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Business owners have an endless list of things to learn as their business grows, and marketing related skills are always going to be something high up on that list.
In this article we will explore what SEO and link building is, why they matter and how business owners should think about them.
An Introduction to SEO
First, let’s explore what SEO is and why it is important for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of setting up your businesses website so that it ranks strongly in the organic search results.
When most people think of search engines, Google will spring to mind. They are by far the biggest search engine, although many others do exist (like Bing and Baidu).
Businesses value SEO because, when done effectively, it allows them to generate sizable amounts of free organic traffic, conversions and sales.
SEO involves many different techniques and strategies, spanning a website’s technical setup, its on-site optimisation for high priority keywords, and its off-site SEO (how much authority and trust the website holds in the eyes of Google).
While paid advertising and other forms of marketing can take precedence in the early stages of a company, eventually most businesses will look to leverage SEO as a way to grow their brand without skyrocketing their advertising costs.
For this reason, it is important that business owners become familiar with perhaps the most misunderstood area of SEO, link building.
What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of earning, acquiring and/or building what are referred to as “backlinks” in the SEO industry.
A backlink is a hyperlink from one website to another, the referring web page is linking back (hence the term backlink!) to the page that receives the link.
The reason why backlinks are so important in SEO is because we know that search engines like Google measure the quantity and quality of websites linking to a given website when determining where to position it in their search results.
The idea here is that if a website has backlinks from other high authority and highly trusted websites, then that website could also be considered as more authoritative and trustworthy.
Many methods and strategies exist for building or earning backlinks, and some will drive significantly greater SEO benefits than others. This is why it is so important for business owners to understand how search engines work, and what link building strategies may or may not help their businesses’ SEO performance.
The Types of Backlinks That Exist
A number of different types of backlinks exist to help search engines better understand the connections between the websites that they crawl each day. The main kinds of links include:
- Brand/URL mentions – Although not strictly a link, every link builder will be familiar with them. These are when a website mentions a brand or website/URL but does not link to it
- Follow links – These pass authority and ranking signals
- No Follow links – When the person adding the link is effectively telling Google that the link should not pass authority and ranking signals
Below are some examples of each link type in the same order as above:
https://www.upbeastali.co.uk/
How Do SEOs Build Backlinks?
As mentioned above, SEOs use many different strategies and techniques to build backlinks to their websites. Some of the most common strategies are:
- Guest posting on other websites
- Carrying out unique data-studies and/or surveys and sharing this information with journalists via digital PR
- Leveraging traditional PR to get media attention which may or may not include links back to the business’ website
Other more old school link building strategies exist, and some less scrupulous SEOs even hack websites and/or run large scale spam campaigns to build links to the websites that they are working on.
However, Google and other search engines have developed their algorithms over the years to try and identify such link building strategies and penalise those using them.
So, business owners should avoid using any link building strategy that could run the risk of their website being penalised and removed from the search results completely.
Which Link Building Methods Should a Business Owner Focus On?
Any business owner serious about improving their SEO performance but also wanting to minimise the risk posed by less credible link building strategies should focus most of their link building efforts on high quality guest posts, plus a mix of digital PR and traditional PR.
This will help make sure that the links built are of a high quality and can actually positively impact the business owner’s website.
Author Profile
- CEO - ClickDo™ & SeekaHost™ | Started as an SEO Consultant and helped over 400 UK business owners grow their business with online marketing and Google advertising. More details about Fernando Raymond are available at www.fernandoraymond.com.
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