Link Building for SEO Requires Manual Labor
Most business owners have attended networking sessions where executives or professionals meet each other to learn how they can collaborate to benefit both businesses. Link building on a website relies on a similar approach. The process by which you can tie your website to others’ sites and vice versa is networking in the online world, and it’s great for SEO, if done properly. Let’s look at some reasons link building is worthwhile and a few tips for best practices.
The Importance of Links
Search engines will reward a site that features external links with higher page rankings. Links from other sites to your site are equally beneficial. Now, you may be thinking that with all the helpful and engaging content you have loaded on your site, you should be attracting links organically from interested parties. Or, you might be under the impression that announcing new website content via social media channels will garner the link attention you are seeking. Unfortunately, SEO studies don’t support this conclusion. Even companies with a large online persona don’t have as many sites linking to them as you’d expect.
Manual Efforts
So, the best way to find external content to link to, and to get others to link to your site, is to do the work manually. Some companies have tried to automate the process using social media or relying on organic linking, but even high-quality content did not garner the links they were seeking. It turns out that outreach by marketing professionals is the best way to see results in link building. At this point, you probably are wondering how you can maximize staff time to create an effective linking network.
Put a Team on It
Anyone who you plan to work toward building more links for your site will require a certain set of skills, but these are largely the same customer service principles used in sales. Staff members will need to have a good feel for the audiences that both your website and the partners’ sites attract. They will need creativity to find link sources that are a little outside the box, and they must be comfortable reaching out to other site admins to establish a linking relationship that can be mutually beneficial. Finally, they need to have an ear for online reputations and authority so your site doesn’t end up linking to one with questionable veracity.
Scaling the Process
Marketing teams who are working on link building likely will need to start slowly. They should evaluate their different outreach approaches constantly to see what is working, what needs to be tweaked, and what is an ethical best practice. Each member of the team can bring their own unique skill set to the process, then collaborate with other members to increase the scale of the method. Once a successful process has been established, the team will be able to ramp up efforts and use their linking prowess on a larger scale.
Link building is a necessity when it comes to solid SEO practices. By being focused on the process and devoting a team to work it, your business can benefit from higher page rankings and more visibility.
