What Is Link Building & What Is Its Importance In SEO

Link building can be defined as the process of getting links to your website from external pages. Being one of the most effective SEO strategies of our time, it’s no wonder that so many webmasters are pondering ‘how to create backlinks for my website to improve my ranking’.

Many webmasters used to think that writing quality content is the only means of SEO link building, which is not entirely true.

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Even a few years back backlink building was a relatively easier process in which tools could be automated for submitting to Web2.0 sites and article directories for generating backlinks and the quality of content or inbound links wasn’t of much importance.

With the launch of the Google Penguin algorithm, the link building techniques have been irrevocably changed.

Benefits of Link Building in SEO

Link building is an indispensible aspect of search engine marketing and is a major factor behind the website’s ranking on Google.

Google has expressly mentioned that the ranking of a website can be improved by increasing the number quality sites which link to the pages. This is precisely why it’s always suggested that after creating your site, you need to spend some time and money on link building services so that you get better exposure on Google and other search engines.

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Incoming links from a popular websites can mean a lot for your site. Effective link building strategies should focus on getting genuine links from authority websites rather than building unlimited links. Some of the obvious advantages of link building are listed below:

1. Greater visibility of your website/blog in Google search results.
2. You’ll be getting traffic from other sites which have linked to you.
3. When your site gets good quality incoming links then it would be automatically branded as a valuable resource. The easiest way to do this is by a steady creation of quality content.
4. It is a crucial aspect of SEO analysis. Your site is going to rank higher for your targeted keywords when other quality websites link to your page.

Best SEO Tools to Help with Link Building

Since link building is an important part of SEO optimization, we have decided to provide you with a list of top SEO tools for link building.

• Majestic SEO
• BuzzStream Link Building
• Seomoz’s open site explorer and Seomoz Linkscape
• Raven SEO Tools
• Solo SEO link building tools
• Page InLink Analyzer
• Plugin SEO Beta Linking tools
• Sheer SEO Backlinks Watchdog
• Hubspot Website Grader
• Ahrefs

Now that you know about all the important link building tools, it’s time to take a look at how to do link building.

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Link Building Tips

Given below are a few tips for getting external sites to link to your website.

1. Creation and promotion of good content – You need to come up with a solid content so that other sites would be prompted to link to it and encourage people to read it.
2. Submissions – Submit any news on your site to press releases and submit your site to free directories. Free web directory submission is an effective way of getting high authority backlinks to your site. These directories are like getting online citations which would sustain your webpage.
3. Mentions and reviews – Make sure to place your website its product/service in front of bloggers who count.
4. SEO backlinks from partners and associates – Convince your partners and friends to link to your website. Always request an in-content link rather than links in the footers or sidebars. The backlink should ideally come from a site which belongs to your niche or else it is not going to work.
5. Build relationships – Any link building strategy should focus on building good relationships with the new contacts. It’s a good idea to start with communities, forums, blogs or groups related to your niche. Take the first step and make a contribution with relevant and engaging posts and comments. Active participation in these online communities is a great way of gaining good backlinks.
6. Write a testimonial – Link building with testimonial and guest posts is a win-win scenario for you. Writing a testimonial or a guest post for a business is a good opportunity to receive backlinks and even traffic from that website. It works better than the typical emails with link requests.
7. Create a blog – Create a blog focussing on your niche and write regular posts with backlinks to your website.

These are the general rules of link building although most of them are dependent on external forces and are extremely time consuming. In order to come up with great internal links what you need to do is create a system for interlinking the pages.

This can be done in a few simple steps:

• Keyword research – Make use of a good keyword research tool which would suggest all the relevant and popular keywords.
• Assigning the keywords to content – Next, you need to strategically group the keywords and come up with Google friendly info architecture.
• Link your pages with targeted anchor text – Apply the keywords you researched to sensible inter-linking this can be done by linking to articles by making use of the discovered keywords. This is one of the most important aspects of link building. You need to make sure that the right pages are linked with the right anchor text.
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Wrapping it up

It also needs to be mentioned in this context that during your link building campaign, you need to remember that although domain authority can be a very useful metric, relevant links are even better.

Never use your keywords as anchors for each link you are building. The links should be natural and it doesn’t really matter if the anchor text and the keywords don’t match. As long as the links are relevant to your niche, you job is nicely done.