Link building is a crucial part of any successful SEO strategy, but it is often the most misunderstood. Link building is a key factor in your website’s search engine ranking, so it is absolutely necessary to address it correctly if you plan on bringing in organic traffic. At CXGS, we receive a lot of questions about link building, so we hope to answer some of them in this blog. Let’s start with the #1 question we get about the subject:
What is Link Building?
Link Building is the process by which you hyperlink to and from other websites. There are two types of hyperlinks involved:
- Backlinks: when other websites are linking back to your website.
- External links: when you are linking to other websites.
- Internal links: links on your own website that link to other pages in your website
How do we build links?
So, an example of a backlink to our website is this article on RCPMag.Com, discussing how to improve your website, with a mention of how CXGlobals helped a client improve their organic traffic through an effective SEO strategy.
Now, an example of us creating an external link to another page would be to reference a great place where you can learn a lot about link building, Hubspot Academy, or more specifically, a tutorial on link building in Hubspot Academy. This is a backlink for Hubspot, benefitting them by giving them a reference, and benefitting us by, in a way, being good neighbors. We use Hubspot internally, and we’re talking about link building, so them having a relevant reference helps give our blog credibility, improves our SEO score, and generally gives us a good standing with Google’s crawlers.
Finally, an example of an internal link would be us simply linking back to our page on Demand Generation, where you can find more information about our different services that can help you build organic traffic and earn nurtured leads. We can also link to some of our older blogs if the information is still relevant today.
Is it really that easy to build links?
Well, yes and no. Yes, the mechanics of link building are quite simple; it’s a matter of finding relevant links and hyperlinking back to them whenever fitting. However, there are a few best practices that you must keep in mind to ensure you have a healthy approach to SEO link building. Here are a few tips to consider:
1) Periodically audit your backlinks to check for their health and relevance
Broken backlinks are like spoiled food in your refrigerator; get rid of them! A healthy part of any SEO strategy is periodically running a backlink audit to check for broken or irrelevant links. For example, if you are an IT solutions company, getting referenced in a popular online technology magazine is a fantastic backlink that will surely send some traffic your way. However, being linked back to a spam website that has security issues is not something you want. Also, make sure to use no follow links to make sure search engines ignore anything that isn’t relevant.
2) Create collaborative content
Collaborative content is any content you work with another company to produce. This could be a blog, a webinar, a case study, etc., where there is a collaboration between two or more people from partners or allied companies. One quick and easy way to do this is to invite guest bloggers to write something for your blog and then provide a guest blogger for theirs.
If you are working in partnership on an event such as a webinar or live round table, make sure to produce enough content around this event that is being published and advertised on both companies’ social channels with relevant links to and from each other’s websites.
3) Make sure your external links are trustworthy
The last thing you want is to send a potential or existing customer to a website that may confuse them or, even worse, put them in danger. Make sure that when you are linking to something external on your website, that it is a link from a trustworthy, secure website.
4) Optimize your on-page link building practice
Take a look at these two examples of an external link:
a. Hubspot Academy has a great tutorial on Link Building. If you go to this link (https://academy.hubspot.com/lessons/link-building-tutorial) you can check it out.
b. At CXGlobals, we can also help you with SEO. You can find out about our SEO services here: https://academy.hubspot.com/lessons/link-building-tutorial
This is an example of how NOT to reference links. In both examples we see the full link displayed, and in the second one, it isn’t even properly hyperlinked. The best practice is to contextualize the link inside your content, making it read naturally, with a word or phrase hyperlinked instead of the full link being provided.
a. There are many great resources to learn more about this subject, for example, Hubspot Academy has an in-depth tutorial on link building.
b. At CXGlobals, we can also help you improve your SEO strategy. Check out our Demand Generation Capabilities for more information.
You can see the link is both quite apparent, but also naturally weaved into the general context of the copy.
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