Effective Tips for SEO Link Building

Link building has changed. If you use outdated methods, you could harm your SEO more than help it. Here is a quick and easy summary of what you need to know for link building in 2019.

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the practice of generating links that point back to your own website. Links to your website are one of the most important ranking factors because they are signals to search engines that others find your content valuable. However, not all links are created equal. The impact of a link to your website is determined by the website that it is coming from. If the New York Times website links to your content, this will certainly provide more SEO value than a link from your friend’s blog that they created last week. This is because high authority websites pass more link value since these are highly trusted websites in the eyes of a search engine. Keep this in mind, as the goal of link building is to gain links back to your site from credible, high-quality websites, rather than amassing many poor-quality links through shortcuts like link schemes.

How Has Link Building Changed?

In the past, buying links was a common and accepted practice. In 2019, you want to avoid purchasing links in any way. Google considers any exchange of money for links to be a link scheme and can penalize your website with lower-ranking for participating in this behavior. In this way, old link building methods can hurt you more than help. As search engines become better and better at recognizing and favoring strong content, your link building efforts should shift to be content-focused as well.

Tip #1: Focus on Content Creation

The easiest tip for link building is to focus on creating unique, compelling, shareable content! Rather than investing your time in finding a way to trick the search engines into thinking you have a strong link profile through link schemes, put that energy toward creating helpful content for other users. Easier said than done, right? After all, everyone has a different idea of what makes “good content”. Use the next tip to create content that is likely to generate links.

Tip #2: Offer Unique, Helpful Information That Fills a Gap

When thinking about what content to create for link building, consider what information you can share to be most helpful to others. Have you recently searched for an answer online and been unsatisfied with the results? Perhaps you found a poor explanation or could not find an answer at all. This is where you can fill the gap to create your own link-worthy content. If you can offer new research, analysis, or findings on a topic relevant to your website, this type of content will be more likely to gain links because others will have to give you credit if they mention this helpful information on their own website. To get even more insight on some possible content gaps to fill, review your Google Analytics data, or use a keyword research tool, to identify the type of questions people are searching on in your industry and create content to answer those questions.

Tip #3 Make Finding & Sharing Your Content Easy

To help others link back to your website, you want to make your content as easy to find and share as possible. One of the easiest ways to do this is by sharing your content on social media. When someone links to your content in a social media post, it does not count as a backlink to your website, but it is a great way to share your content throughout the internet. Users are then more likely to find and share your content with a link on their own website. Also, if you mention a specific person or company in your content, consider reaching out to them to let them know you wrote a piece referencing them, and they are welcome to share. This can be an effective strategy, especially if your content includes research or findings that the other party would benefit from sharing.

Use these easy tips to help guide your link building approach in 2019. Avoid buying links and, most importantly, invest your time in creating compelling, unique content that is helpful to others.

Blog Source: Now Speed | Easy SEO Link Building Tips for 2019