Link building: what it is and why it can make a difference for your business

Among the strategies that those involved in digital marketing have the task of designing, one of the most important is undoubtedly link building, a process by which a website acquires hyperlinks (links, in fact) from other sites.

Link building is extremely useful in SEO terms. Search engines, in fact, use links basically for two reasons:

1. Discover new web pages
2. Determine the organic ranking of websites in search results

Search engine spiders, in fact, constantly crawl web pages, which they can also add content to their indexes. By doing so, they decide whether a page is of sufficient quality to rank well in relation to the keywords that concern it. To make this decision, several factors contribute, including the number and quality of external links pointing to a particular resource. In other words, the higher the number of quality sites linking to a particular web page, the more likely it is that it will rank well in the search results.

The importance of link building

Knowing how to do link building is essential to increase the organic visibility of a website. Each incoming link can be considered as a sort of vote of confidence from one page to another: when you connect to a site other than your own, in fact, this other site is implicitly indicated as a resource. reliable.

However, the manipulation of the algorithm through the excessive use of keywords has represented a significant thorn in the side for Google which, precisely for this reason, over time has penalized unscrupulous link building strategies that violate the guidelines for webmasters.

In fact, since 2012, with the Penguin update, Google has taken a very decisive direction in combating webspam and SEO over-optimization activities: it is no longer sufficient, therefore, to receive links to your site to improve its positioning on the search engines. research but you need to get the right links, that is, those that meet certain requirements.

 

How to do link building without incurring algorithmic penalties

There are various link building techniques. To do this well, it is necessary not only to pursue the main objective of this activity, that is to increase the number of incoming links to a website, but also to increase the authority of a particular site in the eyes of search engines by respecting the established criteria. by Google for its evaluation: quality above all, but also relevance and relevance. The backlinks must come from reliable sources and thematically related to the sector of reference of the website.

 

The most effective link building strategies

There are several strategies for doing link building. In general, an important factor to consider is that the creation of external links must be done in the most natural way possible. Link building sites, therefore, must deal with issues related to the reference site, using the relevant keywords. But that’s not all: link building strategies, in fact, can range from guest posting to collaboration with opinion leaders, to comments on blogs and forums or, simply, to adding URLs to a post.

Carrying out a link building campaign involves organizing a series of specific actions, including:

• Competition analysis;
• The analysis of your site (for example to evaluate the current ranking, from which to start to define the margins for improvement);
• Focus on link quality: as we have seen, Google penalizes low quality content; consequently, to improve link building effectively, it is necessary to check the reliability of the sites you choose to link to.

When it comes to off page SEO, link building is one of the main activities: to be successful in the digital world, in fact, you have to look beyond the site. Off page SEO concerns all the techniques that take place “outside” a website and, alongside activities such as content marketing, social media marketing and the construction of brand identity, link building is certainly an essential element for the success of a website.

 

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