Digital marketing strategies are all about enhancing your SEO rankings across various search engines. Over the years, the canvas of digital marketing has forever changed colors, but one thing has remained constant – backlink building. Ever since the 1990s, search engines have been viewing links (both external and internal) as a metric of popularity and ranking of websites and their content on the web. The founders of Google – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – first introduced the connection between links and search engine rankings, when they invented PageRank – an algorithm that was designed to measure the quality of a page based on the number of relevant links associated with it.
However, we’ve come a long way since then, and link building strategies have now become a much more intricate process. Search engines view links as bridges between pages. Links allow them to analyze the popularity of different websites and pages and also to determine metrics like reliability and spam. While determining the rankings and credibility of pages and websites, search engines not only assess their content but also the number of credible links pointing to them from external sites. It is this increasing focus on links that have made it an imperative for digital marketers and entrepreneurs to nurture the link profile of their websites to garner attention and drive traffic towards them. And this can be simply done with link building services that offer better SEO outcomes to grow your business reach.
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Purpose Of Backlinks
Backlinks refer to high-quality links that are created when other websites on the Internet link to your website. They are of two kinds: internal and external. While external backlinks are the links that point towards you from external sites, indicating a “vote of trust” for your content, internal backlinks are created within your website. For instance, if you are writing on “Top ten nutritious foods,” you can create an internal link to this article by linking another relevant post of yours say, “Foods that can make you healthy from the inside.” This makes it easier for your visitors to navigate within your website without ever leaving it.
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This graph clearly shows that websites having greater referral domains are ranked higher in Google’s search results
Backlinks are not just meant to fetch higher rankings, but they also serve the purpose of creating pathways to reliable and good quality content on the web. In other words, backlinks help create an online storehouse of credible information for the netizens. Let us now look at the reasons why link building is one of the most crucial of all SEO strategies.
- Promoting Your Brand
An efficient linking strategy can be the most excellent way of promoting and building your brand. As the number of both internal and external links pointing towards your website increases, it will indicate that you hold a position of authority within your circle. Backlinks will highlight the strengths of your brand and help re-establish its credibility time and again.
- Promoting Referral Traffic
The higher the number of links associated with your website, the greater will be the traffic pouring in. When people find a site with highly useful content, they actively use social media to talk about it and help it spread like wildfire. This, in turn, can boost your sales and social media mentions, shares, retweets, and so on.
- Developing Fruitful Relationships
Backlinks allow you to reach out to and connect to sites with similar content as yours. It helps you promote a product/service that you recently launched in the websites within your industry. This act of outreaching can serve an ulterior purpose – it can help foster long-term and mutually beneficial relationships between you and the key influencers in your industry. Gradually, you will have created genuine evangelists who support your organization’s cause. Since 2005, there has been a whopping 112% increase in guest posting strategies among various websites.
How To Create An Awesome Linking Strategy?
Now that you know how important link building is in the context of SEO, it’s time to chalk out a comprehensive linking strategy. Here’s how you can do it!
- Verify
Backlinks do not mean that you must have an endless list of links pointing towards your site. When it comes to link building, you always need to verify whether or not the links leading to you are relevant to your business. If the links have nothing to do with your organization or business, then what’s the point of having them on your website? So, check for links that lead to credible and trustworthy pages and sites.
- Quality Matters
Today, for a website to have excellent rankings, it’s all about quality. By quality, we mean links to sites that have high authority on the web. For instance, one or two links from a high-quality website will do you more good than numerous links from irrelevant websites could ever do.
Another essential thing you need to keep in mind is that your content should be worthy of linking to. Make sure you contribute only valuable information on your site that can be of genuine help to your target audience. Research thoroughly and curate your content in such a way as can grab the attention of your readers in the first glance. Give importance to your link anchor texts. Keep the content simple and always, always, PRESENT it well!
- Keep It Fresh
The concept of link building is organic, and hence, it is an ever-changing niche. Over time, links tend to lose importance because of the changing tastes and preference patterns of the consumers. Sites that were popular ten years ago may not be of much use to the modern day user. Thus, it is pivotal that you keep updating the links associated your website from time to time. Popularly known as FreshRank, the freshness of the links on your site will allow search engines to determine the popularity and relevance of your website and pages in the present context.
By using the power of backlinks, you can compel other websites to link to you. In a study conducted by Backlinko, it was found that backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking determinants. Long story short, the backlinking trend is here to stay, and if you want to thrive in the cut-throat market, you better start considering the art of backlinking!
