on a website.

Building links is intrinsically linked with how Google works and ranks search pages. Its algorithms are complex and continuously changing and adapting. However, back links are always a critical factor in how every search engine decides which websites rank for which keywords.

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO), building links is one of the tactics as links signal to Google that your website is a trusted and quality source worthy of being browsed and read. Thus, websites with more back links usually earn higher rankings, which leads to more readers and potential customers.

How To Do Quality Link Building

You can go about link building to your site the correct way or the incorrect way. Business owners, websites, and bloggers who are concerned about their site’s and business long-term viability should undertake only ‘natural’ link building.

Natural link building means the method of EARNING links instead of BUYING them or achieving them via MANIPULATIVE tactics, which are also known as black-hat SEO: a tactic that can get your website banned from search results.Such methods can harm your online reputation, result in financial loss, and an uphill battle to clean your site to get into the good books of search engines.

However, natural or organic link building is easier said than done. It is a challenging and time-consuming process. Moreover, all links are not created or considered equal. A link from are puted site like Forbes will have more impact on your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) compared to a link from a new or small website.

While high-quality links are difficult, building quality links that enhance your natural or organic rankings without breaching the guidelines of Google and other search engines can do wonders for your website and business. Read on, because link building is vital in achieving high organic search rankings.

Importance of Link Building For SEO

Link building is vital as it is a significant factor in deciding how Google ranks different web pages. According to Google:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

As an example, consider a company and website, Shiny Kitchen Equipment,which manufactures, sells, and promotes commercial kitchen equipment in the business-to-business segment, and is also competing with another manufacturer of kitchen equipment: Low light Kitchen Equipment. During a search, when it comes to determining how to rank the respective pages, Google will consider link popularity as one of the most important ranking factors.

Since it employs effective link building for SEO, Shiny Kitchen Equipment will have a better chance of getting higher ranking for search keywords like “baking ovens” compared to Low light Kitchen Equipment because the former has more links to their site.

The above example, while being simple,offers a general pictorial understanding of the importance of link building, but omits crucial factors including:

• Linking pages and their authority
• The content optimization and SEO of the respective websites
• The anchor text of the links that are incoming

Read the following resources to gain an in-depth understanding of how Page Rank is calculated:

• Google’s Page Rank paper
• Wikipedia page on link building for SEO
• A detailed discussion about the formula used for Page Rank

But if we were to cut to the chase: the critical thing to understand, as per Google, is that if you get external sites to link to your pages, you are likely to have your site’s content rank higher for the keywords you are targeting.

Link Building Strategies To Get Other Sites To Link To You

Link building strategies to get external websites to link to your site, include:

Creating and Promoting Content: Write unique, compelling, and high-quality content, which people want to read and link to, and share with people. But you have to let people know before expecting them to find and link your content to in the future.

Mentions and Reviews:Showcase your site, product, or service to influencers in your industry, such as people with a significant social media following and popular bloggers.

Links From Partners and Friends:Ask people you work with or know to link to your website. As relevance matters, links from websites in the same niche or general industry as your website will have more value compared to links from unrelated or random sites.

It takes time and sustained effort to build many links. Remain patient and keep in mind that shortcuts such as buying links go entirely against Google’s guidelines. If you take such risks, it can be destructive for your SEO effort.

Building Links for Free Using Internal Link Building

Internal link building is an underrated and easy method to build links to the pages that require improvemen tin search engine rankings, and it’s also a technique you can control completely.The following critical factors should be considered while trying to get a web page to rank:

Anchor Text: The text a linking page utilizes to communicate about your content is one of the essential aspects search engines take into consideration when ranking a page.

For example, if a user links to the website Shiny Kitchen Equipment with the text “baking ovens,” it will enable us to rank high for this keyword phrase. But if they had only used text such as “Shiny Kitchen Equipment Pvt. Ltd.” to link to the website, the company will not get the same ranking advantage for the search phrase “baking ovens.”

Linking Page and Its Quality: The quality of the page sending the link is also important. Search engines give more weight age to links from trusted and high-quality pages while boosting rankings compared to questionable websites and pages.

The Page The Link Is Directed At:Often, people want to link to a site’s home page, but this makes it hard for individual pages to attain high rankings as it’s difficult for them to create their own link equity.

The above elements can’t be controlled while attempting to get other websites to link to us. However, we can control all these aspects in linking to our own web pages from our own content by:

• Determining the anchor text to be used
• Deciding which page the anchor text should point at
• Ensuring that the linking page’s content is high considering that it’s your page

While creating external links to your website is vital, it is important to put more effort intothe optimization of the internal links,and build high-quality in-bound links, using rich anchor text, to the appropriate pages. Doing so will put you in the position of attaining a powerful boost in rankingsfor free.

Tips And Tools For Internal Link Building

How does one build the sough-after internal links? You can follow a step-by-step process to interlink your web pages in the following easy steps:

Link Building and Keyword Research: Begin by using a keyword research tool to generate several relevant and popular keywords.

Associate Keywords To Content: Your keywords need to be grouped strategically. So create an information architecture that’s search-friendly.

Link Pages Utilizing Targeted Anchor Text: Finally, apply your keyword research to smart inter-linking by linking to content utilizing the keywords you have generated.

Success lies in the execution of the third and final step: ensure that you are linking to the right web pages with the appropriate anchor text. Here are a few tips for the effective execution of your linking strategy.

Utilize Your Website Search

Your site’s search function can be used for many purposes. It can be used to find pages on your website to link to a new web page. When you generate fresh content, you want to ensure that you can search your website for any mention of identical keyword alternatives you may wish to link to that page.

Another way is to find a page that’s been generated to link to. Your website may have many content authors, in which case you may have some idea that a page with a set of keywords has been created, but you don’t know the URL or the page title. In this situation, you can either use Google or type the keywords into your website search to find the corresponding page. Doing so will return all the pages having that phrase that Google indexed.

Generate Internal SEO Link Building Wire Frame

To create the framework, map the keywords you want to target to the most relevant pages. Consider the following three pages:

• shiny kitchenequipment/baking-ovens
• shiny kitchenequipment/double-boilers
• shiny kitchenequipment/gyros-grills

As the baking ovens page seems to be the most appropriate fit for our “baking ovens” keyword, align that keyword with that specific page. Similarly, match “double boilers” and “gyros grills” with the corresponding pages. Thus, each page is associated with multiple keywords. For example, for /baking-ovens, the targeted keywords can be: “baking ovens,” “oven,” and “baking over parts,” etc.

After creating a spreadsheet of keywords and associated pages, share it with all your content writers who can quickly see which pages are targeting which keywords. The writers can also instantly check your SEO wire frame to find which keywords have been targeted.

Now that you are well-informed about the basics of effective link building for SEO, but need information about SEO, read our comprehensive guide to the basics of SEO.