SEO Link Building

What is SEO Link Building?

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.

Why is Link Building Important in SEO?

There are 2 ways that search engines use links:

1. To discover new pages and content

2. To help determine how well a page should rank

When you add new pages or content on your website, it is critical to ensure the pages get indexed or discovered by the search engines. Search engines will follow links on the internet, crawl your pages, and put your content into their indexes. After the search engines index your pages, they will then look at the content on the pages to determine the quality in order to decide how well your pages should rank for relevant keywords.

Aside from looking at your page content, search engines will also look at the number of links pointing to your pages from external websites and the quality of those external websites. When they see many high quality external websites are pointing back to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.

This makes it important for you to master link building if you are looking to do SEO yourself. If you are looking to hire a SEO agency to help with your SEO, it is important for you to check with them the link building strategy that they are using before you decide to hire them.

What Links Mean to Search Engines like Google?

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.

Is Link Building Still Relevant in SEO Today?

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.

What Are the Different Types of Links?

There are both good and bad links. When we build links, our aim is to build good links and avoid the bad links that are going to hurt your SEO performance. As mentioned earlier, quality is more important than ever because Google will penalize websites that build spammy links. Here are some good types of links that we aim to build:

Use content marketing to gain natural editorial links from other websites. When we create high quality content for your website, other websites or blog sites might pick up your content and provide a link back to your website as a reference. These are the types of links that Google often value very highly.

Manual outreach link building. We contact other webmasters to contribute our content or provide guest posting to their website. This is a very manual process and if your business is new and relatively unknown, this method is the most common way to increase your backlinks.

Press release submission. We work with you to develop news angles and submit your press release to the various media owners for publication.

Visual links. Visual links such as infographics, charts, images or diagrams are useful links that are easy to link to. We create this type of links and put it up on your website and you get a link anytime someone shares the visuals on their site.

Get your website listed on your trade or business associations’ websites. We help you to identify existing areas within your business that you can request to have a link back to your website.

NoFollow Links Vs DoFollow 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.

How to Get Links Naturally with Content Marketing

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”.

Black Hat Link Building – Avoid at All Cost

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.

In-House Content Writers and Link Builders

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.