Beginner’s Guide to link building in 2020
Link building is a big chunk of work that SEO services do for your company website. The main purpose of it, like any other SEO strategy is to build your website rankings, increase traffic onto your pages and essentially become a top website in your industry/line of service or product. Link building can be quite technical, there are many rules and regulations by search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, etc) that need to be followed for a legitimate link profile that you as a business owner and search engines can use to assess the performance of your website. Here is a beginner’s guide into link building, what an SEO agency in Singapore would create for a website and some knowledge for you to understand. At the same time, if you wish to learn more about Content Marketing for 2020, take a look at our “12 Tips For Creating Your Best SEO Content in 2020”.
Getting used to the terminology of the types of links that are used is the first step to understanding what they are. When you understand what they are, you will be able to make sense of how they work and the benefits of each. The first and most basic link is an inbound link, which is links from other websites that are directed to yours. The more inbound links you have, the more connected your website is on the web and hence more popular Google (search engines) recognizes your website as.
How Does Google Measure The Credibility Of Your Website?
Take note of this, Google measures how credible your website is by a concept called EAT. This stands for Expertise, Authoritative and Trustworthy. Analysing the number of inbound links you are receiving, helps Google to determine how reliable your website is, how much authority you have over competitors and how valued your expertise are for other websites to reference you
What is SEO backlink?
An easy representation of what links are to your website is like, each link you get is a vote or “like”. Thinking of it in this way, it’s easy to conclude that the more links you get, the more popular your website is. However, like you can be famous you can also be infamous, which we do not want. There are a number of ways your site can be building links by which are not healthy on Google’s terms. These are, unnaturally purchasing links, agreeing to a link for link reciprocal, buying into made-up websites in order to get more links. Do not try to manipulate link building organic methods, because Google wants you to earn your votes for the quality, reliability and value for your website and the content you put out. As the biggest technology company to date, Google has ways to track your link building activity through your link profile. So make sure you don’t get caught!
Therefore, what should you do to improve your link profile? A link profile is what Google and an SEO consultant use to analyse the link building structure of a website ie; how many links are you getting to your website, where the links are coming from, are they coming from safe or dodgy websites – so you can protect and make improvements to your website’s SEO. Links also however, can also be created without any route to Google or search engines. These are called backlinks and are also important to building a reputable website.
As a beginner’s guide to link building in 2020, here is a concluded summary of what you should take away to understand what SEO services do. Or if you are thinking about DIYing your website, this will help.
- Make sure your links are earned and not paid for
- Make sure the links to your website come from authoritative pages
- Aim to receive links from similar topical pages/websites to improve the strength of your links
- Use Anchor text (ie; topic words used in your article or on pages) naturally and make sure it is relevant
- Have a healthy mix of follow and no follow links (these are links that you do not want a link to count as a vote to your site – ie; linking your own website from your company’s social media account is not a reliable link as it is internally created and therefore should not be counted as an earned vote). Note: it is healthy and normal to have a mix of both follow and no follow links. It builds honesty and genuinity of your link building strategies in the eyes of Google and search engines.
- Create excellent content that people see value into reference and hence earn more links
- Build the number of links to your website progressively.
Remember, the more links to your website the more trusted and reliable your website is. It is like, if you ask 3 different friends for their recommendation of the best coffee in town and all 3 friends give you the same answer… you will believe it’s true. The value of a link works just like the recommendation. However, keep your link building pure and try not to go against the rules (as a beginner!).
