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The 3 minute guide to link building to improve SEO

Link building to improve SEO

Despite many changes to Google's ranking algorithm over the years, link building is still an important factor. And since improved SEO is a top goal of many marketers, we've created this quick guide to link building to improve SEO.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of acquiring links from other sites to yours.

It's an important factor in SEO as a link from a site can be seen as a kind of endorsement. Lots of high quality links, or links from reputable sources, suggest your page is of high quality and so Google will feature it more highly.

According to Moz Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015, experts still rate links as the most important aspect of SEO - both at a page level and a domain level.

Link-building-to-improve-SEO-graph

So, how do you go about getting these inbound links?

Create content

Creating, high quality, useful and unique content gives websites a reason to link to you.

If your content is really special, links will come naturally.

Of course, people need to see it in the first place, so be sure to share your content all over social media to get the ball rolling.

Build relationships

Reaching out to relevant websites and blogs in your industry will help increase inbound links to your site.

With so many websites and so much content, yours can easily be lost among the sea of competition. No matter how good your content is, sites won't link to it if they don't know it exists!

This is why it is important to build relationships within your industry. Dazzle contacts with incredible content and they'll happily provide a link to it.

Continuing to provide high quality content will cement these relationships and make contacts become evangelists for your company. This vote of trust trust in your business from a reputable source will in turn increase prospects' trust in your business.

Other methods of acquiring links

Creating and sharing content is the cornerstone of link building. The following are alternative methods of link building which, if done correctly, can benefit SEO too.

  • Guest blogging
  • Answering questions in online forums, groups, and blog comments
  • Enter for industry awards (and win them!)
  • Link trades
  • Directory submissions

If done incorrectly though, these methods can actually lead to penalties from Google. See below for how to avoid this.

Things to avoid

The Penguin updates to Google's ranking algorithm look to actively penalise websites that use low-quality link building techniques.

penguin-link-building-seo

Spamming an unmoderated comment section with links to your site, for example, is not going to improve your SEO.

Similarly, trading links solely for the sake of getting a link is likely to have a negative impact.

Guest blogging is still a good way of getting a link to your site. However, if you mass-mail the same blog post to 1000 sites, Google is likely to catch on.

In short, most so-called short cuts to link building are likely to have a negative effect on SEO in today's environment.

Find out more about our SEO services or get in touch on 01202 788333 or marketing@lexisclick.com.
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