If you’ve spent any time reading through blog posts, discussing with SEO experts or meeting with business executives, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term “link building” tossed around. At a superficial level, it sounds simple enough—adding hyperlinks to your content is a sure-fire way to signal relevance, authenticity, and shoot up the SERP rankings. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is a little bit more complicated than that. While it is a critical aspect of your overall SEO efforts, it’s not something that can be done haphazardly and without a firm understanding of the ins and outs of the practice. That’s why today’s article will briefly introduce the importance of an effective link-building campaign before delving into some of the approaches that you can take to ensure that yours is a successful one.

Why Is Link Building Important, Anyway?

Search engine optimisation is all about ensuring that you content can be discovered. For years now, web developers have attempted to decipher all they can about Google’s enigmatic algorithm in order to find out how to maximise the ROI of their SEO efforts. This led to the development of highly effective, yet unscrupulous, techniques known as “black hat SEO.”

Tracking embedded hyperlinks is one way in which search engines have tried to combat these exploitative practices, and it begins with the algorithms assessing the quality and relevance of the links themselves. As they crawl and index the various pages, they track keyword mentions and the quality of their implementation in order to identify how pages compare with competitors. The more links that refer to your pages when discussing specific keywords, the better. This is because numerous links from a variety of different sources pointing back to your website not only signals well-researched, high-quality content but also high degrees of keyword relevance. Ultimately, quality link building is important to search engines, and it’s therefore important to you—the more referrals you obtain from outside sources, the more trust the algorithms, and ultimate, the consumers, will have in your content, rocketing your pages up the SERP rankings.

Getting the Job Done

So, you now understand precisely why link building is important for SEO, but you’re probably still scratching your head over how, exactly, to properly achieve your goals. Thankfully, link building doesn’t have to be complicated. Results can be reliably experienced by following just a few important tips:

Forge true relationships. Remember how we mentioned black hat SEO? Well, a crucial aspect of the practice was reciprocal—or even paid—link sharing. Websites would point to each other’s articles regardless of relevance or quality in order to gain a leg up on the competition. Unsurprisingly, search engines have long-since begun cracking down on this. In order to gain a link, you now not only need to focus on the curation of high-quality content but also on the development of relationships with larger, more established sites. This could be through the form of appropriate guest post contributions or, more commonly, social media outreach programs.

Avoid spam. Despite the objective importance of numerous links pointing back to your website, it’s important to keep in mind that algorithms assess link quality and relevance on a keyword-by-keyword basis. This means niche terms that are less frequently searched for are going to, unsurprisingly, have fewer links pointing back to them. Because of this, it’s important that you avoid getting caught up in the rat race of link building and encourage the development of slow, steady growth predicated on quality content.

Maintain quality standards. Algorithms keep a close eye on sites that link to a wide variety of external content—often, this implies that the links are paid for. Therefore, remain highly selective in your pursuit of links in order to ensure that everything is of a sufficiently high quality. This includes everything framing the links themselves. Known as anchor text, this content gives readers an impression of what awaits them when clicking on a new hyperlink. It’s extremely important that this content is clean, relevant, and specific, as anything else could signal dishonesty to algorithms, hurting your rankings.

Link building can be a long, complex process, but its importance to your SEO efforts cannot be overstated. While this reality is perhaps what encourages many businesses to try and take shortcuts and game the system, it’s important to be aware that engaging in such practices rarely ends well. In fact, as algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, they’ll only become more effective at identifying—and punishing—black hat SEO efforts. Ultimately, the only way to get better at link building is to do it correctly. Following this beginner’s guide is the perfect way to take your firsts steps on the road towards achieving precisely that.