Link Building

Link Building

Links are essential to ranking for keywords and driving traffic. Getting links, however, ain’t easy.

What are links?

Links connect the internet. A link points from one website to another. People link to content for a variety of reasons, usually because that web page is helpful.

Why are links valuable?

A link is like a recommendation from one website to another. Links tell search engines, “Hey, we like this page. We like it so much that we are going to send people away from our website to this other one.”

Links are an easy way for search engines to measure a website’s authority. The same way Instagram followers can measure an Instagrammer’s influence, links can measure a website’s authority.

How are links measured?

Search engines evaluate a link’s trust and authority. They de-value spammy links and increase value for quality links.

Let’s say a website has one link purchased from a crappy website. They have a second link (which they got naturally) from an authoritative website who wrote an article that linked to one of your blogs.

The crappy link will likely carry less weight. The authoritative link will be more valuable.

Search engines look at your entire link profile and make determinations about how authoritative your site is and what that means about your website.

You guessed it — a good link profile will help your content rank. A bad link profile could get you penalized.

How do I get links?

There are tons of ways. One of the best is called broken link building.

Find broken links in your industry and reach out to website administrators who link to the broken content.

Tell them about a better web page (that isn’t broken, of course). This better web page is on your site and they can easily fix their broken link and replace it.

Another way to attract links, “natural link building,” is about creating quality content. If your content is THAT good, people will find it, and link to it. This can take time. It’s heavily reliant on luck. And on creating content that’s miles better than the competition.

For folks who don’t like link building, you could try this laissez faire approach.

But to push the envelope, you might need a more direct strategy. There are plenty.

Wrapping up

Links can make or break an SEO strategy. Links connect the online universe and Google uses them to evaluate websites and content.

Getting links is difficult but there are plenty of strategies to deploy to give your content the kick-in-the-butt it needs to outrank your competition.