Building Links - Our Friend, Not Foe

As the New Year ever so slowly creeps up on us, we remember all of our best memories and successes from 2015. For businesses, they may be thinking about how many sales they achieved this year, as well as how much profit they received. I wonder though, are they thinking about how many links they got this year?

As much as profit and sales are indicators of a business's success, many companies forget about how important building valuable links are to a business and overall prominence within organic search. Being one of the most crucial elements of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the quality of your websites link profile is one of the many ranking factors Google uses to decide your position on relevant results pages.

To some, building links is a challenge, especially to small businesses that have a smaller authority within their industry, as they simply cannot build links on their brand alone, which bigger companies can do, as they have higher brand awareness. It can take smaller businesses weeks, even months to gather a couple of links, if any at all, which can seem like a fruitless effort to some and counterproductive.

How to identify a good link

• Authority – When link building, it is crucial to get inbound links from websites with good authority, as these businesses are well respected and will most likely be industry leaders, so you want to grab their attention.
• Original Content – Inbound links should be from sites with a structured, easy-to-use layout, with original and useful content.
• Relevant Content – Links from other websites to yours should link to pages which are relevant to their content, people will not be interested if your content isn’t related to theirs.

But, businesses must remember to have their audiences in mind when building links; rather than just spamming high-authority sites for a link, when they have nothing to do with what they offer. It’s all about context, and if a company bears that in mind, they will be successful, even if it appears the opposite at first. Businesses cannot expect success in an instant, sometimes it just takes time to find what works and what doesn’t, and once a business finds what works, then they can get the ball rolling towards building highly-relevant links.

So, as businesses enter 2016, just remember the importance of link building and the role that it plays within the rankings of a website, don’t ignore it, embrace it and success will be achieved for 2016, and the future to come!