Use Link Building to Boost Search Engine Ranking
Coming up high in Google, Bing, or other search engine rankings helps make your company, product, or service visible to those who are looking for what you offer. One way to come up high in search engines is to create links from other sites to your website. These links are called backlinks. These are incoming links to your website from another website. Think of link building as a vote or a recommendation for your business. Backlinks will boost your search engine ranking, which helps to build traffic to your website from new and prospective customers and clients. This can equate to increased brand awareness, new leads, and more sales.
Select Trustworthy Sites
Websites that have valuable content demonstrate they are trustworthy, resulting in a high rank by Google. One way to show trustworthiness is to have incoming links from reputable websites. It’s more important to have a few high-quality links than to have a lot of links that are coming from websites with little or no value. Links that come from spammy or unreputable websites can cause your site to receive a Google penalty and lose traffic. When you build links to your page, be sure they do the following:
- Make sense from the users’ perspective
- Come from sites with strong and valuable content
- Relate to your industry sector
How to Create Backlinks
The following are some ways to accomplish successful link building. These include writing a blog on your website, writing guest blogs, and listing your site in well-regarded business directories. It is important to start with a good backlink strategy.
Write a Blog on Your Website
Write a blog on a regular basis, with the goal of focusing on your industry expertise, and how you help, and provide solutions for your clients and customers. In time, if your content continues to be relevant, you can become a thought leader and gain attention. Others will return to your site frequently to discover what’s new, and will want to link to your content, helping you to gain links to your site. Some types of content that are most likely to result in backlinks include:
- New research and insight
- Trending topics with some new information
- Authoritative news or insight related to new products
- How-to content, including lists
Writing a Guest Blog Helps Link Building
Another way to build authority and backlinks to your website, is to write for other blogs that are related to your business. To search for guest blogging opportunities, google the following:
- Submit a guest post
- Accepting guest posts
- Guest post guidelines
- Guest bloggers wanted
- Guest bloggers wanted (add the name of your industry) – Such as guest bloggers wanted health care
List Your Site in Well-Regarded Business Directories
Online directories, or the websites of professional organizations or associations within your industry sector are a good choice for building links to your website. As an example, we work with The Renaissance International School (TRIS), a private Montessori school in San Francisco’s East Bay. It is listed on the East Bay Independent Schools Association (EBISA) website, with a link back to the school’s website. This gives the school a trustworthy link, and we know from tracking website traffic, that this listing draws a great deal of traffic to TRIS’s website.
Develop a Strategy to Build Backlinks
This is a process and it takes effort to build up quality backlinks. To get the best results, it’s important to develop a long-term strategy for building backlinks and then stay the course. Giving your content time to build credibility and authority is the best way to be successful. Learn more about SEO techniques. Read our blog, SEO for PDFs.
Post by Miriam Schaffer with content contributed by Kaushal Sharma, marketing consultant – digital and social media
