Link Building: What Works and What Doesn’t to Rank Your Website
Backlinks to your website can bring website traffic, develop credibility, and help your brand rank higher on the search engines. That’s why it is essential to make link building a part of your SEO strategy. Below are our four link building pointers to drive your hyperlinking game to brand-new heights in 2020.
If you’re an SEO marketer, or just want to boost your brand name’s ranking on Google, then the top link building methods are probably what you’re looking for. Link building can help reaffirm your website’s integrity, producing a network of access across numerous sites.
Marketers frequently ask why link creation is essential, and they are still relevant in 2020. A new SEO research study confirms the significance of backlinks based on an evaluation of 600,000 keywords from SEMrush’s worldwide database. This is reaffirmed by link structure case studies. For example, a content marketing agency improved a customer’s Google ranking from 18 to 1 through the thoughtful use of link building.
It’s essential to understand which methods to follow and which to avoid if you’re trying to take advantage of link building strategies and boost the organic web traffic flowing into your website. First, let’s start with a quick description of and why web link building is so crucial.
What Is Link Building in SEO?
Link building is a Search Engine Optimization strategy that helps visitors find informative blog sites and write-ups on the net via other pages. It also allows brands to get discovered throughout the massive content database available on the web. It includes getting several other pages to link back to a particular page to:
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- Drive website traffic to a content asset and also create income
- Help a search engine crawl the internet to find and rank your page
While the user sees just a part of the link, the search engine considers the entire link structure and extracts beneficial information from it. Here is a link creation example that explains this clearly. If you have linked to a blog on how to make pizza, the user will see this: it takes just 5 mins for pizza, even if you are a novice, and upon clicking, it will take them to the blog post: http://myblog.com/five-minutes-pizza-for-beginners.
However, when you link back to a different page, link building methods should be carefully followed so that the Google spider can effortlessly discover your page. This means choosing the ideal text for the hyperlink, making sure a keyword in the hyperlinked text, and frequently checking to see if the link is still active.
When crawling a web page where this blog is hyperlinked, the Google spider will see something similar to this:
From this link building model, it is evident that Google (or other search engines) understands more than just your blog title. That’s what makes link building in SEO such an imperative technique for online marketers.
Link Building Do’s and Don’ts
Like any type of link-building-101 guide will demonstrate, the best practices are continually changing. For example, Google presented a brand-new set of rules in September 2019 that might determine spam links. Applying these policies to the link building case we discussed previously, you would need to separately specify what type of content you’re sharing on the site. In case you’re backlinking to a comment on an online forum:
The new rel=”ugc” tag helps Google recognize that you’re referencing “user-generated content.”
This is a classic example of the changing nature of link creation and why it is challenging for web marketers to stay current. Luckily, there is a set of dos and don’ts that have lasted, and we recommend you also follow these link creation methods.
DO insert long keywords when link building
This is a link building basic. Continuing with the example of link building we’ve been following, there are two techniques to refer to a page about making pizza. On your homepage, you can write, “click here to learn pizza making” and also hyperlink “here.” Or, in a different post, you might use the phrase as “as I discussed in my earlier blog on five-minute pizza for newbies.” The latter is a much better approach, as the long search phrase helps Google contextualize the link and show it to genuinely interested visitors.
DO increase social visibility for your page
Social sharing can help direct even more website traffic to your web page and urge readers to link back to it from social media sites. Pages that do well on social media platforms regularly obtain an uptick with regards to SEO. We suggest embedding share buttons for all the main social platforms at the top/bottom of your web page.
DON’T use purchased or sponsored web links
In SEO, the purpose of link building is to occupy a considerable assortment of websites with links to your own page. Some marketers choose to buy links, a method that is significantly discouraged by Google. A link building method would be to specify the rel=”sponsored” tag in case you have a compensation-based arrangement.
DON’T mention the same phrase frequently
If we return to our link building model, there are several different ways to hyperlink an article on “5 minutes pizza for novices.” Rather than repeating the title in the same style throughout pages, try semantic similarities like “pizza for dummies in just five minutes,” “even you can make pizza in five mins,” and “pizza, the preferred Italian meal, takes just 5 minutes to make.” Once again, this will certainly help Google zero in on the specific context, making your web link structure efforts in SEO much more reliable.
Getting Started? Use Technology Simplify Link Building
Interestingly, this can be a totally hands-off process if you comply with basic link building strategies. Nevertheless, as your business expands, with the number of web pages, posts, and social handles continuously growing, link building tools like SEMrush, SEOBuddy, and Ahrefs can help you match quantity with quality. And keep in mind – inspect your web site regularly for broken links – this can guarantee sustained performance on your SEO.
There you go. We hope that you have a better understanding of exactly why link building is important and how you can master it with our link building strategies.