How to go about link building in 2019

Link building might sound like a big and scary internet term, but in essence link building is the practice of creating links to your website from sources outside your website. The purpose is to create more avenues for your potential customers to find you and also to indicate to search engines that your website is authoritative and legitimate.

Link building continues to evolve, and how you go about it keeps changing. Read on to learn how to go about Link Building in 2019.

Link building is one of Google’s top three ranking factors in 2019. It is no surprize that a lot of time and effort is put into building links. But in this case, quality really is way more important than quantity.

Backlinking, or link building, is a lot about relationships. There is only so much an SEO company can do on your behalf before you have to start building links for your own business. It takes time, and should not be rushed. Having one or two quality links to your website in a month are worth much more than getting a lot of links from dubious sources. These can be flagged as spammy by search engines, which hurt you more than they help you. 

What is a quality backlink?

The quality of the link depends on the source it comes from. In other words, the website which contains the link to your website needs to be authoritative, genuine and relevant to your business. Where the link appears on the source website is also important. If your link is in the middle of the body of the content of a blog, it will impact your SEO very positively. This signals to Google that the author of the page gave credibility to your website and its content too.It also helps if the link is keyword-rich, but only if you aren’t over-using this tactic. 

Link building methods

To get you started on link building, here is a list of link building methods for you to build into your marketing strategy:

• Ask for links face to face in business interactions
• Email to ask for links from your contacts
• Guest post with a link on other blogs or social media sites
• Citations on articles that you are an authority at
• Social media posts linking back to your website content or products
• Blogs with helpful and informative content to lead to natural shares
• List your business on directories or resources pages
• Create a Google My Business page
• Get involved in promotions or competitions that will feature in news sources or the social media pages of other businesses
• Restore broken links 

A final note

Be careful not to do too many reciprocal links, where you give a link to a website and get a link from them. If you do this, make sure that it is for legitimate reasons so that you are not penalized by the search engine algorithms. Watch out for black hat linking techniques such as companies promising hundreds of backlinks by filling entire websites with only links. These websites soon get flagged and your own website will gain nothing from such a strategy.

Still unsure on how to proceed with your link building strategy? Book a consult with DMM’s marketing strategists today.