Links from other people’s websites to yours serve to improve your online visibility and are a cornerstone of our SEO campaigns. Link building helps SEO in a variety of ways and we hope to break them down into something easy to understand for marketing novices and professionals alike. Link building helps SEO efforts by serving as “votes” in the game of internet popularity. Backlinks coming into your site from other websites can also generate traffic, gain supplemental links on their own, and improves your trust overall. Linking does not stop once we have generated inbound links as we also need to build up external links pointing from your site to industry-specific domains which proves you know what you are talking about as well.
Links are Like Votes on the Internet
If we break down the entire web into a giant popularity contest, all of the links that come from other people’s websites to yours serve as votes of popularity. This is the foundation of what we provide in regards to link building, but there are some areas to focus on when you are looking to generate backlinks. While the link itself serves value, you can improve that value by acquiring a backlink that hits on one or more of the following tactics:
- Link Placement in the First Paragraph
- Keyword Usage in the Link
- Target URL (on your site)
- Industry Relevance
If you have been pushed down to the bottom of the page on the blog you are acquiring a link on, it will be obvious this is of little importance overall. If we swap that and the link lives in the first paragraph of the piece, Google will readily understand how much attention they should place onto the link and the value it passes. Each link has words associated with it, like this one for our contact page, and each has a target URL on the site. If we linked something related to link building to our technical SEO page, it may not carry the same value as if we pointed it to our link building page. You also want to make sure the link you are acquiring is on a website relevant to your services. It would not make much sense for a bridal company to be writing a blog about sprinkler blowouts in Denver.
Links can Generate Traffic
Depending on the popularity of the domain you are acquiring a link from, you may be able to generate traffic from the link itself. If we were to produce a piece for Neil Patel and it was published on his site, we would be sure to generate traffic from that domain since over 1 million people visit his site each month. So while the intrinsic SEO value is simply related to the link itself establishing value, more traffic could provide value to you and your company as well. We do not necessarily intend for the links we build to generate hundreds of visits per month, but, if they do, we are helping the collective effort.
Links can Generate Links Themselves
When you build a link on another site, that piece of content is visible to everyone on the web. There is the potential for a built link to create a few extra links if a blog is copied, referenced, or otherwise mentioned across the web. Many times we see our efforts for one link turn into many links due to this process. While it is possible to generate links much more quickly, they will not carry the kind of value you could get from having more intention behind the links you are trying to build.
Links Establish Trust
These types of links can be either external (outgoing) or internal (within your site). Links are like the roads for the internet. They interconnect the various pages on the web, whether on and fully within your site or going to other folks’ sites. Once we have our heads wrapped around this mentality, we can see how important properly working links could be for a search engine. Creating links from your site to other people’s sites should be done with ultimate attention. You would not want to link to a spammy site without much credibility since the link does not really show you are establishing value to something trustworthy. Trying to focus on the industry standards, like Neil Patel, Search Engine Journal, and others in our case can greatly help your credibility on the web.
As you can see, the work starts once you know where you want to get a link. The more intention you can place behind your link building, the better results it will have for you and your company.
