What You Need to Know about Link Building in 2018
Link building is another vital part of successful SEO. It includes various tactics with which you can strengthen the authority of your website. And this is the very reason why backlinks are so important for search engine optimisation. Google algorithms pay a lot of attention to the credibility of your content to rank it higher. The more links from authority websites you have leading back to yours, the higher your chances to come up higher in engine searches. But this whole process of including and receiving links can take a lot of time and efforts. So here are the 10 things you need to know about link building in 2018.
#1. What is Link Building
First things first, we need to know what exactly we are doing before we start doing it. Link building is the process in which you include a variety of links from and to your website. There are 3 categories of links that need to be present on every well optimised website.
It’s pretty obvious how you can include the first two categories in your content. However, many online businesses struggle with backlinks building. Hence, we are going to explore different tactics of doing this.
#2. You can replace broken links on other websites with your content
The Internet is an enormous space. This means that over time some websites stop working because the owners don’t renew the domain subscription, cancel hosting plans or go out of business. In other cases particular pages get removed by a website’s administrator because they are outdated or the content is moved to another page. In scenarios like these, the links that lead to these pages expire and are called broken links. Having broken links on your website is bad. This is why you need to check regularly if your external links are still active. If you look at this from a different perspective, though, it is also a fantastic opportunity to get some high authority backlinks.
First, identify the high authority websites in your niche. It’s great to get backlinks from .gov, .edu or .com domains because usually they have the highest trust ranking score. Your second step would be to find out if they contain any broken links on their pages, related to your area of expertise. You can do that by using the Chrome extension Check My Links. Once you have it installed on your browser, find the websites you are interested in getting backlinks from and click the extension icon when you land on the page. It will show you the number of broken/inactive links on the page. Then just scroll down to find the location of the link. It will be highlighted in red.
#3. You should write original content to be published on other websites
Last week we talked about how important blogging is for your SEO because it provides frequent fresh content among other reasons. So definitely, creating new, informative and engaging articles for your website is great. But to take your SEO efforts to the next level, you should also create original content to be published on other websites in the same or similar niche as yours. This is known as guest posting. The main benefit you get from this is a valuable backlink. Be careful when you choose the site you want your article to be published on. You need a high authority one, not just any emerging site with low trust ranking. Any links from such sites are low quality and they can hurt your SEO rather than improve it.
#4. You can reach out directly to organisations and ask for a link exchange
It is a very common practice for thousands of organisations out there to reach out to others and offer a link exchange. This means you write a piece of content, publish it on your website, include a mention of another brand/organisation in it and provide a link to their website. Essentially, it is exactly the way you build external links. However, since this is an exchange opportunity, the other organisation agrees to do the same and you receive a backlink. When you prepare or accept such an offer, make sure you talk about anchor text. Best SEO practices advise the use of text that is most relevant to the content of the page you are linking to. Here’s an example:
Good anchor text: What is anchor text?
Weak anchor text: To read what anchor text is click here.
#5. You should share all of your web content on Google+
Google+ is the social media channel that has the biggest direct impact on your SEO. Unlike other social networks, the links that come from G+ are do-follow and add more weight to your link portfolio when the search algorithm determines your ranking position.
Find out more reasons Why Google+ is Important for Powerful SEO
#6. You can become a HARO source
