Building backlinks to a website is invaluable to improving its rankings and overtaking competition in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Of all the efforts a company can put towards improving their own SEO, backlink acquisition will generate the most movement. There is an art to acquiring links though. Google has improved their ability to detect poor quality or spammy links, so finding natural backlinks is more important now than ever before. Firestarter SEO has been building natural backlinks for over a decade, and we’ve found three simple ways to help boost a company’s link building efforts: Creating valuable content, leveraging social media, and maintaining a diverse and natural link distribution.
Create Valuable Content for SEO
The most important element to gaining more natural links is creating high-quality, linkable content on the website. This helps link building efforts in a couple of ways. First, creating valuable content will attract backlinks without any additional effort. For example, many of the educational articles Firestarter SEO creates (like “How Long Does SEO Take to Work?”) have generated natural links without us having to disseminate the content through other channels or do any manual outreach. The reason behind this is today’s society is constantly craving new content to consume. Whether it’s a potential client or another business in your industry, people are regularly searching for and looking to consume new content. As you produce content worth linking to, people will naturally find it on their own.
The other way building quality content helps link building efforts is it makes other websites much more open and excited about linking to a website containing valuable content. As we undertake manual outreach we find many companies willing to provide links. However, most of the time their one request is that we provide content worth linking to. These websites want to be seen as an authority and thought leader to their target audience. If their articles link to sources with weak and uninspiring content, it weakens their position. So, the responsibility falls on you to produce content that is worth linking to in order to open new doors.
Leverage Social Media
Once quality content has been produced, the next step is to distribute that content through all social media channels. As mentioned in our article about social media and link building, the links pointing to your website on a social media channel generally won’t move the needle. Most of those links don’t actually pass equity to a website. However, social media can be a powerful tool in spreading the word and getting quality content in front of influencers. As the reach of your content spreads, the chances increase of an influencer or other site finding it and writing about it in a blog or content piece they create. This is where the SEO magic happens. Suddenly, this one piece of content has generated the potential of dozens, if not hundreds of additional link opportunities without having to do any manual outreach or followup.
Maintain a Diverse Distribution
Finally, an important principle to follow as a manual outreach campaign takes place is to maintain a natural and diverse distribution of types of links. Links come in all shapes and sizes such as directories, guest posts, press releases, etc. Google simply wants to see a diverse breakdown of these types of links. If every link pointing to a website was a directory link with exact match anchor text it would be a red flag. However, if this link profile instead had a healthy mixture of multiple types of links, and many different forms of anchor text then search engines wouldn’t bat an eye.
As you focus on creating meaningful and inspiring content, distribute it through social media channels, and try to maintain a natural link distribution, your backlink profile will increase in its health and impact. This will generate more movement in SEO results than you ever thought possible.
