What is link-building? And how can it help with your website’s SEO performance?
Ever since the late 1990s, search engines have used links to calculate a web page popularity and importance. Of course, links aren’t the only measure of a website’s performance, but they are definitely worthy of your attention because they do have an influence on your search engine optimization performance.
As an inbound marketing company in Brooklyn, we know that Link building for SEO is an art, and it takes consistent effort and attention. Before we look at some specific strategies, let’s learn about four link-building strategies for boosting your SEO from your local Brooklyn SEO consultants.
Editorial “Natural” Links
These links show up on on sites and pages that want to link to your company and your content. You have little or no control over these links, and the only way to increase them is to publish great content and increase awareness to it. As people find value in your content, they’ll link to you, and your SEO rankings will rise.
Manual “Outreach” Link Building
Natural links rarely increase as quickly as we want them to, so we have to assist in link building by reaching out to bloggers, directories, and listings in order to build links.
When reaching out to the link target, explain why this link is a win-win situation. You can pay to be added to some listings, and you can also fill out forms for submissions to website award programs. Be creative in the ways you reach out to target links, and think about corners of the web where you’d like some influence and you currently don’t have any. A Brooklyn digital marketing agency can help you with this!
Non-Editorial “Self-Created” Link Building
Don’t spam the internet…… Self-created links are achieved by signing guest books and forum signatures and commenting on other blogs with links back to your own website or blog.
This is the least desirable kind of link building for two reasons. First, this kind of link building looks spammy. It’s not very professional, and it can annoy people. Second, non-editorial link building has been so overused in the past that many search engines have devalued these types of links, leaving you with not much benefit for all of your efforts.
Create a Campaign: Link Building for SEO
As with any digital marketing effort, you need to come up with goals and strategies for your link building campaign. Once you have your goals and strategies, you need to commit regular time and resources to reaching your goals. The following are several ideas you can use to build your links on a regular basis.
- Get your customers to link to you. Send out partnership badges to your loyal customers and partners.
- Build a company blog. Blogs give you an opportunity to be included in blog directories, blog rolls, and other blogs.
- Create viral content. Produce content that is especially engaging so it will be shared far and wide.
- Earn press attention. Getting the attention of the news media can earn you some valuable, high ranking links.
For more information about link building for SEO, or for help with any other digital marketing question, get in touch with us at Park Slope Softworks, a digital marketing agency. We look forward to talking with you! Be sure to check out our FREE SEO analysis of your website!