Link building is an essential step for raising your site’s profile on the major search engines. If you don’t participate in link building, it can negatively impact your ranking. And, if you sell products and services, your objective should be to get to the top of the search engine rankings for keywords used by your target market. According to CIO, backlinks are the second most important ranking factor in terms of SEO. Yet, there is a difference between good and bad backlinks. Read on to learn more.
Make them relevant
Google, and other major search engines, determine the quality of backlinks for their ranking systems. They haven’t told us their exact factors, but one of them is certainly relevancy. You can tell this is the case since all of the major search engines are in the business of attracting repeat customers. In order to get people to continue using their search engines, they must provide relevant results. If the quality of their searches goes down, so will their number of users.
This is why it is critical to have relevant backlinks. In fact, it becomes much more valuable when it comes from a relevant source. If you have a blog on cats, it would be more relevant to receive a backlink from a pet food company than it would from a moving company. Does that make sense? And, according to Moz, page- and domain-level backlinks to be the most influential ranking factors for SEO. Plus, the more relevant the link, the more likely it is to get clicked.
As stated in the earlier example, people who are planning a move may not necessarily be interested in clicking on a link for a cat blog. On the other hand, if people are buying pet food, then it may make more sense for them to click on a link from a cat blog–especially if they have cats. This is why link building must be relevant. You can’t just get a bunch of links on random sites and expect results. That may work against you as it is considered black hat link building and spam. People are turned off by it. Instead, you should study keyword placement practices.
Build trust
Google will only display results from sites that are trustworthy. Sure, a few bad apples may sneak into the mix, but not for long. If your links are posted on untrustworthy websites, you are only doing harm to your rankings. A link from a high-trust website may be worth its weight in gold. Of course, this isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes time and research.
You can’t expect a high-trust website to post your article on how to make pancakes. That type of article has been written hundreds of thousands of times. Really, you must be a bit more vigilant in selecting a topic that you hope will get trusted backlinks. Research the site where you want a backlink. Look at their articles. Who is their target audience? What is a topic that may be of interest to them?
And, if you hire a writer to put a piece together for you–be willing to pay well for an article to be submitted to a highly-trusted website. You get what you pay for. Getting an article on a site such as the BBC or Forbes is going to cost you more than $100 in hiring the right writer. But, if you want it badly enough, you will make the right decision.
Keep them diverse
You want links from a wide swath of domains and varying types of domains. In essence, your links should not all be from the same domain. You want a robust link profile. You want diversity in anchor texts and where on the page your links are located. This is also true of FOLLOW or NOFOLLOW. Today’s search engine spiders are intelligent enough to find implicit links and reviews all over the Internet. This is why it also helps to have a trustworthy social media presence.
You can become an industry leader
It is quite difficult to earn links on high-trust sites. Basically, a link is a vote of confidence. You must work hard for it and earn it. When a high-ranking site finally grants you that link, it conveys that you are an industry leader within your niche. This can be extremely significant for your rankings. You can also learn more about good SEO content here.
Yet, link building can be the most time-consuming process of the entire marketing process. This is especially true if you run a relatively new website. You can buy links, but you must only go through reputable vendors who use only white hat techniques.
Link building is certainly an essential part of SEO and building up your site’s rankings. You can’t attract more targeted visitors without an active link building campaign. Whenever you post content, always ask if it is linkable. Try to post content that you believe would be featured on your favorite, high-ranking sites. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
