This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
Does Link Building Still Matter?
As part of the original ranking algorithm, backlinks have always been an important ranking signal for Google. Using links to determine trust and authority was one of their biggest assets that allowed them to overtake competing search engines. However, since the Penguin update back in 2012, people have been predicting the end of link building as SEO. Some reasons for this are:
- Devaluing link spam made benefiting from link building more difficult.
- Punishing sites for participating in link schemes made link building much more risky if you got it wrong.
- There was some ambiguity surrounding what exactly would run afoul of Penguin, which scared many people away from link building entirely.
- SEOs jumping on the content marketing wagon.
These factors combined to push people away from the idea of manual link building and toward "link earning" through content marketing — the idea that quality content is link bait that will just naturally attract links. This was based on the belief that highly-shared content would bring in lots of links.
The problem? That isn’t really the case — there is almost no correlation between shares and links. In fact, the majority of content doesn’t receive any shares or links at all.
So what does this mean? Creating good content is necessary to building links, but it isn’t enough. Links don’t happen on their own. They require strategic, manual promotion to the right audience. And since links are still an integral part of Google’s ranking algorithm, failure to do link building will limit your SEO and therefore your reach.
If you’re still doubting the importance of link building, the fact that Google has incorporated Penguin into its core algorithm is proof of their importance for rankings.
How to Build Links
Step 1: Create Some Content
The number one most important part of building links is to first create content worth sharing. Easier said than done, of course. So how can you create a content strategy geared toward backlinks? It’s actually pretty simple: leverage the content that already gets links.
People link to content they find useful, accurate and unique. To figure out what sort of content meets that criteria, look at what your audience is already sharing. There are tools out there like Ahrefs and Buzzsumo that let you search by topic so you can find articles in your niche that people found useful enough to link to. Pages with a lot of shares and links show that there’s already considerable demand for that content, which makes securing links much easier.
Use Majestic to identify some of your own content that’s managed to attract valuable links. You don’t necessarily want to repurpose this content because you’ll cannibalize your own links, but it will give you some good ideas for content your audience likes. If you’re feeling a bit sneaky, you can engage in some corporate espionage to find your competitors’ highly shared content to use so you can usurp some of their links.
Once you’ve got some good pieces of content, make it your own by making it better. Some good ways to rewrite and upgrade content are:
- Update it: There’s a good chance there’s some older, less relevant content out there getting linked to, particularly if you’re in a fast-paced industry. Update it by adding new, relevant information and links to make it more useful. A good example of this type of thing is 302 redirects: Until recently it was SEO best practice to avoid 302 redirects as it was thought they didn’t pass full PageRank. That changed this year, so there are still lots of articles about SEO best practices out there telling people to avoid 302 redirect. This your opportunity to earn a link by correcting this out of date content.
- Expand it: Some of the most shared content are lists like "top 10 kale recipes" or “5 ways to organize your home.” Improve on these lists and adding to the number of entries. If you can, aim to double or even triple them. Some of these longer lists don’t go into much detail or don’t include any references. If that’s the case, add some detail and links, even if it’s just a sentence or two for each point. This makes content way more valuable.
- Redesign it: Design is a big part of user experience — people won’t link to sites that don’t look good or are hard to read. Add some aesthetically-pleasing visual elements to help readers get more out of it. Or, if it makes sense, turn it into an infographic. Infographics are some of the most popular forms of content on the web in terms of sharing and linking. You can make it even easier to share by creating embed code that links back to your site.
Blogs are one of the best, and most popular, ways to add published content to your website, but it’s not always the right choice for everyone. Having a blog just for SEO won’t really help you much if you don’t have the resources to maintain it and consistently publish new content. If that’s the case, concentrate on creating longer pieces of evergreen content that will stay relevant for months or even years. Evergreen content is a good idea even if you don’t have a blog, and will help you protect your links from people doing what we just described.
Step 2. Build a List and a Spreadsheet
This is a relatively simple step, but it can make or break your link building. Successful campaigns require sticking with a well thought out strategy and tracking your progress. The next step in your link building strategy is to cultivate a list of potential links. If you haven’t done some competitor link research yet, do so now. You’ll end up with a list of pages that are interested in your niche, cover topics relevant to your website and show the propensity to link to content similar (but not nearly as good) to your own.
Then, put together a list of other websites to reach out to in order to build links. Here are a couple of tools to use for this:
Continue reading %Link Building for 2017 and Beyond%
by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint
