In SEO, link building is key to propel your website to the first page of the search results listing. Link building is the process of getting links or mentions from other websites to your own. Users follow links on the internet to navigate between pages and search engine robots crawl the links between pages to discover new content. The quality of the links you build matters a lot. When it comes to link building, there are white hat and black hat links, and you should absolutely avoid the latter. If you can master the art of acquiring high quality links, you will give your business a clear advantage over your competitors who do not know how to do it.
Google has always been using links as a ranking factor to determine which pages to rank for relevant keywords. With many abuse and overuse of link building by many SEO practitioners, Google is always evolving their algorithm in order to combat the abuse. Google started rolling out regular updates, such as Google Penguin, which was specifically aimed at flagging websites that did not deserve to rank. However, this does not mean that Google does not value links anymore. As long as you continue to build high quality backlinks and avoid the black hat methods, your website can still do well in Google search results.
Link building is definitely still relevant in SEO today. Effective link building is not only about quantity but also the quality of links that you build. In SEO link building, sometimes more might not be ideal. In fact, spamming many low quantity links will hurt your SEO performance. There is no shortcut to link building. You should avoid tools that automatically help you to build links or any SEO agencies that promise to build X numbers of links for you every month. SEO link building is hard work as you will need to put in a lot of sweat and creativity in order to build high quality links.
When someone places this tag: rel=”nofollow” to a link, they are telling the search engines to not count this link as an endorsement. Of course, we should always try to get dofollow links however this will not be realistic at all. In fact, nofollow links are not as bad as you think. As a nofollow link still works perfectly fine when someone clicks on it, you will get increased traffic and also social signals or brand mentions when your brand is mentioned in the referring website. Both social signal and brand mentions will help boost your SEO performance.
The best type of links are editorial links when other webmasters publish or share your articles as a form of endorsement. As mentioned earlier, Google values this type of link the most and if you can get an editorial link, it goes a long way to boost your SEO performance.
At OOm, we use content marketing to get links for you naturally. One of the techniques that we use is the SEO skyscraper technique. Our skyscraper articles contain high-value and useful content, which make it very sharable. Also, skyscraper articles tend to rank on the first page of Google due to its quality of content. Please refer below for some examples of our skyscraper content ranked on the first page of Google, at the highly sought after “Position Zero”.
When it comes to link building, there are 2 school-of-thoughts: White Hat and Black Hat. You should avoid black hat link building at all cost so that you do not get a Google penalty. A Google penalty is the negative impact on your website’s rankings on the search results based on updates to Google’s search algorithms. This is Google’s way to combat against black hat SEO techniques. Every year, Google releases different algorithm updates to combat against black hat SEO, such as the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates.
At OOm, we only use white hat SEO techniques and link building to get your website to the first page of Google. With our many years of experience in SEO, we know what works for your business and will propel your website to the top of the search results.
By having in-house content writers and link builders, we are able to control every part of the on-page and link building process to deliver the highest quality work for you. Our team receives frequent training and is always kept abreast with the latest Google’s search algorithm changes to help you win in SEO.
We care greatly about our clientele. Our clients are an expanded mix of SMEs and enterprises. Check out some of the companies we’ve helped recently through our diverse portfolio.
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