When it comes to search engine rankings, it pays to be ranked above your competitors! Being
ranked among the first-page listings of a search engine such as Google, for example, increases your website’s visibility, boosts your online presence, and maximises your website’s reach to your target audience.
But how exactly do you influence or maximise your search engine ranking? In case you’ve been living under a rock – the best way to get your website ranking in the top search engine listings is to engage in Search Engine Optimisation. Also known as SEO, this is a multi-faceted approach that employs various techniques to increase your website’s ranking in search engine results pages.
One of the most essential SEO techniques, however – and the one we will be focusing on here today – is link building. To learn more about link building and why it is essential for top search engine rankings – just read on!
What is Link Building?
First and foremost – while link building is enormously effective in terms of influencing search engine rankings, it is also quite an involved process! As such, it is best to leave this particular Search Engine Optimisation method to the experts. If you’re interested in dabbling in this somewhat more elusive area of SEO, it is highly recommended to engage the services of link building agencies.
Despite employing professional link building support, however, you may still be curious to learn what these types of SEO professionals do! Link building is, admittedly, a relatively convoluted process, that involves several different steps.
A basic outline of these steps:
- The SEO link building experts research your brand – including market fit, target audience, and business goals.
- A list of prospect websites (external sites on which a referral link to your website will be placed) that are relevant to your brand are sourced by the SEO link building experts.
- The SEO link building experts engage the services of copywriters to compile Outreach Guest Posting articles (blog posts written for the purpose of embedding links referring back to your website throughout the body of the text).
- The outreach guest post containing the link to your website is then uploaded to the external prospect website – creating what is called a ‘back link’.
Of course, the goal here is to create backlinks on websites that already appear as voices of authority to search engines such as Google. Having what is considered by search engines as credible external sources linking to your website, naturally, increases the credibility of your website. This is why SEO link building experts need to be able to source external prospect websites with solid reputations.
How can Link Building help boost my Search Engine rankings?
So, we’ve looked at the link building process and explained a little about how it works. But, you may still be wondering, how does link building help boost search engine rankings?
As mentioned earlier, having reputable websites linking to your site is a great way to increase your credibility in the eyes of search engines such as Google. And, with this increased credibility, so too comes a more favourable ranking in search engine results pages.
But, what makes for a credible website? Importantly, search engines index and rank websites preferentially, based on their compliance with preferred technical specifications and characteristics. By meeting these criteria, a website essentially becomes search engine optimised, and preferred by Google.
Admittedly, the process of link building and creating backlinks to your website from other external sources is essentially piggy-backing on the success of more reputable sites. This practice, however, is extremely effective – as the more external sources of authority you have linking to your website, the more reputable your website will seem. This is because, to search engines such as Google – if your website is being referenced by other credible sources, you must have something valuable to say! And, most importantly, value that is worth ranking highly in search engine results listings.
Search Engine Optimisation is essential if you want your website to stand out online. However, with most websites engaging in some form of SEO or another already, SEO experts need to get more creative about the methods they engage to influence search engine rankings. This is where link building comes in – and it is quickly becoming what is considered to be one of the most effective methods of SEO. Of course, getting into Google’s good books is the ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimisation. By capitalising on the success of other reputable websites through the process of link building, you can ensure your website is also ranked favourably – ideally, within the first page of search engine listings.
