Link building is, in simple terms, about getting other websites to link to your website. All marketers and business owners should be interested in link building to drive referral traffic and increase their site authority.
Why create a link? Google’s algorithms are complex and constantly changing, but backlinks are still a big factor in determining which sites rank for which keywords. Linking is one of many tips used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links tell Google that your site cites a quality resource. Therefore, sites with more backlinks receive higher rankings.
That said, building natural and biological links is a difficult and time-consuming process. Not all links are created equal: A link to a small website or website will have a major impact on your SERP rank from a link to an official website like the Wall Street Journal. Newly created websites, but high quality links are harder to find. For more info read iGaming link building.
This guide will teach you how to create quality links that improve your organic ranking without breaking Google guidelines.
Remember, link building is necessary to achieve high organic search rankings.
Why link building is important for SEO
Link building is important because it is a major factor in how Google ranks web pages. Google notes that:
“In general, webmasters can improve the ranking of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
Imagine that we have a site promoting wind energy equipment that we sell. We are competing with another manufacturer of wind turbine equipment. One of the ranking factors that Google will look into determining how to rank our related pages is link popularity.
Link building strategies
While the example above provides a general visual understanding of the importance of link building, it is very basic. This omits major factors such as:
- Trust and authority of linking pages.
- Optimization of content of SEO and related sites.
- Inner link anchor text.
- For a more in-depth explanation of how PageRank is calculated, read these resources:
- Original Google PageRank Articles
- In-depth discussion of the thread behind PageRank
- Wikipedia page on the topic
The most important concept to understand is that, as Google says, you are likely to rank your content higher to target your keywords if you can get an external website to link to your pages.
Simple Link Building Strategies: How To Get Links To Other Sites
There are several link strategies that are used to link external websites to you:
Content Creation and Promotion – Create engaging, unique, high-quality content that people will naturally want to reference, link to, and talk about. You need to get the word out before you can expect someone to find and link to your content!
Reviews and mentions – Put your product, service or site in front of influencers in your industry, such as popular bloggers or people with high social media.
Friend and Partner Links – Ask people you know and people you work with to link to your site. Remember that relevance matters; Links to sites from the same industry or general niche as your site will be more valuable than links to random, unrelated sites.
Creating lots of links can take some time, but be patient and remember that shortcuts like buying links are against Google guidelines and can be disastrous for your SEO. Do not take chances.
Link for free with internal link building
There is an easy and small way to link to the pages you improve to improve search engine rankings. And this is a method over which you have complete control: internal linking.
When considering web page rankings, there are some major factors to consider:
Anchor text – one of the most important things search engines consider when ranking a page is the actual text that the link page uses to speak.
These are all things that we cannot control when trying to get links to other sites. However, we can control all these things by linking our content to our own pages. We can do it:
Determine the anchor text to be used.
Decide which page to indicate this anchor text.
Make sure the quality and content of the linking page is high (because this is our page!).
Creating external links for your site is important, but by focusing more of your efforts on optimizing those internal links, you can build quality inbound links to the right pages with the right anchor text, which will give you a Unmatched ranking boost (for free!).
Create an Internal SEO Link Building Wireframe
To do this, you just have to map the keywords you want to target to the most logical pages. So, let’s say we have three pages to choose from:
Since the turbine rotors page certainly seems best suited for our keyword “wind turbine rotors”, we will align that keyword with this page.
Similarly, we can associate “wind turbine parts” and “wind turbine shafts” with related pages. In a spreadsheet, it might look like this:
What is internal linking
As you can see, each page is associated with many keywords. By making this document available to all of your content authors, they can quickly see which pages are targeting which keywords; They can instantly check your SEO wireframes to see which keywords are targeted (with a simple CTL F!).