In the past link building was used by online marketers to build tons of backlinks to their website to increase search engine rankings. And it worked. But, in 2012, the Google Penguin algorithm update stopped websites spamming their search results. In particular, those websites which were buying links or getting them through free link building sites designed to boost their Google rankings.
So does this mean that link building for your website is all but dead today? Far from it!
Don’t Disregard Link Building For Your Website
Link building for your website has always been an important factor for it to rank well in the search engines. Links back to your website provide strong signals that your site is relevant and popular.
The focus for any website owner is now to create quality content and then build links to that from other relevant high-quality sites.
How To Do Link Building With Content
Generally, increasing the number of backlinks pointing to your website will improve your website’s search ranking. To get more links, contact authoritative websites or blogs to see if you can provide a guest post or article. That post or article will contain a link back to your website.
It’s much easier to build links to your site when you have high-quality content. Remember that without good content your online business has no value to your audience. It doesn’t have to be a literary masterpiece, but it should be relevant and interesting.
Evergreen Content
Content can be an article, a blog post, a report, an eBook, an online course, a video or an audio. The best kind of content is that which is classed as ‘evergreen’. This means that the information presented doesn’t go out of date, so in years to come it’s still relevant. That means you’ll still have content on your site that’s worth linking to.
Social Media
It’s true that Google still relies on ‘traditional links’, that is, links from other authority sites. We’re now seeing a shift towards Google and Bing taking more of an interest on what’s happening on social media.
What social media links are great for is to reach your real live customers. This is a way to drive traffic back to your site without having to worry about what Google or Bing does. Once again, content is king. If you continually produce high-quality content, your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+ will share these posts, comment on them and vote for them.
