Link Building: More Than Meets The Eye

So you probably think that link building is all about acquiring high-quality links from authoritative and relevant sites. Well if that is the case then yes, you’re partially right!

What many people don’t know, however, is that there’s so much more to link building than just external links. In fact, the link building process starts when your website build is in the process, and it isn’t just about building new links, but about optimising your existing ones too! So let’s start at the very beginning of your link building strategy.

On-site Link Building

Choosing your URL/Domain Name

Although Google doesn’t place a huge weight on this ranking factor, carefully choosing your domain name can help contribute towards SEO efforts. It’s an exciting process, but it’s important to stay within Google’s guidelines. If you’re stuck for inspiration, read this helpful article by SE Journal about how to choose a domain for maximum SEO results.

Menus and Site Navigation

Google is continuously scanning your website’s link infrastructure and has a good nose for sniffing out links with unnatural patterns. Creating user-friendly navigation is essential, and well-structured menu improves user experience by allowing users to easily navigate your site and find what they’re looking for, which ultimately helps you climb the ranks and drive traffic.

At Hush, we always build our websites with the search engine and user-friendliness in mind, to help boost your chances of SEO success.

Link Optimisation

So once you’ve decided on your search engine friendly domain name and structured your website, so that is easy to navigate, you need to optimise your links as this is another ranking factor. At Hush we always ensure that links are fully optimised as part of an ongoing SEO strategy, and any new web pages we add along the way are always fully optimised before they are published.

Internal Linking Structure

The optimal structure for internal link building looks like a pyramid. Continuously optimising your website’s internal links is another important factor of link building. Internal links are useful because they allow Google to understand which pages they should put the most weight on in order of importance. By building internal links in your content, you are also helping users transition through the website, and stay on your site for longer by introducing related content.

External Link Building

We often speak about link building as an important aspect of any SEO strategy, but often when we chat to clients about link building for SEO they ask, “what is it?” Well simply, link building refers to the process of getting external pages to link to a page on your website. It is important to remember that link building isn’t about getting websites to link to websites, it’s about getting a web page to link to your web page.

However, link building is all about relevance and authority, so we can’t just get any random page to link to your website as it won’t hold any value whatsoever. We have to ensure that all of the links pointing to your web pages are highly relevant to your content and that the web page that the link is pointing from is of authority and contains valuable content to your visitors.

So how do we do actually build links then?

A lot of research is involved in acquiring high quality links, which is why it can be so time consuming. One successful link building method is through content marketing and PR.

Content marketing is “a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.” When it comes to link building, the types of content we’re particularly interested are blogs. Guest blogging – although time consuming – is one of the best ways to get your content onto other websites, that will then link back to your original article or web page. By creating content that is unique, insightful and of high quality, you’re more likely to gain links that are of high relevancy and are useful to your readers.

PR is also another way to build high quality links, particularly if your press releases and news articles are disseminated across authoritative media outlets and online publications. Pages with a high authority pass a lot of link juice to your pages, which helps boost your rankings.

Link building is a process

Like all aspects of SEO, link building is a process and unfortunately you won’t see results overnight. You can’t just build one link and expect to shoot up the rankings, you have to build lots of links over a long period of time, and eventually Google will recognise that your content is deemed as super-useful and relevant to your industry. It is important to remember when building links that the quality of the links you acquire far outweighs the quantity. Stick with it… It can only bring positive results!

Need help building quality links to your site, or perhaps your SEO strategy needs a revamp? Give the HushBots a call on 01325 361729, or drop us a line at [email protected].