Link building has always been associated with high organic rankings ever since. Even if your pages have top-notch content, they won’t generate lots of traffic unless you have high-quality links pointing to them.
At the same time, this aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) has led to lots of confusion among site owners.
Ever since the Panda update, Google has been very stringent regarding the kind of links that point to websites. For instance, just because you’re using a link building tactic that’s working now, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to sustain your rankings over time.
Therefore, you as site owners have to be picky about the type of backlink strategy you will employ on your website. The last thing you want is for Google to penalize your site in the future because you’ve been building links years ago that are now considered spammy.
In this post, we’ll look into what link building holds for you moving forward. This way, you’ll be able to build links that help your website to rank now but also in the future.
Make Your Links Look as Natural as Possible
Google has a pretty clear definition as to what makes backlinks “unnatural:”
The page shows the types of link schemes that the search engine would penalize over time. In the case of unnatural links, there’s a sense of deception and gamification that’s taking place, which doesn’t sit well with Google.
A backlink, for better or worse, is a form of endorsement that takes place between websites. If website A links to website B, that means the former recommends the latter to its target audience. But for the recommendation to be valid, the initiative to link has to come from the website owner and no one else’s.
At the same time, if you build links on private blog networks (PBNs) or other tactics where you can manipulate backlinks, you’re mostly setting yourself up for failure. It betrays the very foundation that link building is built on, which is the relationship between site owners that sustain the backlink. Once you start owning a network of websites to use primarily for building unnatural links, you run the risk of getting your site penalized.
Therefore, if you want your links to look as natural as possible, they have to be natural in the very sense of the word.
For instance, if you have a really great piece of content on your site, you can leverage it for your blogger outreach and encourage people to read and link to it if they find it useful. From here, it’s up to the blogger or site owner if they will indeed link to it or not. If your content is strong enough to warrant a backlink, you’ll get it.
Treat Backlinks Like a Living, Breathing Thing
As mentioned, backlinks are borne out of the relationship between websites. And, just like any relationship, it doesn’t end after securing the link on their site.
There’s always a possibility that the site owner could remove your link or replace it with something better. And this happens if you haven’t built enough of an affinity with the website owner. This occurs more often than not since most people treat link building campaigns as a one-off thing.
Link building has a human component to it that not a lot of people talk about. To keep site owners from removing your link on their site, you need to give them a reason not to do it. And it all goes back to providing value to site owners.
By sharing their content on social media, commenting on their posts, or even keeping in touch with them in one way or another, you keep the affinity alive, if not strengthen it. As a result, they will be more likely to keep your link on their site.
And even if they do remove it, it’s your responsibility to monitor and recover it so your site’s organic ranking won’t suffer.
Look at the Big Picture
Link building is just one of the many SEO tactics that websites can implement to drive more organic traffic and revenue. However, most website owners think small with their SEO efforts in the sense that they place their eggs in a single basket.
For example, since link building bears the most weight as a ranking signal, they focus on finding the best backlinks they can while disregarding other factors like quality content, loading speed, and others.
This approach would lead to problems down the line. No authoritative website would want to link to a site that has poor or substandard content. And even if they do, they put their credibility into question for linking to a page that sticks out like a sore thumb, making the link unnatural as a result.
Therefore, for your site to acquire relevant links that would have an indelible impact on search engines, you need your site to be clicking on all cylinders.
You need to make a concerted effort to publish web pages with high-quality content that sites and blogs would want to link out to. At the same time, you have to observe ranking factors like site speed, creating topic clusters, and others.
Doing these things strengthens your link building strategies and helps you acquire more inbound links moving forward.
Conclusion
When it comes to link building, it is clear that not all links are equal. At the same time, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to bolster the digital marketing strategy that will help you rank websites. Years have passed and the constant Google algorithm updates have killed most of these tactics that give way to low-quality links.
What’s truly important is this one thing: high-quality and natural backlinks are still the way to go.
They are hard to come by and acquire, and that’s what makes them even more valuable. And if you learn how to build more links of this type on your own website, expect to rank your site on top of Google and keep it there for a long time.
If you need any help building backlinks from high-quality sites, our link builders at Linkplicity are on standby to help you. Our services will take care of getting future-proof backlinks for your site so you can scale your business and focus on other things to help grow it. Reach out to us and we’ll get back to you shortly on how we can personally help you.
