Link Building
How important is link building to your SEO strategy?
Link building is perhaps the most polarising topic within the SEO industry. There are those in SEO who swear by link building and do pretty much JUST link building. Then there are those who stay well clear of any sort of link building due to the penalties Google has dished out over the years, where entire SEO agencies have crumbled because an over reliance on the wrong link-building method.
But who is correct? How do you build links properly? What is the “wrong link-building method”?
First of all, let’s look at what a link is and how it’s beneficial for your website’s rankings
When Google first came to the fore in the search engine wars (we realise we’re sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi here talking about the Clone Wars) it was built on the premise of links. Google used a system called PageRank, which was a ranking for every page on the internet (not just every site, every page of every site) which was determined by the number and quality of the web pages that linked TO them. The more links you had coming into your website’s pages, from high-quality websites, the higher your PageRank in Google and, everything else being equal, the higher you ranked in Google against your competitors.
Naturally, as with everything in the SEO industry, people in SEO tried to find a workaround. How could they acquire more links for their clients, quickly, cheaply and effectively? This is where bulk link buying came in, and some agencies (most of whom no longer exist) built their whole agency model on renting links from websites that were set up purely for the purposes of selling links. Some call them ‘link farms’.
This worked. For a time. It worked until Google evolved to detect it. This was in 2012, and it was labelled the Penguin update, to combat webspam and link building. Business owners who were using low-quality paid links, acquired by agencies who were essentially cheating Google’s algorithm, lost their rankings. They were hit hard by Google in the Penguin update.
This gave link builders a bloody nose, and turned a lot of SEO consultants and agencies off the concept of link building altogether. The problem is that links are still important for your rankings. You need them in order to rank, but you need to acquire them in the right way so that Google doesn’t penalise you for breaking its rules.
So what are Google’s rules on link building?
Google’s rules, or ‘best practices’, do get regularly updated so it’s wise to keep an eye on the changes. The general rule of thumb, though, is that you’re not allowed to pay for a link for the purposes of increasing your website’s rankings within Google. Paid links are fine, so long as they are marked as ‘sponsored’. However, doing so means those links are (at time of writing) completely ignored for ranking purposes.
So what link building is allowed?
Google does actually want your website to feature inbound links from other websites. It’s how the Internet works, and is required for Google to be able to order any search results. So don’t think that links are bad, and should be avoided. That’s the opposite of the case. Here are some of the link-building strategies you may encounter.
Link Attraction
This is the process of creating content that encourages other websites to link to you. Think of it as fishing in a lake or the sea. The bait you use to fish is the content you create, and the fish you catch are the websites that link to you. They’re coming to you, and they’re linking to you without you having to contact them, or even to be aware they’ve done it.
These types of links can be extremely powerful, and can result in links from websites such as news sites, university or school sites or even government websites. Using this technique we have acquired links from sites such as the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Sky and Wikipedia. These are links you cannot buy, and worth more any number of paid links.
These links can be attracted by creating content such as video, animation, infographics, featured articles, quizzes, podcasts, blogs and many more – all content we at Engage Web create for our clients.
Link Outreach
This is what the SEO industry would term ‘proper link building’. This is the link building strategy that is the most effective in terms of increasing rankings, but is also the most time consuming. Many SEO agencies and indeed large businesses often have whole outreach departments. The process involves identifying the websites that would make good inbound links for your website, and then contacting those websites and requesting a link.
That’s the simplified version. The reality is, of course, much more intensive. Effective outreach includes:
Analysing your competitors’ links and performing a ‘gap analysis’ between your links and their links
Reviewing and analysing potential websites to determine whether or not they would actually make a good link
Identifying the contact details for the correct person at that website
Crafting the perfect outreach message to send to that website
Communicating and negotiating with someone at the website for a link
All of this needs to be done before any links are obtained. This takes a lot of time, and often without much success. Once you have finally agreed a link with the contact at a website, you then need to create and supply the content for the link, choose the anchor text and the destination page for the link. Only once that content is published on the website, is the link live so that Google can index it and your rankings can benefit.
There are millions of business directories on the internet, and there are companies who will offer to submit your business to these directories for a fee. You need to be careful when using a service such as this, however. While the vast majority of these directories will do practically nothing to your website’s rankings, you should consider the “make up” of your link profile.
You want your link profile to be natural. A natural link profile will have some very good, strong links from powerful websites. It will have a lot of mid-quality links from websites, and it will most likely have lots of lower quality links. That’s unavoidable and, as it happens, necessary. If, however, your website is brand new and has no link profile to speak of, and it suddenly acquires 500 very low quality links from directories around the internet, that’s a bit of a red flag.
Before you decide to make any directory submissions, or use any service that offers to do that for you, consider where your link profile currently sits. If you’re unsure, contact us today and we’ll happily run a backlink report for you, and compare it against your competitors to see where you sit in relation to them. At least then you’ll have peace of mind on whether or not a directory submission service will help or hinder your website’s rankings.
Conclusion
Link building is a time-consuming process, but a vital one for any SEO strategy. It can be the difference between success and failure when trying to rank for a competitive keyword, or trying to outrank a tricky competitor. For instant help with link building, we walk you through a number of strategies inside our learning platform EngageWeb.Club. You’re welcome to access those now and go through the videos on link building strategy.
If you want Engage Web to handle this for you, however, or you’d like to discuss how link building could benefit your business, set up a call with us now and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.
