Step Four for a Successful SEO Campaign: Link Building
Link Building can be one of the most time consuming yet ultimately rewarding tasks in your SEO and internet marketing strategy. Links are one of the biggest factors in influencing how well your website ranks in the SERPs. A perfect link building campaign would win you links from authoritative directories and relevant websites, mass links posted in blogs, forums and shared on social networks. High ranking sites using the same keywords with you would give you a link and let you do some guest blogging for them to promote yourself within your industries online community. However, we don't live in an SEO utopia and these things very rarely all come together.
Links are so important because they are the main way the search engines interpret which sites will rank higher in the search engine results pages after all the relevant content and keyword use has been taken into account. Links are votes or citations for your website. If someone likes a product, the service you have offered or something you have written then they can share that by putting a link to it on their website. This acts as a notification for the search engine spiders crawling the internet that your webpage has been vouched for – and the more authoritative the source sharing the link, the more that link is worth. But this is not the only influencing factor in determining the quality of a link, there are many. This is why a successful link building campaign can be a difficult process.
The first step of a link building campaign can often start at the directories. Directories are occasionally maligned by some of the SEO community despite the fact that they are a proven platform on which to build the rest of you link building strategy. It is true that some directories lack authority in the eyes of the search engine which can be down to a lack of authority – perhaps due to the quality of content they link to, or even how long they have been in existence. However, with a little research good directories can be found. This can be through looking at their T&Cs, the quality of the content they link to and if the directory itself has a good PageRank. Based on these factors you should begin approaching the directories with the proposition of gaining a link through them. Some directories require a fee, while others are free and some may even ask to exchange links. Whatever way you choose to approach these websites, it is important to keep in mind that they can play a big part in the success of your website, so if you submit content make sure it is as relevant and dynamic as possible.
Another possibility can be inspired by the analysis of competitors. Using the information garnered from the keyword searches done, you can personally contact each of the top ranking sites in an attempt to get a link from them. The best way to do this is usually to take a personable approach –a bespoke e-mail, or even a phone call can make the difference as supposed to a stock e-mail.
The final possibility for a link building campaign that I will discuss is probably the most difficult, but proves that link building is a process that needs to be on going. That is blogging, activity on forums, a social media presence – anything that will keep your company being spoken about in the online community relevant to your market. Link building can be a bit of a PR exercise. So, when approaching blogs and social media, if you take the time to comment about someone else's product or link to their site they will, more often than not, link back to you. An important factor in this approach is that the quality of the content on your site needs to be relevant and original, as you don't want to create a link to a site that will lose you lots of authority.
Link building is difficult. It's hard work, and needs to be carefully monitored and constantly updated in order to achieve the best results. However, it is one of the most important processes that you will undertake during an SEO campaign and can yield big improvement in the SERPs.
