Note: Following is an edited transcript of this video, featuring Josh Eberly, 5K’s former chief operating officer and SEO wizard.
Today we’re going to be talking about what SEO link building is and the importance of link building for your business. Link building is an extremely helpful way to rank higher on Google and other search engines.
Here, at 5K, we use the term link building very often, as we do a lot of link building for our clients. When we talk about link building, many people get confused about what link building is, how it works and what specifically we’re doing with link building. We’ll answer those questions about what is link building and how to build links for SEO.
Let’s begin!
What Is Link Building?
Link building is simply the process of getting other websites and companies to talk about your business. This includes talking about your products, services and website. I’m going to show you some link building tips and a little bit of what a link looks like. I’ll also dive into how we do link building organically and important strategies to have.
External Link Building Strategy
So I’m going to review 5K’s website and go into what’s called referring domains. A referring domain is a URL that is pointing to you but is not from your website. In other words, a different website is linking over to your site.
Here is an example from an article that we published on 99Designs.com. Dave Conklin, 5K’s CEO, wrote this two years ago, and it is a really good example of link building. In this article, Dave talks about starting a digital marketing agency, what’s involved with the process and other helpful information.
In this piece of content, there are links that go out to different places and different internal links. But one of those links actually links back to Dave Conklin. Thus, we get a link back to 5K’s website from this article.
Why Link Building Is Important
You may be asking, “Why is link building important?” There are a lot of reasons why link building is important for your business. When Google is crawling the internet, it gives more bandwidth or crawl space to the sites with more authority. So 99designs.com, in Google’s eyes, is a very authoritative site.
The SEO tool here is DR of 85 out of 100 which is really, really good. Because it’s so good, Google views this site as a really authoritative site in its eyes. Basically, anytime there’s a piece of content and it’s linking somewhere else, Google is going to follow that link back to where it’s linking and rank it higher.
It’s really important when you link build to be niche-relevant and also to think about the kind of websites that you want to link build on. We want to have good quality authoritative websites that give our URL, in Google’s eyes, authority. We also want to be niche-relevant and to use specific keywords that we want to rank for. In this case, Dave’s ranking for digital design, digital agency and related keywords that would bring us business as a company. That, in itself, is link building explained.
How to Build Links for SEO
Now that you understand what link building is, you may be wondering how to build links for your business. There are multiple ways to build links for your site. The first way, as mentioned above, is called guest posting. Guest posting is simply the process of doing outreach to other relevant blogs in your niche and finding people to partner with to do guest posting for. This is a good way to drive referral traffic to your site. It is also an excellent way to create relationships and get your content out on Google.
Link Building Tips
So how do you find sites to write guest posts for? One easy hack for doing this is searching Google with the keywords you want to use. So let’s just say I want to do digital marketing, so I’ll search that along with guest post. This is going to bring back anything that has “digital marketing + guest post” inside the search results.
Once you type that in, your search results may look something like “35 digital marketing blogs that say guest posts, guest blogging, write for us, top 100 marketing blogs that accept guest posts.” They’re giving you all these resources of places that you can pitch and you can essentially get a guest post inside of.
Link Building Agency Guidelines
Now a lot of these places are going to have what are called guidelines. These guidelines may include that your content has got to be original and how to submit your guest posts. When you get to nicer, bigger authoritative blogs, you’ll see higher guidelines, as they want to have standards around the writing.
The downside of guest posting is they might not accept your pitch, as these sites are very competitive. Another downside is that you have to write the content, which can be very time-intensive. If you work with us, we actually write the content for you as part of our services to you. Thus, there’s no time involved for you. But if you plan on writing the content yourself, you may end up wasting a lot of time if that site doesn’t accept your pitch.
Link Building Company
Another way of doing link building is partnerships. This means finding other relevant brands and people you know in the industry and writing content for their websites. As an alternative, you could incentivize them through affiliate marketing, such as offering a discount if people go through their link.
So you can find people who do affiliate marketing out there and say, “Well, I think their audience would match my audience, so let’s create a piece of content. And if somebody comes from that content we’ll give them 10 percent off for our products or services.” This is another great way to build links.
SEO Link Building Services
Another great way for link building, which is one of my favorites, is called ego baiting. It’s really an insider tactic. I’ll show you a good example of this.
So I’m going to pull up a site called The Manifest. All that The Manifest does is rank “different companies.” For example, The Manifest is ranking the top 100 content marketing companies. What they do is they rank different marketing agencies and give them a little bit of writeup along with a link to that website.
This is called ego baiting. What they’re doing is they’re saying, “Hey, we want all these agencies to link back to our site because we’re mentioning them and edifying them in our content.”
So, if you have a product or service, and, let’s say, you want other companies to link to you, you can create a piece of content that says, “The top 10 manufacturers, digital manufacturers of XYZ 3D printers.” Once your content is written, you can outreach to all of those companies and say, “Hey, we thought we’d feature you in this article. We’d love for you to share it on your social media, we’d love for you to link back to us and to spread it around.” And, of course, the company’s going to be like: “Oh, great, this is free media for us, it’s free exposure. We love working with you guys.” So they’re going to link back to that piece of content.
Content Link Building
Now the whole idea of link building is to create content that you know is going to rank around a certain topic, and you get links inbound from that content. It’s a really, really smart strategy to use, among other digital marketing strategies.
Good content marketing is super-important as well. If you write a good, informative piece of content that’s better than everybody else’s content out there and you promote that content, pushing it out there, doing a PR release, things of that nature, you’ll get links as well.
Final Thoughts on SEO Link Building
As you can see, there’s a lot of ways to do SEO link building. I’m not going to jump into all of them, but I hope I kind of gave you a glimpse of what link building is.
Why is link building important, in Google’s eyes? Once again, you’re getting other websites to mention you, to tell Google, “Hey, there’s authority over here, there’s relevancy, there are niche keywords that we want to rank for over here.” You can then use that link building strategy to increase your organic rankings.
Looking for link building services or Search Engine Marketing Companies to help you out? You’re in the right place! We’ve helped clients climb in the rankings through link building and more. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. We are happy to help you get started with your content writing and offer link building expert tips.
