Link building is the process of creating links in order to improve the rankings of a website in search engine results – and thus of course get more people to click on and visit it. Because search engines are capable of counting the number of links a site has, if your site has a high number of links, logically this should help it appear higher in search results. Of course it is not as simple as that – there are many factors affecting how high the search engines score your links.
You should not confuse link building with link buying, which involves paying a webmaster to place a link on their site. If you are considering this route it is important to ensure the links to your site are considered by the search engines to be high quality. The engines are cleverer than you might think – they can detect large amounts of low quality paid-for links and can penalise you. To help steer you in the right direction it is worth using a company such as Manual Link Building to develop and implement an effective strategy.
These companies can also make sure your links appear natural to the search engine. Your site should focus on quality over quantity and make it seem that all the links are genuine, in order for your search engine rankings to improve in a sustainable long-term pattern.
Another technique which can be beneficial is tiered link building. This is the process of creating links to external domains that, in turn, link to a target website, in order to increase the authority of the linking page. This, in turn, fuels the link popularity of the target site. However, this must be very carefully managed to avoid mirroring a ‘doorway’ linking approach which is likely to be penalised.
One of the most important contributors to higher rankings is solid new content on and off site. The main strength of content marketing is the creation of the natural links that you need. Additionally, it can have a long-lasting beneficial effect, which often continues long after the original publication. This is achieved through readers of the content sharing and recommending it through their social networks.
Social signals such as Tweets, Facebook “Likes” and Google “+1s” are another form of “votes” for pages. Social votes are quickly becoming a more important factor in the search engine calculations, especially as Google and Bing continue to evolve in the direction of social and search integration.
It can take weeks or months for link building to really start to show its beneficial effects so you must be patient. This is because it takes a fair amount of time to build high quality links and the search engines may take a while to detect changes. Time scales may also vary depending on how many other similar sites there are to yours, how long your site has been running and what types of links are being built.
David Spencer is a digital media marketing consultant and freelance writer who blogs on a variety of subjects for online sources, including this guest post for Manual Link Building