Link building describes an off-page SEO strategy that aims to earn valuable inbound links from third-party websites. Specifically, this involves a website linking to your site from one of their pages, which Google may look at as an indicator of content quality.
The key thing about link building is that not all links are worth the same; most are worth little or nothing at all.
To build your search ranking with link building,
You have to earn links that elevate your phone number database profile. You need links with a specific set of characteristics:
- Authority: This is an unofficial SEO term used in the industry to describe a website’s quality and influence within a specific topic or set of keywords.
- Domain relevance: The more relevant the linking website is to your brand, the more legitimate this link will be seen by search engines.
- Topical relevance: This describes the relevance of the content on the specific page linking to your website.
- Do-follow: Do-follow links pass significantly more credit to your website than no-follow links.
- Placement: The most valuable inbound links are placed within the text of the content/copy of the page linking to your site.
- Anchor text: Ideally, you want the anchor text for your inbound links to be descriptive, rather than something generic like “this page”.
Quality links don’t necessarily need to fulfil all of the criteria above but you definitely want links that perform well in terms of authority and relevance. Authority is particularly challenging to quantify but a good rule of thumb is to aim for links from sites that rank higher than you for top-level keywords.
Most SEO tools include some kind of authority score as part of their domain analysis reports. While these metrics are all slightly different (and calculated differently), you can get a good idea of a website’s authority by averaging out the scores of multiple tools.
To wrap this section up, we should clarify something very important about link building: link quality is far more important than quantity.
How to build links
A few things you can do to Google warns against duplicate content in Business Profile posts build good quality links include:
- Write quality content and blogging on a regular basis
- Create the best content available on the web for your most important topics
- Publish data-driven content – such as surveys, industry reports, etc. – that other sites will want to quote and link to
- Create quality data visualisations and encourage sites to embed them with links to your original content
- Submit your site to business directories
- Guest post on relevant high-authority websites
- Participate in social media communities
- Comment on relevant blogs
- Promote your most linkable content on social media
Whichever approaches you take in your link building strategy, always remember the core essentials. Not all links are created equal. You have to send the right signals to search engines and this starts with authority and relevance.
Likewise, you also have to consider the users who will see the links pointing to your website. These links can put your brand in front of fresh faces so think carefully about what kind of content they might be looking for and what you want them to do if they click through and land on your site.
Quality inbound links aren’t only going to boost your search ranking but generate relevant traffic and build awareness of your brand – and you want to take full advantage of this.
Related reading
Check out this blog for zn business directory more advice: 16 MUST HAVE tools for off-page SEO and link building
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