Beginners SEO: Refresher guide to Link Building in 2016
Whether you are a novice or an expert it’s important to remind yourself about key topics in SEO. Here I will be discussing link building. Link building is an off page SEO technique used to relate pages with pages of similar topics and increasing the number and quality of inbound links. Search engines use these links to determine what pages are deemed popular, trustworthy, not spam and worth being ranked higher. They use very refined and complex algorithms when linking data. Links are a good way for search engines to identify trustworthy pages on a particular topic. Reliable sites are usually linked to other reliable sites, and vice versa for spam, untrustworthy sites. If done well enough, links can be crucial for a website or blog gaining higher ranking and more traffic from search engines. Here are some tips on using link building to make the best impression on search engines.
Get popular neighbours
Link to internationally known, large and trusted sites such as Wikipedia, Forbes, gov.uk, The New York Times and Huffington Post etc. These are highly trusted sites, with thousands of sites linked to them. Linking to them relevantly helps you to gain trust with search engines and be favourably associated with.
Get popular neighbours based on the topic of your page
Link to highly regarded sites with a similar topic to what your content consists of. For example, if you are writing about healthcare, a good link that search algorithms will favour would be an NHS page.
Be current
Search engines like pages that are new and fresh, as importance of links and sites can decay. Keep creating high quality content with fresh links to large relevant sites. Content marketing is the best and most trusted way, by Google, to build links.
Have a variety of linked keywords
Use a variety of keywords to link to URLs. These keywords that are linked to other sites, called anchor text, are highlighted and clickable when linked to a URL. They also tell the search engine what your page is about. For example, if I hyperlink the phrase ‘link building’ then that will become prominent to search engines as vital information about the page. (There’s no need to link to the same URL twice in one page, as Google will only place importance on the first link.)
Sharing is Caring
If you really want to affect search engines even more then share your content on social media. Search engines notice this and this could lead to more clicks, views and shares from friends and online groups. Social shares are not the same as links but they still matter as social media grows in importance.
Watch out for Spam
Majority of the internet consists of spam or spamdexing. It’s therefore vital that your web pages remain separate from being labelled spam and are seen as reliable pages. Search engines use links to fish out unreliable spam pages, and spam pages usually link to other spam pages, so remember to link to high-trust sites only. Be extra selective about sites that you gain links from too and ensure they are not spam. You want your website to be associated with other good websites; as the saying goes ‘You are the company you keep!’
Retain the attention
SEO professionals, with their knowledge of HTML and coding, will ensure that your website retains all the power and attention from search engines when a link is created, rather than your more dominant neighbours.
Done correctly, link building is still highly relevant today as a great SEO tactic. It’s more than just providing extra information for readers; it adds power to your page too. Do get in touch with us today for SEO help from our SEO experts on link building and much more.
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- I'm a digitally inspired, e-Business professional. I write about digital marketing, social media and how psychology impacts modern day online buying behaviours and how people do business on the web.
