A business website is a must, even if you do not sell online. The most convenient way for potential customers to know about your brand before actually visiting your store or office is to visit your website. A functional business website without visitors cannot take your business to the next level. So, it is essential that people should be able to find and locate that website.
Search Engine Optimization is the most relevant technique to ensure a regular flow of visitors to your website and linkbuilding stands as one of the most important pillars of effective SEO.
Why linkbuilding is important:
Despite the fact the a good SEO strategy allocates 80% efforts to the on-page SEO and 20% to off-page, link building cannot be replaced. Search engines today are very intelligent and can identify the quality of your website from its content, internal linking and navigation etc, so having an optimized website is the key. But you do need endorsements as well, i.e. other people taking about your brand. So, in order to ensure the search engines that you have a good website in place and some people are interested in it, you must have a significant number links pointing to your domain.
You can use this backlink checker tool to find who is linking to you. And yes, you can also extract the backlinks of your competitors and other popular websites in your niche for a quick comparison. You will surely notice that the top ranking websites have a lot of incoming links from authentic websites and blogs.
The more links you have the better it is…
But wait…. more links doesn’t mean you start getting links from every other website without a plan.
So, which link types are good and which are not so good?
Today the search engines use artificial intelligence for quality control. It won’t be wrong to say that the search engines today are more intelligent than ever before and they will be better in coming days for sure. So, they understand the good links and bad links very well, and based on this categorization they either give your website top position in search result pages or throw it at the end. That is why you must be very careful while building links and make sure to gain clean, healthy and natural backlinks.
Let’s see which are good backlinks:
1- Links within high-quality content relevant to your industry.
How to get: Create relevant articles, lists, videos, infographics etc. and distriibute these resources to relevant niche blogs.
2- Links from high-quality guest posting.
How to get: Be a guest blogger on top niche blogs, participate in bloggers’ Q&A sessions to get editorial mentions.
3- Media mentions or public relations campaigns.
How to get: Have a proper PR strategy in place.
4- Promotional campaigns & contests:
How to get: Create a bloggers outreach program, organize a contest or giveaway free products for review.
5- Local directory listing:
How to get: create a list of local and niche directories and submit your website.
The crux is; any link that is coming from a high quality website/blog that is relevant to your business is a good backlink.
Now, which are not so good/bad backlinks:
1- Link farms; where hundreds of sites are linked from one page
2- Hidden links; where the URL is not visible to the reader but the search engine bot can read it.
3- Sitewide links using automated link building programs; for instance the blogroll link, footer link etc.
4- Too many in-content links with exact same anchor text; for instance, excessive guest posting with same keyword as anchor.
5- Links from duplicate or spun content; if you are using one article and reword it to make 10 out of it, the links within each will have no value.
6- Paid link placements; a piece of content that mentions that this is a paid content or an advertisement, will pass no link value.
The Bottom Line:
Not every backlink is beneficial for your website, and the number or backlinks doesn’t matter when it comes for a search engine to identify your unique brand name. What matters most is the quality of content on your website and the quality of content on the websites linking to it. So, your linkbuilding strategy should focus on quality and not the quantity. Don’t worry about the number of links; they will increase overtime if you develop an SEO strategy for a long time. But quality should be top priority from the day one. So, build only good backlinks and avoid backlinks.
