If you have a business, having a blog can greater increase your chances of getting more customers and sales. Many people these days look for information about products and services through the internet. If you have a local business, combining your blog with Google Maps marketing will allow your customers as well as prospects to easily know more about your business and where it is located.
As an entrepreneur and blogger, of course, you want your blog to be number one in any search engine’s search list. One way on how to increase traffic to your website or blog, and has remained the most effective, is to gather a high number of quality links that would point to your blog or what we call link-building. But out of 319.8 million blog websites in the world, how can you top the search results?
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What is link-building?
Link-building is the process of acquiring links from an external website pointing to a specific page or a website. This is one of the fundamental tactics used in search engine optimization, often called as SEO.
Why is link-building important?
This is important because the more links you get, the more traffic your website will have. If your website has a high traffic number (especially if the links that you’re getting are from those high authority websites), that means that your website is visited most of the time and may attract potential sale or clients. Also, you might want to check the domain authority and trust flow of the external website that you’re targeting for high-quality links. That would determine how known or famous that website is.
Strategies on how to get high-quality links:
1. Understand Google’s criteria in ranking quality website
Google has this specific algorithm in ranking websites according to quality, authority, and relevance. Instead of knowing the countless Do’s of this algorithm, why don’t we learn the few Don’ts instead?
Scraped content from well-known websites – especially if this is a search engine magnet. If search engines notice that you’re just copying and pasting contents from other websites just for your website to get more links, Google will penalize your website. And one more thing, plagiarism is a crime.
Low-quality guest posts – Google has turned its attention to this since this year. Google is strongly discouraging the publishing of thin, reused, ungenuine content that does not provide massive value to readers. Google updated their standards and anyone who’s caught will be tagged in the same sort as “scraped content”.
Syndicating content from your own website – Yahoo is one example of an ideal external website where you can get links from. Nonetheless, if you copied the same exact content that you have on your website, you can still be identified as someone who copies content from another website. Avoid this scenario by publishing it first on your website before it is published elsewhere and use authorship marks that state it is your content and copyrighted from any other reputable authors.
2. Relevance more than anything
While quality is of your predominant importance, it is fairly significant that these sites are relevant to your business as well. According to Google’s standards, the more useful the contents found in your website is for the user, the greater chance for it to rank high. You can use local maps marketing to provide more information about your business for your visitors. Backlinks or approaching high-authority sites to feature or publish your content will only be helpful if it is somehow related to the keywords that are important for your business.
This simple four-step test will make it a lot better for you:
- Make sure that the links you gathered are from sites related to your business or industry.
- If the external website is not precisely related to your business, it should have a segment that is related in some way to your industry.
- If you have written for a website that is not related to your site, make sure that the content that you have written for is directly related to the content of your own site.
- The link that you received should be helpful and directly related to the website you have written for.
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3. A wide variety of link-building strategy is the key
Google may tell us a ton of what not to do, but I tell you this, there is no such thing that will act like a magical weapon that would solve a long-term issue, which is gaining qualified and helpful inbound links. When you’re just using one or two, you’re at risk for not being important and be qualified for Google’s changing algorithm.
Link building schemes that are still in may include but not limited to:
- Creating, publishing and advertising high-quality content that links back to your site.
- Getting recommendations and mentions from high-authority websites and personalities.
- Becoming a guest poster or a columnist of a website on popular websites.
- Perform a Google Maps optimization to improve your ranking in the search engine page rankings.
4. Have your own strategy when it comes to link-building
Most SEO specialists tend to set their minds to one ultimate goal: to gain much high-quality traffic. But in doing so, there are times that they forget one important component of the SEO rules, which is brand building.
It may be very obvious that brand-building is a must but unfortunately, it is one of the things that is forgotten most of the time by SEO practitioners. The wider your brand recognition, the powerful your brand image. Now the question is, how can you build a strong brand image?
Good question! Just a suggestion, refrain from copying other columnist or competitor’s style or way of building links. For me personally, I find it rewarding and fulfilling at the same time whenever I discover new ways of building high-quality links that are helpful for my site. We don’t know how others do link-building but it is always better to have your originality.
5. Anchor text should be natural and seamless
This is very helpful in building connections with other trusted websites. There are sites which strongly prohibits making anchor texts with the only purpose is to have a backlink pointing to a specific website. When these sites identified you as one, they’ll not accept any guest posts from you anymore, which is a big no-no! Make sure to make your anchor texts helpful and seamless. Especially if you want to be found on Google Maps, you should employ a maps marketing strategy. Place some of these in your website contents because it is a necessity and not just for backlinks.
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