The role of link building in an SEO plan

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an incredibly varied discipline that requires a number of skills to be truly successful at. Effective SEO can be split into two categories: on-page factors and off-page factors. This post is going to be discussing link building, the effect it can have on SEO and three strategies for building quality links.

Search engines use bots, also known as crawlers to constantly scour the Internet and read the HTML on a website. What these bots find will determine how well a website ranks in the results pages, but first, they need to find your website, and that’s where links come in. Links are like the roads of the Internet for bots, they’re the quickest way to get around.

A link to your website from another is essentially an endorsement of your content, as someone clearly thought it was good enough to link to. Links can have different values depending on the quality of the website it comes from, this is also known commonly as link juice. The higher quality the website, the better the SEO benefit. So, how do you build links? Here are three approved strategies:

1. Natural Links

Natural links are ones that you automatically generate. The strategy here is to create great content and distribute it so that people will want to link to it naturally.

2. Outreach Links

Outreach links take a bit more work. The idea with an outreach strategy is that you highlight potential target websites and contact the owner or webmaster and try to negotiate a link to your content. Try to find high-quality websites that might benefit from your content for maximum effect.

3. Guest Blogging

Many websites allow and even actively encourage guest blog contributions. This will mean that you need to spend some time creating a totally unique piece of content for the host website, but often you can link back to your own content as part of the deal. This is a great strategy that can also help to strengthen your own visibility.

Need some help with your SEO strategy? At Excalibur Digital we have comprehensive SEO packages that include link building and much more. Contact us to get started today.