How to develop a foolproof link building strategy?

Posted by Thomas J Decker on August 27th, 2017

Many have understood the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) and how it can contribute to overall growth of any business. However, your time, money and effort can be wasted if you don’t frame the right link building strategies. Developing the right link building strategy should be well thought-out process.

Many big enterprises as well as small businesses are allocating a significant part of their marketing budget for SEO as it is a wonderful way of generate organic traffic to your website. Before getting into the developing the strategy part, first let’s understand why it is important to have links to your website when you are running an independent business.

Links simply mean that individual or businesses are some way connected to your business by following your business or endorsing it to others. And, why a business would follow or endorse your business? The answer is simple – only if they get value by doing so. Links still remain the most effective parameter to judge the quality of a webpage and algorithms developed by popular search engines like Google put a lot of value on links while determining the page rank.

By reading the above paragraphs, you may quickly conclude the getting the maximum number of links from other digital assets is the sole and primary objective of your link building strategies. This is partially true. The number of links is definitely important but not at the cost of quality of links. You cannot just acquire links from any source to increase the number of links. Post Penguin update, Google puts lot of value on the quality of links for determining page rank. So, as the first step of developing your link building strategy, you should identify the sources from where you have the opportunity of getting high quality, natural links.  

Now, let’s look at few best practices to be followed while making a strategy. You should not get into any kind of reciprocal linking where other website owners agree to put your link under the condition of putting link to their website in your site. Most of the website owners do it for the sake of cross linking without looking at the relevance of such linking from the user’s perspective. This will negatively impact your webpage ranking. However, link exchange is not a bad idea if it makes sense to the users and adds value to them.  

The agency you engage for your link building should be aware of the factors that affect the page rank. The process from their end should start from analysing your website, so that they know what needs to be changed and what new has to be done. If you have thin content or only sales-related information, the content has to be changed at the very first step.

Content marketing is essentially most important part of all link building strategies. But, it is an absolute must that the content generated should be of very high quality. It is a great idea to publish informative articles, blogs online and link it back to your website.

Link building strategies should be developed following search engine’s guidelines. Wrong link building strategy may ruin your chance of having a high rank.