Link Building: How to Develop a Winning Link Profile
September 27th, 2016 by
Backlinks are a significant factor in a website’s search visibility. When a site links back to your website, it signals to search engines that it’s authoritative enough to be an information resource for other websites. That’s why it’s so important to any SEO strategy.
However, SEO’s and businesses alike walk a thin line when it comes to generating backlinks for their sites. Each backlink has a different value depending on that source site’s own authority and trustworthiness. The goal is to develop a diverse but high-value link profile of authoritative links from a variety of source types. This process is called link building.
Link building can be categorized into two different types of work: manual link building, where a link is submitted to directories or included in profiles, and editorial link earning, where a site links to your website organically because they want to share or refer to your content.
Manual Link Building
It may seem like this is not the preferred method for link building. However, don’t forget that we want a diverse link profile. The character of your link profile reflects the character of your business to search engines.
It’s natural to place your website and information on sites that potential customers may use to find a business like yours (i.e. directories) or in your social profiles. This is the same as adding your business’s information to a phone book or business card that you share with people.
When doing manual link building, just remember that you want the sources of your links to make sense and reflect the authority and relevance you’d like your website to have. Ideally, these links come from sources like your social profiles, local directories like Google Maps or Yelp, and niche directories that apply to your industry (Healthgrades.com for doctors, for example).
Editorial Link Earning (aka Link Attraction)
It’s a little more difficult to build out the other side of your link building strategy—editorial link earning. You can’t control these links like those that you manually build. However, link earning is a great opportunity to show the internet just how great you are at what you do and can result in some of the most valuable links out there. It should also already fit into your overall branding strategy.
So, what are editorial backlinks? These are links that people have shared on their own websites or social media back to your website. For example, if someone read a blog post that you wrote for your business and thought the content was so engaging and noteworthy, they shared it on Facebook or wrote their own blog referring to yours, you’ve just received an editorial backlink.
This type of link building starts with creating great content and ends with sharing and strategically placing that content for the most relevant and influential users to see and engage with it.
That’s it, the basic composition of any good link building strategy. Link building definitely takes some thinking but it is immensely valuable to your overall SEO. Directory and social profile links are important in building brand awareness, and creating and sharing great content is highly integral to exhibiting your business’s overall value and capabilities both on- and offline.
To find out why link building is important for dentists, click here.
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Link Building is not an easy task since Google is always updating its algorithms. I think having a great, natural and useful content is very important when it comes to link building. Does editorial link building/earning more effective than Manual Link Building?
Hi Raphael,
Having a diverse profile of backlinks is important so a combination of the two is best, but links that you earn from reputable and active sites are often more valuable than those you can just create yourself. Again, it’s most important to make sure that the outreach you do is to appropriate and relevant sources, regardless of whether backlinks are created manually or earned. Outreach shouldn’t be done to sources whose sole purpose is to provide links.