Link Building: do it right!
Link building: what exactly is it? Well, it can be described as committing time, effort and resources to establishing good quality links to your site (though this is a pretty generic definition). If you’re a fairly new player in the SEO game, the portfolio of links pointing to a site is one of the many factors that impacts its search rankings. “Content is king”. We’ve all heard this one before at some point. It’s safe to say that good content can often be a great help towards inspiring a webmaster to create that oh-so-important ‘thumbs up’ for your website in the way of a nice shiny link. A little note saying “Wow! Awesome read, check this out:”, or something to that effect, will also do wonders. You’re going to want that thumbs up to be from a reputable source too. It’s fantastic if you have a set of influential bloggers on speed dial, but unfortunately, this may not be the case. A key thing to bear in mind is relevance. If you’re selling lovely oak furniture in London, Google won’t like a bunch of links coming from a car sales website in Russia. It’s a good idea to channel your link building efforts towards sites that relate to yours in order to achieve maximum ‘link juice’. Quality should most definitely come before quantity but you’re doing really well if you get both hand-in-hand. We no longer live in a time whereby spam links deliver benefit to search engine optimisation (farewell to link farms offering thousands of links for an enticing fee). Alas, Google cottoned on to this one quite a while ago and launched the Penguin update in 2012 to alter its search algorithm to penalise sites that have a backlink profile full of unnatural links. What’s a natural link then? The answer to this is a link that is not acquired through financial purchase, link networks/farms, generic directories or a range of other shady methods. In fact, a new version of the Penguin algorithm (Penguin 4.0) is due soon which will penalise sites with unnatural and spammy backlink profiles much faster. Just for fun, lets look back on some notable cases where prominent websites received a severe telling off from Google. 2013 saw florist website Interflora fail to even rank for searches for their own company name due to suspected blackhat link building practices. Lyric annotation site Rap Genius had some hard work ahead of them to remove unnatural links after inviting bloggers to link site content in exchange for tweeting bloggers’ content. Thanks for reading our ‘Link Building: do it right!’ article. Be sure to visit the rest of our Digital Marketing Blog for all the latest happenings in Digital Marketing. We’re Digital Clicks, SEO specialists working in Cambridge with clients across the whole country. We specialise in SEO campaigns, especially when one wants to optimise for a local SEO campaign in Cambridge. For more information, any help or advice for your campaign or to know more about how we work, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of the team. Error: Contact form not found.