SEO for Beginners – Part Four – Link Building

Welcome back to our SEO for Beginners series! So far we’ve covered website optimization, keyword research and social media marketing. This month we’re going to focus on Link Building! Sounds exciting right? Well, it might not sound exciting, but it’s an important part of SEO that will help with rankings and ultimately drive website traffic and that’s exciting!

Link building has been a vital component of SEO campaigns since Google’s inception. You may have heard rumors that link building is a thing of the past, but in reality that’s just not true. If you want your website to rank well, you will need links, but a handful of high quality links will serve you much better than a whole bunch of low quality links from inconsequential websites.

My best advice is to focus on fewer, hard earned links.

What types of links are high quality links you ask? Acquiring editorial links from the media is a great place to start. Find publications within your industry and request to write a thought leadership article or perhaps there is a guest blogging opportunity. Links from .gov or .edu websites are generally very highly rated as well. Also consider relevant non-profit organizations which you could connect with as these usually have high-trust domains.

It is estimated that around 60% of the web’s pages are spam. Search engines need to weed through all of these websites in order to create a link graph which helps determine how everything is connected. With that said, not only is it important to consider which websites link into your website, but also which websites you link out to. Avoid linking to low quality or irrelevant websites.

Link signals tend to wane over time, so it’s important to continue link building. Websites that might have been popular in 2010 might no longer be popular in 2015 and so a link that might have been very valuable at one time no longer carries the same weight. Keep things fresh!

Another link building tactic is to hunt for broken links on authoritative websites. If you find a broken link, contact the publishers and ask to have your link/content substituted instead. Although labor intensive, you can do this by seeing which websites link into your competitors and then check for broken links.

Finally, if you find a website which links to your competitors, try to acquire a link there as well. This tells Google that your companies are related and if your competitors are already considered authoritative, this will signal Google that your business is reputable as well.

Link building is a VAST area of search engine optimization and this one topic could easily turn into a very lengthy post. Despite this, I hope that you found at least a few tips to help your link building efforts. As always, please don’t hesitate to email me Amy Grishman from www.socialfocus.com with your marketing questions at amy@socialfocus.com.