Link Building for Your Online Marketing

by Rahimah Sultan

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What is Link Building?

According to Wikipedia, “Link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks (usually called links) to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results.”



How Important are Links?

Link building for your online marketing is very important.

Before, Google search engines ranked their search results 100% based on the content on a webpage. Things changed with Google’s PageRank Algorithm which looked at how many people linked to a page.

Backlinks still remain the best way of determining the quality of a webpage. That’s why they’re still Google’s go-to ranking indicator.

With more updates Google’s focus is not just on quantity but also linkquality.


Page Authority

The authority of the page linking to you matters most. Links from authoritative pages pass more PageRank to your site. Google doesn’t share PageRank information publicly, although it’s the foundation of their algorithm.


Relevancy

When it comes to links page authority matters as well as relevance.

For example, if you operate a website all about photography and you get a link from an authoritative site about sports, that link won’t really count.

Generally speaking, you want to get links from authority sites that are closely related to your site.


Position

Your link’s position on a page is very important. If it’s embedded in a section of content, you get more notice. Don’t place it in a footer or sidebar where it counts for very little.

You want to place your links in the main body of the page. They should be “editorially placed,” where someone clicks it because they think your site is amazing, not in a profile you created on a random site in which you dropped a link.

These unnatural links can be considered a violation of Google’s guidelines.


Anchor Text

The clickable text section of a link is known as the anchor text. Anchor text needs to be relevant to the topic of the page you’re linking to rather than generic.

Don’t use anchor text excessively as that is considered spammy, just as excessive keyword use (keyword stuffing) is spammy.

A spammy anchor text is a link with an anchor text that has no relationship to the page on which it exists or the page it is linking to.

For natural anchor text links to your website, create beneficial content and the links and anchor text should come naturally.

You don’t want to be penalized.


Guest Posts

Be careful of guest posts. They can be spammy if:

Someone is paid to publish the post
The post contains exact match anchor text
The site exists solely to publish guest posts
The site is unrelated to yours

But, if you publish an awesome guest post on an authoritative, relevant site, that link CAN help your rank.


Nofollow vs. Dofollow

Both types help boost your SEO for search engine rankings because you get lots of clicks from many different sources. For instance, social media.

Nofollow links may not build you as much SEO juice as dofollow links, but they still drive traffic and build your SEO.

After all, your end goal is to drive leads, traffic, conversions, and revenue. SEO just happens to be one of the best ways to accomplish these goals.


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