What is link building?
A backlink for a particular website is a link received from an external website (the referrer) to that website (the referent). The important thing to keep in mind is not all links are equal. A link from a highly authoritative site has more value than a site people rarely visit. On a very basic level, the key is to find an intricate balance between the quality and quantity of backlinks. You can have hundreds of websites referring to your business, but unless search engines recognize the websites referring to you, any number of links will not help your SEO progress. In general, the backlinks obtained by a website can be categorized as:
- Natural Links – These links are received naturally from others without any effort or action from the page owner.
- Manually Built Links – These links are acquired through deliberate link-building efforts. You might request your customers to link to your website or ask any influencer to share your content.
- Self-created Links – These links are created intentionally by the site owners from self-submissions on directors, forums, or press releases. These links often tend to be labeled as a black-hat SEO practice as search engines do not prefer this kind of link-building tactic. Therefore, we mostly focus on natural and manually built links.
Why is link building important?
A backlink is a vote of confidence that your website is relevant and worth visiting. The larger the number of links pointing to your website, the bigger the value. Unfortunately there’s a catch. Search engines also look at the website offering the backlink. If the website is industry-specific, relevant, and reputable, it can increase the value of the backlink. If the website is not industry-specific or holds little authority, Google may disregard the backlink entirely. The quality of backlinks matters more than the number of backlinks. Search engines look at backlinks as a stamp of approval that your content is valuable. Since search engines are always looking to serve valuable content to their users, backlinks improve your organic rankings.
How crucial is link building?
Link building is the most crucial thing in off-page SEO. Search engines primarily use backlinks as indications of the linked-to page’s quality and authority. A website with backlinks from high authority and relevant websites will undoubtedly perform much better than another website that is otherwise similar in content quality, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. Getting reputable websites to link back to you is a two-way beneficial deal – they drive traffic to your site and give a positive boost to your page rank and rankings.
Building links seems easy. Can’t I do it on my own?
Trust us; it is not. Link building has somewhat of a tarnished fame in the SEO world. During the digital marketing boom, businesses rushed to gather a large number of links without considering the quality of links. As a result, link farms were born. Link farms are websites that are established for the sole purpose of linking to each other. Over the years search engines have gotten smarter.
Google introduced Google Penguin to discover link farms and removed several websites from its search results. Today, if search engines find shady backlinks to your website, you could be penalized. Yes, Google actually removes businesses from their organic results. Understanding how search engines interpret a website requires massive amounts of technical SEO knowledge and years of experience.
Are all backlinks equal?
No, all backlinks are not equal. The quality of a backlink differs depending on the quality of the referring website. Even though link building seems like a simple SEO strategy, there is more to it. Making sure your website is only referred to by highly authoritative websites can be a challenging task. On the other hand, it is also an irrefutable fact that the larger the number of websites pointing at your business, the better the chances of ranking high in organic searches. The goal is to find a sweet spot that highlights your business to search engines as relevant. Partnering with Outpace will ensure that your link building strategy is properly planned and implemented. This will help your business rank high in organic results and generate high amounts of relevant traffic.
What is citation link building?
A citation is any mention of your company’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) on the internet. Citation link building includes strategies designed to help you list the NAP of your business online. Citation link buildings help to boost your local organic rankings. They are highly relevant when you want to rank your business in Google Maps. Since customers use Google Maps to find local businesses close to them, ranking high in Google Maps can help direct local traffic to your website. Like link building, citation link building needs quality over quantity. You can list the NAP of your business in every online directory you come across, but not all online directories hold the same authority. While looking at citation links, Google considers listings that come from industry-specific directories to be highly credible. You can’t list your dental clinic in a foundation repair directory and expect changes in your organic listings. You need industry-relevant directories Google trusts. Outpace has the experience and connections to put your business across Google-friendly directories that will give your website the power it needs.