A website could be filled with great keywords, mobile optimized, and all set up with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These things certainly help, but there is still more needed to validate the content on your site as quality in the eyes of search engines. Like many search engine optimization strategies, there is a wrong way and a right way of approaching link building.
What is Link Building?
In short, link building is when a website provides useful links to other websites and other websites provide useful links back. This is especially common when making travel plans. When you go to a hotel website they may link to local attractions and local attractions might link back. These are useful links- something that benefits the user.
Why is Link Building Important?
Link analysis is used by search engines to determine how websites are related to each other. Quality websites do not often link to spam websites. A website that has many other quality sites linking to it is determined to be pretty important. For example, major news websites are often being linked to and search engines deem that site to have significance and that users must also value this website. The more popular a site, the more valuable the links will be. Wikipedia is another example of many outgoing links and many in flowing links. Wikipedia is often one of the first websites to pop up in a search result when wanting more information over almost any subject.
Bad Link Building
There is a way to overdo it. Similar to keyword stuffing, too many non-relevant links will not do anything to help your website. Remember that a good website has quality content that a user enjoys or finds beneficial. Your content is the one that suffers as the result of including links just to include links. Not only will search engines ignore these links, but so will users. Pages that look spammy with out of place links means users are more likely to hit the back button.
Good Link Building
Think about what purpose your website serves. What do people want to see? What do they want to learn more about? Updating Facebook and Twitter with links back to your website is a simple way to begin link building. Facebook and Twitter are deemed trustworthy and also a platform to get people clicking to your site and hopefully landing on a page that they are truly interested in. Clicks don’t matter in the world of search engine optimization if they immediately leave the page. While social media links are treated differently in search engine algorithms, they matter nonetheless.
Additionally, think locally about who you can begin networking with. Hair salons might link to beauty blogs (“Our Ten Favorite Products”) or health clubs may link to nutrition articles. Link building is powerful and takes time. However, with quality and purposeful content, link building will eventually become natural as your website’s popularity grows. As time goes on, it is important to not neglect link building. Keeping content fresh and links relevant is also crucial to being successful in search engine optimization.
Need help building a strong foundation on the web? Contact us and our team at Innovative Solutions will be happy to assist you with your search engine optimization!
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