What is Link Building and What Can It Do For You?
Link building plays a crucial role in any online marketing campaign. In fact, link building is a vital part of an SEO’s arsenal of tactics.
According to a recent survey, 60 percent of companies engaged in SEO are spending more than $5,000 a month on link building. So why is it that there is a large amount of confusion surrounding link building within the industry itself? It could be that there’s no standard definition, or maybe that SEO is barely taught in educational institutions. But if you ask any member of our team for a barebones definition of link building, we would tell you it’s the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own.
What is link building? Link building defined.
Link building is the process of going out of your way to find great links that point to your site. A link, sometimes called a hyperlink, is a way for users to jump between pages on the Internet. By clicking on a link, you will be brought directly to its owner’s page or wherever else they wish to lead you.
Search engines, like Google for instance, use links to crawl the web, crawl links between individual pages on a site and crawl the links between entire websites. Links are one of the most important ranking tools in Google’s algorithm. It works like this: search engines use software – often known as “web crawlers” – to discover publicly available pages. This software looks at webpages and follows links that are displayed on those pages. They navigate from link to link and collect data about those pages, which they feed back to their server. Though it may sound complicated, it’s really quite simple – if the search engines can’t crawl your website efficiently, you are unlikely to rank.
There are several techniques for link building. At Izzdo, we use 7. These include, link roundups, resource pages, guest postings, local blogger outreach, broken link building and link reclamation. While these techniques vary in difficulty and purpose, most SEOs will agree with us when we say link building is one of the hardest parts of our job. Fortunately, our team has mastered the art of high-quality links – we know what it takes to get you featured in the top publications.
What are the benefits to link building?
As mentioned, links are a very important signal that search engines use to determine rankings. This means that increasing the number of high-quality links that efficiently lead users to your website can considerably increase your chances of ranking well. This is the most obvious benefit, however it is not the only one.
You may come across some other worthy benefits of link building, such as the following:
Building Relationships – Link building sometimes involves reaching out to other websites and blogs within your niche. This kind of outreach most often relates to promotion of some type, like promoting content you just created or an infographic. Though a common goal of outreach is to get a link, there is a lot more to it than just that. Reaching out to other websites, blogs and/or businesses can be a way of building long-term relationships with key influencers in your niche. Aside from link building, this in itself is powerful because you are creating genuine advocates for your business.
Brand Building – High-quality link building can help build your brand and establish you as an authority in your industry. Link building techniques, like content creation, can communicate the expertise of your company – this can go a long way when trying to build your brand! For example, if you write and publish a high-quality piece of content that is both relevant and specific to your target audience, you have a chance of being recognized for it in your industry. You are proving your expertise and asking others in your industry to spread the word when you do link outreach to try and get links to content you have generated.
Sending Referral Traffic – A good link from a high-visited website can lead to an increase in traffic. If this website is relevant to your niche, then the chances are that this traffic is relevant too. Therefore, you may notice an increase in sales! There’s a difference being exposed to a large audience and being exposed to a relevant audience.
What is the difference between white-hat link building, gray-hat link building and black-hat link building?
“White-hat”, “black-hat” – or the questionable area in between, known as “gray-hat” – are common SEO terms, particularly when it comes to link building strategies. Each approach has its own pros and cons.
White-Hat Strategies – These strategies are usually very low-risk to carry out and stay within the terms and conditions outlined by your chosen search engine. When you use a white-hat strategy you are going by the search engine’s rules. If you follow their rules than you stand very little chance of running into problems with search engines when it comes to losing traffic to your site because of a penalty.
White-hat tactics include creating quality content, building an engaged community that interacts with your website, and promoting your website to relevant people in the industry by sending personalized messages.
White-hat strategies will allow you to operate without fear of manual spam penalties, however, they can take some time to have a big effect on traffic to your site if they are not aggressive enough.
Gray-Hat Strategies – Gray-hat tactics combine white-hat strategies and a dash of strategies that slightly bend the rules. For example, with gray-hat tactics you might write content in large quantities knowing that it isn’t entirely relevant, but ensuring that it is of some quality and substance.
Gray-hat methods are often used to speed up results while minimizing the risk of penalties by the search engine.
Black-Hat Strategies – black-hat SEO are the tactics that are specifically forbidden by the search engine. These tactics seek to exploit loopholes in the search engine algorithms and rank websites higher than they should.
Black-hat strategies include showing different content to the search engine than what you show to users, inserting hidden links into a website you do not own but exploiting a security flaw, and using hidden text on a page that it full of key words (to rank) that only appear to search engines and not users.
Black-hat SEO is incredibly difficult because you need to remain under the radar. These tactics can be extremely detrimental to your site if discovered and do not work in the long-term because search engines are always on the lookout to stop them from happening. That means if you’re discovered then your rankings and traffic can pretty much drop overnight.
At Izzdo, we operate using sustainable and efficient white-hat strategies that are guaranteed to drive results.
Link building isn’t just the process of acquiring backlinks that lead users to your site – it’s also a proven marketing tactic that increases conversions and brand awareness. Contact a member of our Izzdo team today to get your SEO campaign started.
