In-House vs. Outsourced SEO: Which Is Right for Your Business?
SEO is what makes your business visible online. It’s an essential part of any strategy…
In the past, link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. was all about quantity. Where your link showed up did not matter, just so long as it was published in as many different locations as possible. This method led to link farms, private blog networks (PBNs) and comment spamComment spam is a form of search engine spam because it is a comment that does not offer any value to the conversation. which detracted from the quality and integrity of the internet severely. Users do not want to have to sift through spam to get to the information they are looking for, and as a result, Google has updated and advanced its search engine algorithms. Today, black-hat and spam techniques will get you penalised if not outright de-listed entirely.
These algorithm updates have many digital marketers and businesses scared of addressing link building in their SEO campaigns, but that is a huge mistake. As with everything online, quality will get you far. Instead of relying on spam techniques, you need to invest in the right methods. Done right, link building can benefit your site for these six key reasons:
To start with, link building is still a key component that search engine’s use to determine your ranking. The more a site is linked to, the more likely it is that your content is what users are searching for. Unlike in the past, however, where these linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. are located now matters. By investing in a quality link building strategy and SEO agency, you can adhere to Google’s guidelines and increase your search engine ranking and organic visibility.
Even if you don’t want to touch link building, chances are you are still being affected by it. If you committed to a backlink strategy in the past, or if your site has somehow been linked to by a PBN, then your ranking will be hurt all the same. Every great link building campaign starts with an SEO audit to clean up and fix Google penalties at the source. As you cannot ignore your backlink profile, you might as well improve it with a white-hat campaign.
As a white-hat campaign requires the publisher to be authoritative and trustworthy, and for the content, you post through them to be of quality content, you gain another benefit – organic exposure. Quality sites have their own community that reads, engages with, and shares the content on their site. By getting published on one such blog, you can introduce your brand to a whole new audience and build up your organic exposure.
Link building can be done through a variety of methods as well, and many of those tactics fall under traditional methods of marketing. Say, for example, you are a local business that is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a party. You can create a press release and contact your local news agencies. As the news would be of interest to the community, chances are it will be published and distributed. It will boost your party attendance and your backlink profile at the same time. There are so many ways to link build, and you can achieve multiple goals with one strategy. Go in with the intention of increasing your organic reach and engagement, and you will be able to boost your site traffic and increase sales from multiple avenues.
Trust is hard to develop online. New companies are distrusted by users who would prefer to use the sites and brands they use. Yes, there are many ways you can protect their data, but unless they are data savvy, chances are they won’t know or care that you have an SSL certificate. What they care about are user reviews, Google ranking, and about how many times they have seen and heard of your brand. By committing to a link building strategy, you can frequently appear on sites within their niche, thus increasing your exposure to them and becoming trusted through familiarity.
So long as you follow through on this link building with quality content and a beautiful site, you should be able to grow and develop a relationship with many users. The better the trust and stronger the relationship you have with them, the more likely they will buy your products or use your services. There are many different sites out there on the internet, and to become a success, you need to cut through the attention market and build a strong community of your own. By investing in a backlink strategy, you can boost the amount of new traffic to your site and increase your brand authority.
Ironically, one of the biggest reasons why link building is more important than ever is that it allows you to vet and partner with trusted sites. If you were to try to build up your backlink profile organically through content marketing, you have little control over who links to your content. If their site is new or does not have a high enough Domain Ranking, this could hurt your overall visibility, even if you didn’t directly have your link placed on their site. Though this is a small percentage, it can still happen. By instead being in complete control of your backlink profile, you can target your efforts for increased visibility and greater brand awareness.
Link building is and will continue to be important. Google will not stop using it as a metric when determining your ranking, which is why you should never stop investing in it as part of your SEO. What will change, however, is the metrics that Google uses to determine the quality of your backlink. This can refer to the quality of the site it is published on as well as the quality of the content it can be found it. By investing the time, energy, and resources in creating a quality backlink profile, you can invest in your future and improve your visibility and search ranking significantly.
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While the fundamentals of SEO remain the same no matter the size of your business, if you are an enterprise…
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