Is building links for your website worth the effort?
In the past, online marketers used link building to create tons of backlinks to their website to increase search engine rankings. And it worked. But, in 2012, the Google Penguin algorithm update stopped websites from spamming their search results. In particular, those websites were buying links or getting links through free link building sites designed to improve their rankings in Google.
So does this mean that link building for your website is all but dead today? Far from there!
Don’t underestimate link building for your website
Building links for your website has always been an important factor in getting it to rank well in search engines. Links to your website provide strong signals that your site is relevant and popular.
The focus for any website owner now is to create quality content and then link to that content from other high-quality relevant sites.
How to do Link Building with content
In general, increasing the number of backlinks pointing to your website will improve your website’s search ranking. For more links, contact authoritative websites or blogs to see if you can provide a guest post or article. That post or article will contain a link to your website.
It is much easier to build links to your site when you have high-quality content. Remember that without good content your online business has no value to your audience. It doesn’t have to be a literary masterpiece, but it should be relevant and interesting.
perennial content
The content can be an article, blog post, report, eBook, online course, video, or audio. The best type of content is what is classified as ‘evergreen’. This means that the information presented does not become out of date, so it will continue to be relevant for years to come. That means you’ll still have content on your site that’s worth linking to.
social networks
It is true that Google still relies on ‘traditional links’, that is, links from other authority sites. We are now seeing a shift towards Google and Bing becoming more interested in what is happening on social media.
What social media links are great for is reaching your actual, live customers. This is a way to drive traffic to your site without having to worry about what Google or Bing are doing. Once again, content is king. If you continually produce high-quality content, your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ will share, comment on, and vote on these posts.