Blog | 27 June 2022
Link building: Maximise SEO with external links
External links play an important role in search engine optimisation to drive organic traffic – especially in highly competitive industries. Combining good link building with technical SEO, thoughtful on-page SEO, engaging content and a great user experience will boost your traffic.
Today, the need for quality, relevant and authoritative links is increasingly important.
In the first two posts of our SEO blog series, we talked about the fundamentals of successful keyword research and how you can use it for on-page SEO.
What is link building?
Link building is the process of obtaining links from other websites to your own. A link is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet, but search engines also use links when they index the web. They will crawl (i.e. read and retrieve) links between different websites but also between individual pages on your website.
It is not only marketers who create links, but it could just as easily be a blogger who found a bargain for their home at a particular flea market or a person who wrote a text and wants to refer to the source.
As a search engine optimiser, you should work to get these types of links in the long term. And you get them by earning them – by creating content on your website that is of such high quality that others want to link to it.
What do search engines use links for?
- They discover new websites to index and use in their search results.
- They determine how well a page will rank in search results.
Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, invented PageRank, which Google used to measure the quality of a link. It quickly became an important part of the algorithm that determines which content should appear in search results. It was also one of the reasons why Google's search results were so much better than those of other search engines.
Links may not matter as much now as they did then. But if you and a competitor have equally good other content, links will be a decisive factor in whether you rank higher in search results or not.
How do I get more external links?
1. Content
Create content that is relevant to your target audience and that is about the keywords you want to rank for. To do this, you need to know your target audience and have done a keyword analysis. Based on this, you then write thoughtful content and distribute it via social media, for example.
Keep in mind that when you create the page, it should be optimised for On-page SEO.
2. Outreach
SEO Outreach is a combination of activities and processes that allow you to get closer to your potential "linkers". Some examples:
- Broken links
Identify broken links on blogs, news sites and similar places that contain content relevant to your target audience (and the keywords you want to rank for). Contact the content owner and let them know you have content to link to instead of the broken one. - Guest blogging
Jump in as a guest blogger on other people's blogs and remember to link to content that you want to promote yourself. - Make sure others link
Find sites that mention your brand without linking to it – and ask them to do so. Also look for sites that list products or services where you fit in and ask them to add you.
A post on link building can be pretty much as long as you want, but a final note is that depending on the quality, the link will be more or less popular with search engines. So: create relevant and engaging content – and build up a bunch of links from pages that are as good as yours.
Good luck to you!
