Link building is something every website owner should be aware of. There are three types of links (hyperlinks) you can build:
- Internal links – linking different pages of your website to other pages on your website
- Outgoing links from your site to other reputable and relevant sites
- Incoming links that point from other sites to your own site
Ideally, you should have a mix of all three. Obviously, the internal links are the easiest ones to deal with. If you write a blog post on a certain topic, you can easily link to other posts and pages you have written based on the same topic.
Similarly, outgoing links are easy to handle too. Simply find other reputable websites that do not compete with your own business and link out to those. One or two will suffice for each piece of content you write, depending on length and what would be suitable given the topic.
Then we come to incoming links – by far the hardest to get. Google places more importance on these for good reason. If a site has lots of good links pointing to it from reputable sites, it will rank the site higher than another similar site that does not have such links.
Be aware of the harm a bad link can do to your site. Over-optimising your site by submitting it to countless web directories will do more harm than good. It is far slower to build natural and worthwhile links pointing to your site, but you will gain more from this than anything else. If you write great content people wish to share, this is often the best way to start gaining those links. It might seem like taking the long way around, but the shortcut to building incoming links is fraught with disaster.
Remember – don’t annoy Google. A good-quality site does not rank highly in the search engines overnight. Focus on the different links you can do something about and focus on developing strong links from other sites pointing to your own. This will help you get the best outcome.