So you’ve built a great website for your business. It looks good, and it’s full of awesome content. But you’re just not getting as many visitors as you’d like. What can you do to remedy that? Educate yourself about link building!
Here’s the thing. Link building is a vital part of getting traffic to your website. In order to rank high in search results, you need to get other websites to post links back to your site. And they need to do so using specific, strategic keywords as the anchor text for those links.
That is link building in a nutshell.
Search engines are really smart these days. It’s just not enough to put SEO keywords into your own site – although that is still very important. But what search engines are really looking for is a site that others have found so useful, they are willing to associate their own websites with it by linking to it.
Think about that for a moment. These other companies have to be so impressed by your site that they willingly send their own customers there – and away from their own website – to get further information. What does this mean for you? It means you need to have amazing content on your site, in order for it to make sense for other companies to do this.
So the first step in link building is making sure your content is worth linking to.
Once that great content is in place, the next thing you need to do is get the word out. The more links back to your site a search engine can find, the higher your search ranking will be – as long as they are quality links. What’s a quality link? It’s a link from a website that is relevant, authoritative, and user-friendly.
- Relevant: If you sell toys, you don’t want links from websites talking about plumbing services. Links from sites that different from your niche just won’t count when it comes to search engine rankings. Instead, try to get links from sites relevant to your business – like ones selling children’s clothing, or discussing education, or listing fun summer activities for kids.
- Authoritative: Now, if your Aunt Betty has her own website, complete with MIDI file music and falling snow graphics, you might be tempted to ask her to post some links to your site to help your rankings. Don’t do it! What you want are links from authoritative sites – sites that have been around for years, and that are widely respected – like The New York Times website, for example. Links from that type of site will tell search engines that your site must be worthwhile.
- User-friendly: Believe it or not, search engines even take into consideration how easy-to-navigate the sites are that link back to you. The better those sites are put together, the higher they’ll boost your search rankings.
So your next step is to decide which websites you want to spread the word to. Remember to look for relevant, authoritative, and user-friendly websites. And what do you do when you’ve identified those perfect sites?
Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of our series on link building to find out!
All data and information provided on this site is for informational purposes only. The Zen Media Group makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided on an as-is basis.
