SEO link building is crucial to the success of your site ranking on the major search engines for the keyword terms that will bring you more business. If you are a site owner, potential site owner, or do it yourself SEO person this post will give you the basic understand of link building for SEO purposes and some tips to get you going.
What is Link Building?
Link building is a term in the SEO industry that is very broad and vague but, usually describes anything you do to point links from other websites back into your site. These inbound links help to get traffic to your site but most importantly assist in having your site found by search engines such as Google. Search engines, through use of complicated algorithms, give better search result rankings to those that have more quality inbound links to their website. Links equate to ‘votes’ or ‘authority status’ on the web. It should be noted that search engines also have other criteria that determine their results, but inbound links are often given the most weight. The important issue of SEO link building is that quality trumps quantity and that is done in a “natural” way. It is all about finding the right mix.
Link Building Tip #1
Do not increase your monthly inbound links by more than 20%. This is by far the most important tip any link building service or link building expert can give you. Now, if you have just created a new site 20% of 0 is nothing, but you must realize that only a very small fraction (less than 1%) of all new websites will have that much “buzz” that will create hundreds or thousands of links in a short period of time. Your site will most likely not be one of them so it is crucial that you “show” the search engines a natural progression of increasing your link profile month over month.
Link Building Tip #2
Before you start going gangbusters on getting inbound links you need link assets or what the industry calls “linkbait”. A link is a very precious thing on the Internet. If you have seen my link building page on this site you will notice I use a picture of the Holy Grail. I do this because a link from another site to your own site is just that in the SEO link building world. Quality links are very valuable and hard to obtain so you must think first and brain storm around the types of link assets you have. Say to yourself “What do I offer in my industry that will set me as the authority?” Examples are:
- Subject matter expert
- Whitepapers
- Articles
- Guides
- Worksheets
- Videos
- Etc.
Hopefully this quick post has gotten the creative juices flowing for you as you start your link building campaign. The process of link building requires a lot of time and effort, and each and every campaign is different from another. client. Every website, business and industry has its own challenges to over come to achieve success, and with many years in the industry I have seen it all!
Just remember, link building is an art. It requires thought and time and must be customized in order to show best results. Obtaining a link, for many can take a lot of time and energy. Sadly, many efforts are unfruitful, but if you dedicate the time to obtaining these valuable links, you can benefit from it and dominate your competition!
[...] how link building has changed since 2005. Back then SEO link building was very easy and anybody could do it and be successful at it. Strategies revolved around a [...]