Is Link Building Still Important to SEO?

What is Link Building?

Link building is the process of obtaining links from other websites and connecting them to your website. When it comes to search engine optimization, getting as many high-quality links connected to your website is the goal in order to increase the ranking of your site. These links are a really good way to improve the influence of your website to bring in additional search traffic and are also sometimes referred to as “backlinks.” With a new website, even a really good piece of content will not bring the desired amount of authority that your site needs. The process of receiving links from other dependable websites is truly an excellent way to help search engines see your site as more reliable. 

Backlinks are considered to be recommendations to your site by search engines like Google. Naturally, the more recommendations or referrals made other the people or websites, the more reliable your site comes across to search engines. If only it were that simple. According to many SEO specialists, link building is one of the hardest skills to master. Finding the right resources to help you during this process could prove to be quite valuable. Search engines typically have access to such advanced technology that so much more is considered than just links when they are analyzing your website. How relevant the information is to the topic plays a bid part in this process, as well as the actual quality of the website that the link originated from. Essentially, it is important for the backlink to seem like it makes sense where it is. It would be counterintuitive to simply add a seemingly random link to your website or article. 

How Does Link Building Work? 

There are many different ways in which you can work to help build links for your website. Whether you use approaches like public relations, email outreach, or content marketing, there are a multitude of strategies that have proven to be successful. Earning backlinks from trustworthy and reliable sources is one of the best ways to increase the trustworthiness of your own site. Having a bunch of links that are from un-reliable and spammy websites actually does more to harm your site than to help it’s ranking. When search engines are crawling a website, they pay more attention to the quantity of high-quality links that are leading to that website. It makes sense that the websites with more quality backlinks are likely to do better in search result rankings. The higher quality links a webpage has, the better it will rank. 

When it comes to link building, there are two major ways to develop links for your website: internally and externally. Internal linking is fun because it all completely up to you and in your control, plus it is easy! With some time and thoughtful preparation, you yourself can strategically place internal links to help improve SEO for your business. Instead of just including links that direct people to your homepage, get creative and add links that bring people to relevant blog posts or product pages. Creating and sustaining a blog yourself is a great way to increase internal links by providing more opportunities for you to include links of specific products of yours or other internal pages to increase internal links overall. Social media is another great source to link to for your business. As far as external links go, they are not as easy to acquire because they are often out of your control. Because they come from other websites, the best way to obtain external links to just create excellent content for your website. Additionally, you can reach out other professionals in the industry like bloggers and influencers to help create reliable external links to direct people to your website. 

Link Building Best Practices

Adding links is an easy way to quickly get more links to your website. The process of visiting a website other than your own and manually placing a link there is known as adding a link. There are numerous tactics for how to add links. Some that fall into this category are commenting on blogs, creating social media profiles, posting on forums, and submitting links to the business directory. The actual process of building links using these tactics is not that difficult. Because it does not require too much knowledge or skill means that pretty much anyone else can do it too. This is why these types of links are not considered to have much weight and can even be flagged as spam by search engines. Bottom line, these types of links do not really give your business any form of a  head over your competition. As easy as it can be for you, expect the same for your competition. These strategies should not be ignored, as they can help add value to your website, but they are not the optimized solution for link building.

Asking for links is another effective way to acquire additional links. The process of directly reaching out to the owner of a website with a compelling reason for them to link to your website is known as asking for links. The most essential element of this tactic is to have a compelling enough reason for the website to link to you. Anything from guest blogging to link exchanges could be examples in this category of link building. In order to really have these link building strategies to be effective, the content on your website must be truly exceptional so that people will actually be likely to link to it. Being sure to have a lot of authority and credibility on your page could help to compensate for the lack of notoriety of your page. In order to convince other websites that it is in their and their audience’s best interest to link back the website, the best SEO companies use tailored approaches.  

Without a doubt, earning links is the most effective way to get them. The process of other websites linking back to your website without you asking them to do so is known as earning links. This usually does not happen randomly but means that you have high-quality content on your page worth mentioning. In order for this quality content to be seen though, there will be some necessary investment into promoting it. The more exposure the content gets, the more likely someone would be to link back to it. Never resort to black hat SEO tricks, like paying for links. Spammy websites linking to your website can backfire. In some cases, your best bet is to simply create the best content you can, then promote it without spamming people. In time, you may catch the important links needed to land you on page one of search results.

Why is Link Building Still Important?  

Since their formation, search engines have been utilizing links to rank websites. The value of links in ranking does not look like it will be altering anytime soon. Still to this day, links remain one of the most critical aspects that search engines take into consideration when ranking websites. Considering the unpredictability of the SEO world, this may come as a surprise. Since they are a fundamental part of how the internet works, links remain relevant. Link building helps to increase rank, drive website traffic, and increase brand exposure. The internet would be profoundly different without links, they are like the fabric that ties various website properties together. In this day and age, search engines want to do whatever possible to deliver the most pertinent and beneficial results available. It is important to search engines to create an environment that can run efficiently with minimal issues for people searching for answers. That’s why backlinks remain Google’s go-to ranking signal.

In the future, the reliability and relevancy of your links will only continue to become more and more important. The authority, expertise, and trust of your website is determined by search engines relying on links to decide. There is no end in sight for this process. Really one of the only constants in the SEO industry has been link building. In order to remain on the right track, stay on top of the trends, get creative with how to obtain links, and acquire relevant links. Even though the process of link building is notoriously one of the most complicated and time-consuming SEO tactics, it can still help increase the traffic and ranking of your website, thus significantly benefitting your business.