How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
About The Author
XO Digital Marketing aims to help main street businesses marketing themselves in the digital age. Building a local online presence is not impossible & can be more affordable than traditional marketing. It is far more interactive and allows the people and personality of your business to shine through.
Providing a full range of solutions to help solve the technology & marketing gap for entrepreneurs to focus on their people and products.
This e-book will explain the how & why link building is important in your search rankings. We hope this gets your business on the right path to finding ways to get ranked for those all important keywords that consumers use to find your product or service.
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How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
Table of Contents
How Does Link Building Fit into the SEO Equation?
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What is the Affect of Link Building on Search Rankings?
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How Do You Build Links?
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What Will Link Building Do For My Site?
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Conclusion
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How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
How Does Link Building Fit into the SEO Equation? When search engines return results for a given search phrase or keyword term, ideally, the ten most relevant results will appear on the first page. The idea behind this is that the top three pages, returned during a search, are viewed by the search engine as the most relevant resources available for that search. By optimizing your website with certain keywords, you can improve the position in which you rank for a certain keyword term; your rankings will appear within the search engine results pages, also known as SERPs. It's important to note that search engine optimization is the first step in the link building process. You must optimize the pages first in order to build links to those pages with anchor text that matches what the data on the page has been optimized for. For example, if you wanted to rank higher in SERPs for the keyword term, "Surveillance Camera Installations", you would first optimize your home page to link to your Surveillance Camera Installations page and then edit your Surveillance Camera Installations page with your targeted keywords in the title tag of the page, the Meta description and the Meta keywords. Once a page is optimized it has to be indexed and found by the search engine spiders in order to begin to appear in search engine results. This can be done by obtaining a link back to the page from another page that has already been indexed by the search engine. When a search engine spider comes to a site it will "crawl" the site for new information and will follow any new links that have been added. When the site is crawled all of the information there is added to the search engine index. Once the page is indexed it can be found and returned as a result for a search query. The new Digital Consumer wants to the ability to find you on Facebook, Google and other related sites. The Digital Consumer also expects speed, professionalism and to be convinced as to why they should do business with you instead of a someone else. Effectively optimizing one's site can help you achieve that, thus appealing to the Digital Consumer on a larger scale.
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How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
What is the Affect of Link Building on Search Rankings? To a search engine, links are seen as votes for a website. The more "votes" a site has, the more search engines view it as relevant and popular. However, when it comes to the links that point back to your site, there are two factors that are very important. 1. How relevant is the linking website to your site and 2. How popular is the site that the link is coming from to your site? When it comes to obtaining inbound links to your site, the quality of the site is always more important than the quantity of links. One link from a great, relevant website can do more for your rankings than 100 lower quality links. The relevancy of those links to your site also plays a factor in how much they will help your rankings. There is also the aspect of driving traffic to your website. If you can build links on sites where you know your target audience is active, you can begin to get people clicking through your links to your site. In this case, the strength of the site does not matter as much as the amount of traffic the links on this site will send to your site. An example of a site like this can be a business within your niche but not a direct competitor. If the service you offer compliments their goods or services then the fit is very natural and helpful for both parties.
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How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
How Do You Build Links? Building links can be a tedious and time consuming process. Finding partnerships, webmasters and bloggers to connect with can take up several hours of your day and the results can be non-existent when you begin your link building process. But anything that is worth doing is never easy. The results that you can achieve with a well planned and well executed link building campaign can increase your SERPs rankings for the better and the results are long lasting. With continued link building, you can continue to rank high for search terms by building fewer and fewer links each month. Building your back link profile is something that requires thought and strategy. The idea behind a link building campaign is quality not quantity. One great link can do so much more for your website than 100 low quality links. Start by taking an assessment of your current linkable assets. Do you currently have a blog? Do you have a YouTube channel? Do you have any outside speaking engagements scheduled or does your agency appear at any industry conventions? Take stock in what you are already doing and what you can leverage into a link back to your website, social media pages or blog. Use these tools with discretion, not every piece of content you write on your blog, post to your Facebook wall or Tweet needs to be a sales pitch. Remember people want to read interesting content, not a brochure on your products or services. Also, consider any existing relationships you may have already formed that could lead to a back link for your site. This can be friends you have within a similar industry, local organizations such as the Better Business Bureau or local chamber of commerce and other civic organizations.
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How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
What Will Link Building Do For My Site? Websites with a diverse link profile and a greater number of links are viewed by search engines as more relevant and trustworthy than a site with fewer links from fewer domains. Increasing the number of links you have into your site will ultimately help your site rank higher in search engine results. Building links to your site will have several benefits: • Drive traffic to your site. Links drive traffic to your site and get your agency in front of more people. More traffic equals a greater opportunity for conversion and increased sales and revenue for your business. • Building links lets search engines know what the pages of your site are all about. Links with optimized anchor text improve your rankings by getting search engines to associate keywords with the corresponding pages to your site. If you have ever clicked through a link it was probably due to the anchor text. Rather than "click here", you want your links to say "City, State Insurance", or whatever the keyword term you would like to rank for. • Links equal authority. To a search engine, the more links you have on industry websites, the more authoritative your site appears. To a search engine your link on a site means that you are a resource to that site. Link Types: Links can come in several different packages and building different types of links can help you build that diverse link profile that I spoke about earlier. Here are a few examples of some of tactics used to build links: •
PPC - Pay per click links are advertisements that are purchased on a pay per
click basis. A PPC campaign is a great way to appear at the top of SERPs with keyword rich copy and a descriptive link back to your site. The PPC links will appear at the top of the page, ahead of the organic search rankings. PPC links are used to drive traffic to your site and you can target the clients you want to capture. • Blog links - These are links within copy such as a blog post or another editorial piece. Content links are very beneficial because they are one of the most natural ways to go about link building. When a link with optimized anchor text can be naturally worked Page 7
How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings? into copy it has a great chance to be clicked through, getting people directly to your website. Also, the practice of forming relationships and writing on other blogs will help you to be viewed as authority within your industry. Guest blogging can typically be worked out where the blogger will post your content in exchange for link back to your site. • Press Releases - Press releases work great for any type of newsworthy information or breaking news about your agency. Oftentimes press releases will be picked up into the news feed of a search engine. Using press release submission services like PRWeb will get your press release syndicated out to several news sources. • Link Bait - Link baiting is the practice of creating something that will generate its own links. This can be a useful tool that people can link to on their websites or something that can be shared. Creating link bait is not an exact science and can be tricky but is one of the most natural ways to build links. In closing, links are viewed as the streets and roads of the internet and the more roads you have leading back to your site the more opportunities you will have for people to find you. Undergoing a link building campaign requires planning a strategy and executing that strategy but the benefits of link building are long lasting SEO success. A link building campaign can take up to 12 months to be fully realized but like anything you get out of it what you put into it.
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How Can Link Building Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
Conclusion
Link building is an integral part of your overall SEO strategy that has a few different but equally important strategies. If you are a small business trying to build a brand in today’s world, the time is now to begin this journey to build your online presence to reach your consumers. Some of these items in this e-book you may be able to tackle some of these on your own, others you may want to hire others to do for you.
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