The internet is a highly competitive space for businesses. If you want to maximize your online assets, you need to make sure that you’re using the right strategies. For example, for your website to improve its rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll need to step up your SEO or search engine optimization efforts.
Businesses that intend to invest in their SEO using “white hat” or legitimate practices will likely be recommended an SEO action plan that aims to (1) increase organic website traffic and (2) bolster appearances in the top SERPs. Some notable SEO activities include content marketing, website optimization for mobile, and link building. The latter is particularly important with regard to establishing a business’s credibility. When search engines like Google pick up on the fact that there are plenty of links leading back to your site or content, they will interpret this as a sign of reliability on your part or even see you as an authority in your industry.
However, there’s a proper and legitimate approach to link building. If you don’t do it the right way, the effort may backfire and you may actually end up hurting your SERP rankings. It’s best to work with an SEO company Philippines and international clients trust so that you don’t get penalized or wreak damage to your business’s reputation. You can also count on a competent SEO company to know what, when, and how to use different types of links (i.e., external and internal links) to the fullest.
All that being said, here are some things you should know about link building for your business and how to go about it in a legitimate way:
Creating Meaningful, Relevant Content
As mentioned above, one of the goals of link building is to establish your website’s credibility in the online world. You won’t be able to achieve this without having any content that other websites can use for backlinks. As such, your first order of business for legitimate and successful link building is to generate content—without falling into the trap of creating links for the purpose of accumulating them.
In SEO, quality almost always trumps quantity. It’s good to have a lot of links, yes, but having hundreds of irrelevant, low-quality ones can negatively impact both your business reputation and your SERP rankings.
The focus should be on creating meaningful, relevant content for your target audience. Your chosen SEO company can handle this for you, but you may also want to contribute content like day-in-the-life blogs. These can provide customers a glimpse of the people behind the company and add a touch of relatability to your brand.
Refurbishing or Republishing Your Old, but Well-Performing Content
For the content you already have, make sure to take a look at the performance of your best pieces. Find out which pieces have produced the best results when it comes to generating traffic, increasing the time spent on your website, and making conversions. Consider restructuring those pieces of content to share on other platforms—for example, turning a popular travel blog post into a TikTok video. Doing this ensures that search engines won’t be your only source of traffic. At the same time, the same high-quality content on other platforms may also be crawled and indexed.
You should also conduct periodic reviews of your content and see if any of it can be updated. Did you write about the latest developments about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in 2021? Well, things may be different two years down the line. Update your posts accordingly so that search engines can re-index your most valuable content.
Maintaining a Reasonable Number of Reciprocal Links
If you’re familiar with so-called “ex-deals” in marketing, there’s a sort-of equivalent to the practice when it comes to link building: reciprocal links. This is a common practice within industries because there’s a high chance that Website A’s content will be relevant or connected to Website B’s content, and vice versa.
That said, if Website A and Website B have been exchanging links a little too often, search engines may flag that as suspicious. In short, that means that you’ll want to balance reciprocal links with other link building practices.
Removing Bad Links
Beyond creating high-quality content that can be used for link building, you should also make it a habit to remove bad links. Some examples include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Links that can’t be found or accessed because the page has been moved or deleted (also called broken links)
- Links to or from spammy, unsecure, or low-authority websites
- Links to or from an irrelevant website, e.g. a construction website linking to a cosmetics website
- Links to or from a link farm, which is a group of websites that all link to the others in the group
Essentially, a bad link is something that doesn’t give your business website any value. If you don’t get rid of them, you can get punished with lower SERP rankings.
For bad internal links, you can resolve each issue by creating new content for each link or redirecting the content to another high-quality and relevant URL within your site. For bad backlinks, get in touch with the website owner ASAP to have the link to your website removed. In case they don’t respond, use Google’s Disavow Tool. This lets Google know that you don’t want the said link to be included in your profile.
Saying NO to Link Buying
There are many ways that unscrupulous organizations can try to undermine the algorithms of search engines. One is through link buying, which is essentially paying another website to link back to yours. Of course, search engines can’t really identify whether a link is paid or organic. However, there are certain indicators or patterns that can clue them in on your anomalous actions, and these can result in various penalties.
Keep in mind that link building—and SEO in general—takes a bit of time to generate appreciable results. Moreover, it takes consistency to achieve. Don’t let your business resort to shortcuts; instead, work with a good SEO company and make sure to acquire your links organically.
Hopefully, this article has helped you better understand what goes into link building for SEO and how you can go about it for your business website. With a combination of patience and a choice to rely on legitimate link building strategies, you’ll be able to rise through the SERP rankings and earn your business a place on the front pages.