The ABCs of Link Building for Solid Rankings

Our top strategies for building quality links for search engine rankings.

(Marketingzen.com)When it comes to building up your company’s brand and creating a solid, influential place for yourself on the web, it usually takes a lot more effort and energy than simply providing quality content and a solid business plan to bring an audience to your web page. In fact, there are a large number of outside factors that go in to gaining website views, from search engine ranking to interlinking.

However, one avenue of digital marketing that many people often overlook is the task of link building. For search engines who are crawling across the web searching for quality content, link-based factors are a large portion of a search engines algorithm. Through links, these search engines are not only able to analyze the popularity of any given website, but can also measure important metrics such as spam, authority and trust.
Link building itself is a simple term that refers to the process of getting external pages to link to your website. However, the task of link building is a much more difficult, time-consuming process. However, developing your link-building strategies for SEO and ranking purposes is a critical next step for anyone who is looking to further the views of their website.
Whether you are someone who is creating their website from scratch or simply looking to further enhance your already developed link profile, links remain a critical method of marketing. To help you get a better grasp on how to achieve high organic search rankings, we have put together some of our top strategies for building quality links for search engine rankings.
Provide Quality Content
If you have a website that is lacking in quality content and information, you stand very little chance of acquiring outside links back to your page. You must first make sure that you are putting out relevant, quality content for your audience. This content could be provided through blog posts, internal web pages or any kind of content that is updated regularly. After all, if you are not providing your consumers with this type of content, you can bet that your competitor surely is.
Utilize Social Media
Social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, are all great sources for finding links. While there are currently many tools available for this on the web (such as technorati or icerocket), simply going to Twitter and searching for quality keywords is enough to produce fantastic linking opportunities.
Form Partnerships Across The Web
One of the most important steps to finding quality links for your site is to know what makes up a good linking partner. For instance, try to find sites that not only send you relevant traffic, but also sites that could improve your search engine rankings and have an active audience. If you are ever scrolling the web and see a blog post that is relevant to your business or industry, look into the number of comments, shares, re-tweets or likes for that post. These are all good indicators of a good linking partner site.
Leave Your Links Around
You, yourself are also a good tool for sharing your links around the web and ensuring that your content gets recognized by the right kind of audience. For instance, comment on relevant blog posts and sites (in a non-spammy way, of course) and use your site for your comment signature on blogs. Also, if you have a good relationship with contacts in your industry, don’t be afraid to link out to them and ask for a link back. It is the same as any other kind of marketing in the long run―you want your content to be seen by as many eyes as possible.