Link Building SEO

Everyone wants to increase traffic to their website - more traffic means more potential customers. Ranking in the earliest pages of Google means that your website will be seen by a greater number of people. Here's some helpful tips on how to get there.

Where to Start with Link Building? 

First of all it’s important to understand exactly what your company is about and the products you sell. Sound obvious? Maybe so - but it will help you understand who your potential customers are and how you can better adapt to fulfil their requirements.

“If you have a dating website, does it make sense to build links with a company that specialises in funeral services?" 

Figure Out the Most Relevant Links to Your Website

Imagine if Google didn’t exist. Who is the most directly linked to your business?

• Create a relevancy tree to focus on customers that would be most interested in your product or service.
• Write all of the terms and phrases which are closely linked to your business. If you own cake business for example suitable keyword phrase would be: cake decorating, cake shows, cake creations, cake delivery, cafes, caterers, cake shops and so on.

Research 

• Research where you are ranked and study competitors websites to see how you can improve.
• Make a list of industry sites - associations to your business, news sites, blogs, forums etc.

The Best Links

Building links with other websites can be time consuming - you have consider which links are going to benefit your website. If you have links which are of little relevance to your company, it will not benefit your website's ranking in any way.

• Having 3 relevant links to your website is better than having 20 links which are bad quality.
• Poor quality links - links that duplicate content, spam related content and links which are irrelevant to content.
• The best links come from people - if you cannot find the contact information of a website its likely to be a poor link.
• It is best to talk to companies directly when trying to build links.

Matt Cutts, head of the webspan team at Google said "The vast majority of times those links (low quality links that a competitor has) aren't counting". This is why it is important to find good quality relvant links.

Ideas for Link Building Strategies 

• Blogging - can become the platform for content marketing and can magnify your search terms. When posting a blog its important to focus around the most relevant keyword phrases. These will help you to determine the title of your content and what your content is going to be based on.
• Make a glossary for customers ensuring any complicated technical jargon can be better understood. This can also reassure the customer that you are knowledgeable in your business and you are a trusted company.
• Forums are a great way to help potential customers out and promote your business. Be careful not to give links to your website straight away this is seen as spamming and may be bad publicity for business.
• Competitions - if your company can host a competition with an interesting prize to entice the customer this is a brilliant way to promote your business.

On a Final Note 

Remember that Google ranks webpages not websites so make sure that you have good content to match your back links. Also Google wants to rank websites which are active and therefore fresh links carry more weight than older links.

Always build links - if you stop building links you will never dominate the rankings. 

Still have questions about link building? Want some professional friendly advice? Get in touch.