link-building

Over the last couple of years the term Link Building has become a somewhat “dirty” word in the world of SEO. This is mainly due to the outdated techniques of building a large number of links into your website solely for the purpose of achieving high rankings on Google. Therefore SEO companies, over the last couple of years, have gradually had to use different terminology for the building of links into websites; phrases such as “Content Marketing” and “Relationship Building” are regularly used.

However these are still essentially methods of building links into websites. The main difference is that it is no longer simply a case of building directory links, adding links to forums and similar “basic” link building techniques.

Nowadays, link building uses more advanced techniques to not only build links into websites, to improve rankings on search engines, but to also build meaningful relationships with other websites. The aim of this being to drive more regular, and valuable, traffic to the site – hence the modernised term “Relationship Building”.

We will take you through a selection of the numerous techniques now used to do this:

Current Relationships

If you’ve been to one of our talks you may remember Jan referring to this as “Low Hanging Fruit”. This is using the relationships that you already have whether it be customers, suppliers, partners etc. Then ensuring that these relationships are visible online; normally via links from their websites, social media, blogs etc. to yours.

Competitor Analysis

This is an extremely obvious technique, the basic idea of which is to look at the competitors that are doing well within your industry, and analyse their link building techniques to see what they are getting right. The more advanced way to use this, is to exploit the knowledge gained to modernise and improve on competitors methods.

Content Marketing

Content-Marketing

Building good quality, unique content on a website that people will be interested in and then share online. Obviously, this will also initially involve sharing the content yourselves to get the ball rolling.

Guest Blogging

This was huge in 2014 but then diminished as more and more companies used this technique to build both backlinks, and their companies’ reputations on other relevant website blogs, articles, news etc. However, despite this method initially being abused by lesser SEO companies, there are still areas where this works well as part of an overall strategy;

Forums

forum

This was initially poorly used, back in the day, where companies would simply sign up to forums and blogs with the basic idea of adding a reply to a post or comment just to get a backlink, via their signature. However when done correctly this became a fantastic technique to build company branding and gain links with referring traffic – This can also become a great place to engage with both potential and current customers together with other people within your industry. However, be warned: This demands a lot of time and attention to be done correctly.

Social Media

social_media_strategy

We have all probably seen the importance of Social Media. It has been a ranking factor in Search Engines for quite a while, but also brings it’s own wealth in digital marketing. Here are a few examples of how this can be used:

  • Build your followers and drive traffic to your website;
  • As a first point of contact for customer service;
  • To build company branding;
  • To engage with other companies – both in your industry and potential customers.

Summary

Above are some of the main areas, but there are many more depending on your industry. The overall objective is to ensure that backlinks gained are as natural as possible. Primarily, don’t just think about search engines, but try to think about what you would gain from each and every link built, if Google didn’t exist.
Google has always admitted that links are important to websites – it’s actually what the original Google platform was built on. Obviously Google has evolved considerably since then but when you have a little time, it’s always worth looking back at the prototype paper produced by the founders of Google: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Google-Original-logo

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or would like any help with your Relationship Building:

Contact Jon Seymour
Tel: 01492 460 460
Email: jon@janklin.com