The importance of link building in SEO cannot be emphasized enough. With Google’s Penguin update in 2012, the landscape of link building changed forever, and for the better. However, since spammy or editorially placed links will take your SEO efforts nowhere, the challenge is to build quality links organically. For beginners in SEO, this may not be a cakewalk. But why so? Let’s understand.
Backlinks, as put simply by Neil Patel, “are links that travel from another website to your website. They can come from social media sites and directories, but they most often come from blog posts and the content of other websites.” These show that the content on the website is so credible and valuable than others to vouch for it. This further translates to better rank and discoverability for your website. Now, here’s the catch. SEO professionals at the best SEO companies in India are working towards the same goal, which results in a good variety of quality content. In such a competitive scenario, it becomes difficult to get a link even if you have put the best content out there, and that is exactly why link building is considered a hard nut to crack.
But rarely there are problems that have no solution. There are some fail-safe tips you can implement to build quality links. Read further to know more.
1. Ask those you know
If you are a beginner, start with asking for in-content links from those friends, colleagues, and relatives who maintain a blog. Remember that the blog should be relevant to your niche, otherwise your website might end up getting penalized.
Write testimonials
A less common but effective way to build links is through testimonials. All businesses need a few words of praise about their products. This is a win-win situation for both you and the company. A good testimonial helps them earn the trust of their customers, while you can get a backlink and potential traffic from that site. Generally, the approval rate of this method is much higher than sending standard link request e-mails.
According to Igloo SEO Agency in Dubai, building backlinks through writing customer testimonials and reviews can be a great way to build branding and awareness. While many businesses feel that this is still not the right SEO strategy to pursue, a case study showed that a brand was able to build more than 50+ backlinks in less than a month, just by writing testimonials.
Go blogging
Start a blog and keep it alive, which means write on the most searched topics, use keywords correctly and organically, and update your blog regularly. Avoid the mistake of creating a blog and then abandoning it after a post or two and one backlink to your site. This single link may even prove risky for your website (and you will have wasted your time as well). Therefore, write regularly with a focus on your industry, your client’s needs, and more so the needs of the customers and potential customers of your client. To-the-point, useful, and well-structured content will help gain authority, with time. This is one of the most tried, tested, and trusted ways of ensuring that the web searchers will want to link to it time and again. Perhaps, that is why experts at SEO companies in Mumbai and other cities reiterate that you don’t get great backlinks, you earn them.
Bring the dead back
We are referring to the rot or broken links to your website. Such links show error 404 and are caused by a change in location of your pages or if another webmaster misspelled your link. These issues may also crop up if a site has been relaunched or migrated to another domain. To resolve this problem, use the Link Juice Recovery Tool (LJR) to find the rot backlinks on your website and try to recover those. This can be done by either recreating the page or redirecting the link to another existing page. However, do remember that this will prove beneficial in the long run only when the page that you have recreated or redirected the recovered link to has valuable information.
Which is your preferred tactic for link building and how has it worked for you? Comment below and let us know.