An Introduction to Link Building
If you are new to the world of digital marketing, or more to the point content and inbound marketing, link building is one of the most important process when you begin to add content to your websites.
What is Link Building?
Link Building is the method of getting links from other websites and “adding them” to your own. Users who do a search on sites such as Google, Yahoo!, or Bing for example, use these link to navigate from page-to-page on the Internet.
Search engines, like Google, use these links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. Google has a great support help page that explains their way of crawling the Internet (As you can see, I just practiced link building by referencing another site with similar information). *Note: Make sure your site has a sitemap, which is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content.
Reasons Why You Would Want Search Engines to Crawl Your Site:
- To discover new web pages.
- To help determine how well a page should rank in their results.
- To gain more visitors and leads.
Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. Search engines, however, do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. The more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.
Link building is great for your business. It will help your site rise in rankings, which then leads to increase of traffic and leads. It’s all about ROI after SEO, but that’s another topic for another day.
The Dark Side of Link Building
A warning about link building, Google might actually give you what is called a Google Penalty. Google might actually think you are “over optimizing” or even “buying links” if they deem your site to have too many links. In 2012, Google released Penguin, which caused many sites to loose their previous ranking, some even dropped off the first page of search. Now in 2015, Google released Mobile Update AKA Mobilegeddon, which affected sites that did not have mobile friendly sites. This latest update is a whole other ball game, but nonetheless hurts ranking.
Have a new site? Or you are just building your company site? Don’t go crazy and link every piece of content you might have on your new site or over create landing pages. Yes, marketers say landing pages are great for SEO, but Google actually thinks it’s a bad practice to have too many one page keyword and linked stuffed pages. It’s normal to want your new site to climb the rankings. This practice of over linking on new sites is viewed as linking automation by Google. You don’t want a Google Penalty before your site even has the chance to rank fairly against competitors.
We’ll be having a series of link building that includes crawling your website for SEO, an infographic on link building habits to stop practicing, and website content clean up.
Have questions on link building? Or anything else? Leave it in the comments below.
