If you read a lot of online content, you probably know what happens when you click words or sentences that are blue and underlined (Did you try to click that one?)
But have you ever wondered what it does for websites and why most online contents have it? If you’re looking for an answer, you’ve come to the right place: this is actually part of a website’s SEO effort called “link-building.”
Building links to and from your website is a crucial element of SEO and page ranking — and if done right, link-building can help land your website a spot on the first page of search engine result pages. But link-building is no walk in the park, and building high-quality links are more important now than ever if you want to compete in the online market.
What is link-building?
Before we dive into the ways of proper link-building, let’s first talk about what link-building is. According to MOZ, “link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own.” These links help drive traffic to your website, helps make your website SEO- friendly so Google can index your website for ranking, and helps build your website’s authority.
If you do proper link-building (by following our tips below,) you’ll be seeing a lot of traffic coming into your website because other people trust your page – And Google loves trustworthy websites.
Link-building strategies
1. Research keywords
Just like any other phase of optimizing your website for search engines, keyword research is also important in link-building. When Google sends out googlebots to crawl your website for indexing, they use keywords as a marker. So when someone searches for that particular keyword, they know where to find your website.
When it comes to link-building, google does the same thing: googlebots peek into the hyperlinked website and sees its relevance to your website’s content. If the relevance is strong, your website gets plus points for the link; the more points you get, the better the googlebots will index your website.
2. Find quality links
If you’re thinking that spamming your website with links will give you all the plus points you need to bag the top spot of the search result page and you’re excited to use this new-found knowledge to sweep your competition, just keep calm and continue reading.
Link-building IS important, but the links you build with your website should be QUALITY LINKS. Simply adding whatever link you find relevant to your website or your web content will only hurt your ranking (and the spamming, please don’t do that)
Quality links mean that the targeted website is credible in the digital sphere. Examples of authoritative websites include straitstimes.com, google.com, cnn.com, etc.; these websites have proven themselves in the online world to be authors in the respective industries, and if you form links with these kinds of websites, then you get credibility too.
3. Finding pages on your site to link to a new page
Outbound links are not your only link-building opportunities: If your website has numerous content with similar keyword variations, then it’s an opportunity to link!
When you link pages in your website with one another, you’re building a link network called “internal-linking.” This link network helps spread the authority and ranking power of your website as a whole instead of just one webpage on your site. This also helps users navigate to important pages in your website (like the about us page or contact form page.)
4. Link Pages Using Targeted Anchor Text
Using the right anchor text for your hyperlink is important as this will help googlebots find the relation of the targeted website to the content of your website.
For example: using “read more” as an anchor text to a hyperlink that directs to the full version of s snippet post is a good anchor text since it shows people where to click to view the entire article. And at the same time helps Google see the relevance of the link.
5. Create Quality Content
Lastly, creating great content will naturally grow its own link-builds. If your website has good, authentic, and highly-informative content, others will link to it on their own websites, making you an authority on the subject matter.
This link is very important when it comes to getting a good google-ranking; the more links direct toward your website, Google starts seeing your website as an authoritative source and will rank you higher in the search results page. The good content = better ranking, more traffic.
Whether you’re a start-up company trying to get noticed online or a huge company brand trying to boost your ranking online, link-building should be a part of your SEO strategy, so it’s best to work with a team of professionals for an effective link-building and SEO strategy.
