Link building plays a crucial role in driving organic traffic to your website. In fact, backlinks are arguably the most important factor in search engine ranking. If you want to appear at the top of customers’ search results, then your content marketing strategy needs to take SEO linking into account. Combined with quality content, an optimized user experience, and good overall SEO, link building will improve your search performance and boost conversions.
What is SEO Link Building?
Link building is a process that involves obtaining hyperlinks to your website from other websites. These incoming links are known as backlinks. The backlinks are crawled by search engines, and having more of them will give your website a higher search result.
There are many ways to encourage more backlinks to your website, such as building relationships with other businesses and being active on social media. Ensuring that your website offers quality content that people want to engage with—in the form of a blog, for example—will attract more links as well. Guest blogging can also be an effective part of an SEO link strategy, as you can embed links to your website within the blog post.
Why Invest in an SEO Link Strategy?
The reason marketers and businesses should invest in SEO linking is to increase search engine rankings and draw more organic traffic. Growing your organic traffic is a critical part of a content marketing plan. People who find your website by searching for your products and services are more likely to go through with the purchase. This is an important avenue for business growth that you don’t want to overlook.
In addition to organic search engine traffic, backlinks provide referral traffic from the websites linking to yours. Referral traffic is also a great way to increase leads and sales. Link building is all about helping people who may be interested in your business discover it.
3 Tips for Effective Link Building
When it comes to link building, there are a few best practices to keep in mind. Here are three linking 101 tips to help ensure you come out on top.
1. How to Identify Good Links
Whether a link is “good” or “bad” depends on its relevance. A link that comes from a website that isn’t relevant to your business has little value. On the other hand, links from pages with similar topics to yours will generate a higher search engine ranking. The links should be closely connected to and appropriate for your niche. For example, a link from a fashion blogger has big value for a clothing business.
Related Reading: How to Determine if a Link is Good or Bad
2. Build Your SEO Link Strategy Around Trustworthy Sites
Search engines also base the quality of backlinks on the trustworthiness of the sites they come from. Trustworthy sites are secure and respected for their content. Relevant links from authoritative sources like these will improve your search performance. Conversely, links from untrustworthy sites, spam sites, unsecured sites, and sites that sell links will hurt your ranking. Each incoming link should be a vote of confidence that indicates the usefulness of your page.
3. Optimize the On-Page Location of Links
When guest blogging, the location of hyperlinks within the post will also affect its SEO value. Thankfully, using links correctly is easy—just make sure to contextualize them inside the body of the content. The link should read naturally, so try to use phrases that are suitable for the text. This will also help ensure that you don’t always use the same anchor text, which can hurt your rankings.
Related Reading: Link Building & Anchor Text: 3 Things You Need to Know
An SEO linking strategy should be all about building contextualized links on trustworthy and relevant websites.
Support for All Your Content Marketing Needs
Successful content marketing, including SEO linking, starts with good content. Constant Content is here to bring your marketing and SEO link strategy to fruition. Our experienced writers can create quality landing pages, articles, blog posts, and other types of content that encourage backlinks. You can also hire writers to write guest blogs with relevant, contextual, and well-placed hyperlinks. Get started today with content that will help your business grow.