Whilst having a well-optimised website is crucial for SEO success, link building remains an absolute must if you are serious about your site’s visibility and rankings. SEO landscape is a rapidly changing field and as such link building can be difficult to carry out effectively. Below I have outlined 4 of the link building techniques we perform on a daily basis that help us achieve and maintain high-level rankings.
1. Links from Credible and Authority Websites
Arguably the most important link building technique is building links from trusted, credible and authoritative sites. These types of links will help build your website’s authority and elevate it higher up the search rankings as they tell Google that this website is an authority on the subject matter.
Relevancy is key here. Search engine algorithms will not recognise a site that has links to another site that has absolutely nothing to do with their products or services. For example, a printer website will not want a link to another website about cooking as they have no relation to each other and thus no one will benefit from the link. The speed of acquiring links is another issue. Build too many links too quickly and Google may consider these links as spam and consequently punish your website.
2. Internal Links
Often overlooked, internal links are links that link from one page to another within your site. This method is actually a fantastic way to help website visitors delve deeper into your site. It’s critical to look for a strong keyword phrase on your web pages and link it to an inner page with more content and information. This will result in your website visitors staying longer on the site and exploring more of your content.
Internal linking also provides the benefit of improving page authority by passing link juice equally to other pages of the website. This, in turn, improves the overall crawl-ability and indexation of the website. It can be quite useful applying this to old blog posts to help these pages gain more traffic and exposure.
3. Infographics
Infographics can be a very creative way of displaying information visually and thus can provide value to a website. This makes them an attractive way to promote links and increase your websites exposure.
When creating an infographic keep in mind who you are targeting and build it around your audience, keeping it relevant and simple. Add useful data, facts, figures and always credit your sources. It can be prudent to add graphs and charts to help display the data too. Always add a 200-300 word description with a few variations of your keywords to help introduce the infographic and your website. These infographics will act as a valuable piece of content other websites will potentially wish to have on their site, thus resulting in more exposure to your website.
4. Local Business Citations
Local business citations can act as an ideal backlink, especially for local SEO. They can serve as relevant links that draw additional traffic from visitors who routinely use local searches to find businesses.
What’s critical here is consistency. Your “NAP” (Name, Address, Phone Number) needs to be consistently accurate on citation websites. Links from Yelp, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Bing help create authority for your website and build trust. Look deeper for citation websites that are specific to your industry to help gain more targeted traffic.
Of course there are many more methods of acquiring links, however, these 4 specific techniques provide a solid foundation to build upon for your link building campaign. Action these techniques effectively or ask an SEO Agency to carry this out and you will see better results in your rankings.
Founder of Grizzly, a digital agency specialising in SEO, PPC and Web Design based in Bristol, UK.
