Link building: Maximise SEO with external links

What is link building?

Link Building is about the process of getting links from other websites to your own. A link is a way for users to navigate between pages on the Internet, but search engines also use the links when they index the web. They will crawl (i.e. read and download) links between different websites, but also between individual pages on your website.

It’s not just marketers who create links, it could just as well be a blogger who has found a find for her home at a certain flea market or a person who has written a text and wants to refer to the source.

As a search engine optimiser, you should work to achieve these kinds of links in the long term. And you get the links by earning them – that is, by creating content on your website that is so high-quality that others want to link to it.

What do search engines use links to?

1. They discover new sites to index and use in their search results.
2. They determine how well a page should rank in the search result.
   

Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, invented PageRank External link., which Google used to measure the quality of a link. Early on, it became an important part of the algorithm that determines what content should be visible in the search results. This was also one reason why Google’s search results were so much better than those of the other search engines.

Links may not be as important now as they were then. But if you and a competitor have equally good additional content, the links will be a decisive factor in determining whether or not you rank higher in the search results.

How do I get more external links?

1. Content

Create content relevant to your audience that is about the keywords you want to rank on. To do this, you need to get to know your target group and have carried out a keyword analysis. Based on this, you then write thoughtful content and spread it via social media, for example.

Remember that when you create the page, it must be optimised for On-page SEO.

2. Outreach

SEO Outreach is a combination of activities and processes that allows you to get closer to your potential “linkers”. Some examples are:

• Broken links
  Identify broken links on blogs, news sites and similar sites that contain content relevant to your audience (and the keywords you want to rank on). Get in touch with the content owner and tell them that you have content to link to instead of the broken content.
• Guest blog
  Hop in as a guest blogger on other people’s blogs and remember to link to content that you want to highlight yourself.
• Make other links
  Find websites that mention your brand without linking to it – and ask them to do so. Also look for pages that list products or services where you fit in and ask them to add you.

A link-building post can be almost anything, but one final message is that depending on quality, the link will be more or less popular with search engines. So, create relevant and engaging content – and build up a bunch of links from pages that are as good as yours.

Good luck!