You have decided you need to do some form of online marketing and there are so many options from Google Adwords, SEO, Social Media marketing to Newsletter marketing and they can all be so confusing. But everyone you speak to keep mentioning Link Building and they are right. Link building is a necessary and essential part of an online marketing strategy for your business. For many a business, the process of building good backlinks can been very time consuming and daunting as often you don’t know where to even start.
Google gives a lot of credibility to good links when building a profile. There are a lot of ways to generate links for your website, some easier than others and well, some just require a lot of work. Let us help you shed some light on link building.
Internal and external link building and the benefits to your website.
There are two main types of link building, internal link building and external link building. Let’s review Internal Link Building
Internal Link Building:
Internal links are links within a website pointing to another page within the same website. For example on your home page you have a button that says Contact Us and when someone clicks on this button, it takes that person through to the contact Page. These types of links are useful for three main reasons:
- Users can navigate a website much easier
- Internal links establish a website structure for the given website
- They help with spreading “link juice” around websites which in turn helps with ranking power.
Basically from an SEO perspective Google crawls a website with content on it, these links embedded into the content create a crawlable link structure allowing Google spiders to follow paths to visit all the pages on your website. Moz offers a great Open Site Explorer that will give you a sneak peak into what your website structure looks like in terms of links.
Many companies make the huge mistake of putting on “no follows” onto their internal links. This is not a recommended practice as it stops google spiders from progressing further into your website and crawling all your pages.
HINT: Search engines have crawl limits of 150 links per page so don’t think you can go and stuff a website page with thousands of links. This limit can be flexible for important pages that may have 250 links but in general practice is isn’t wise to have more than 150 links per page.
External Link Building:
External Links or Backlinks are links that your website gets from other websites. Backlinks play a significant role in positioning for search engine results, which is why they are so important.
Backlinks should be natural, which means that a website gives credit to your website through a link that is not artificial or bought. Just like life, it is the same with External Links, Quality over Quantity. When you are link building remember to always ask yourself, how good is the quality of this link.
Bad Backlinks: Be careful of bad backlinks, they can be toxic for your website. We understand that you want to build backlinks quickly however building bad backlinks is very dangerous for the reputation of your website with Google. We never recommend practising bad backlink building, it might work in the short run but eventually Google will penalise your website and there is no recovery. Some types of bad backlink practices include:
- buying backlinks
- link exchange networks
- Selling Backlinks
Good Backlinks: Quality link building back to your website is time consuming and so worth it in the long run. We highly recommend taking the time to build good quality links back to your website. Here are a few great ways to build good quality back links:
- Infographics: People are very visual, imagery always works so well and by creating an infographic that is informative and attractive and people will want to share and when they do, they will need to link back to you. Remember to research your information and ensure that your infographic is factual and unique.
- Guest Blogging: Take some time to write a blog for another website. For example, write a blog for your local community or schooling website. Give them the rights to use this blog on their website and when they sign off the bottom of the blog they will give credit to you and your website. A great place to guest blog is on .edu websites. Educational websites are ranked well with Google because of the hoops that they have to jump through in order to get the domain and prove they are a legitimate education business, these kind of backlinks to your website are of significant quality.
- Social Media: Social Media platforms like Facebook have a 100 Domain Authority not even Google Australia has a 100 Domain Authority (and they wrote the algorithm). The higher a domain authority the more credibility that website has, so why not utilise the benefits of Facebook and other social media platforms. Post your blogs on facebook and google plus, this will give you links back to your website. Consider perhaps even running an advertisement promoting your most recent blog. Not only will a great blog and a social media advert drive traffic to your website it will build credible qood quality links for your website.
- Write Testimonials: If you have worked with someone in the past then why not give them a testimonial. They will be ever grateful for your testimonial and in turn you can ask them to link back to your website. If a client or partner of yours ever asks if they can add you to their website as a partner, say Yes! You would love them to add your logo to their website as long as they link back to your website.
- Directory Websites: Get your website listed on directory websites, but be careful. Only add your business directory onto legitimate directory websites. Major directory websites get lots of traffic on a daily basis and are very reputable, having a natural organic link back to your website from a directory website is a great form of good external link.
In Conclusion:
Link building takes a long time, but worth it in the long run. It is a tedious job and often feels very unrewarding but it significantly helps with building a websites credibility when it comes to organic rankings. Link Building is not a quick fix, it takes a long time to see a return on investment but if you are diligent and consistent then you will most definitely see organic growth of your website.
If you would like to chat to us more about your unique Link Building requirements, we would love to hear from you.
