In the past, link building was used by online marketers to build tons of backlinks to their website to improve search engine rankings. And it worked. But in 2012, the Google Penguin algorithm update stopped websites from spamming their search results. Especially those websites that bought links or got them through free link building websites designed to increase their Google rankings.
So does this mean that link building is as good as dead for your website today? Far from it!
Don’t neglect link building for your website
Link building for your website has always been an important factor in order to rank well in the search engines. Links back to your site provide strong signals that your site is relevant and popular.
The focus for every website owner now is to create quality content and then link to it from other relevant quality websites.
How to do link building with content
In general, increasing the number of backlinks pointing to your website improves your website’s search ranking. For more links, contact authoritative websites or blogs to see if you can provide a guest post or article. This post or article contains a link back to your website.
It’s much easier to generate links to your website when you have quality content. Remember that without good content, your online business has no value to your audience. It doesn’t have to be a literary masterpiece, but it should be relevant and interesting.
Evergreen content
Content can be an article, blog post, report, eBook, online course, video, or audio. The best type of content is that which is classified as “evergreen”. This means that the information presented is not out of date and will still be relevant for years to come. That means you still have content on your site that is worth linking to.
social media
It’s true that Google still relies on “traditional links,” meaning links from other authority sites. We’re now seeing a shift towards Google and Bing, which are more interested in what’s happening on social media.
Social media links are great for reaching your real live customers. This way you can redirect traffic back to your website without worrying about what Google or Bing is doing. Once again, content is king. If you consistently produce quality content, your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ will share, comment, and vote on those posts.
