Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to your website and generate more sales. There are 2 main elements of SEO – On Page Optimisation (which tells Google what your website is about) and Off Page Optimisation (which tells Google how important your website is).
Off Page Optimisation is driven by external factors outside of your website, and essentially come down to the number of other web pages linking to yours. The more external pages linking back to your website, the more important Google will find your website. But like everything, more isn’t always better. Quality and relevance of the external pages linking to you will drive better rankings every time!
So how do you get other websites linking to you?
There are some easy ways to get links back to your website which every business owner can do.
- Setting up social profiles which allow a link in the bio (ie. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn)
- Creating business listings on local directories (ie. Yellow Pages, True Local, Hot Frog)
While these will help your web presence, on their own it won’t be enough to compete for the top rankings in your niche (unless you have a very uncompetitive niche, like “licorice flavoured croissants Melbourne”).
Acquiring other links from a range of sources is imperative to ensure a diverse link profile, and boost your domain authority so that Google sees you as an important player in your industry.
Here are a number of strategic link building opportunities which our SEO agency provides within our campaigns, including a bit about what each one is.
Link Building Strategies
Here are a range of strategic link building methods we use to help boost our clients authority, importance and thus rankings.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 link building involves publishing high-quality content on strong authority Web 2.0 platforms, such as blogs, forums, and wikis. Within this content, a link is built back to your website, which helps to diversify the types of backlinks to your site. These help increase authority in search engines by signalling your site has valuable information and is trustworthy.
Brand Profiles
Branding links focus on getting links back to your website using your brand name as the anchor text (the words which are clickable on the page and link to your site). These are important as they are natural (no keywords in them), utilising your business name or a variation, or even a naked URL (just the link as the anchor text).
Bookmarking
Bookmarking (also known as social bookmarking) is the practice where a website lets people save and share interesting links. Using these bookmarking sites, we can create an organised group of useful links on a topic, including links back to your website. This not only builds authority, but helps with relevance, as your site link is surrounded by content related to your niche and other similar sites. They also allow users to search for different topics and discover your content.
Niche Directories
As mentioned earlier, simply getting lots of links is not the key to ranking success. Relevance plays a major part, which is why niche directories are so powerful. If you’re a mechanic, getting a link in an automotive directory will be a lot more beneficial than a link on a food lovers directory.
Classifieds
Classified ads are a popular way to sell goods and services. They are also a great way for businesses to get a link back to their website. As long as you are legitimately promoting your product or service, creating these ads will help you naturally acquire a link to your site and help your rankings – and you might even get people contacting you directly from the classified website wanting to engage your services!
Portfolio/PPT Links
Powerpoints are an excellent communication tool, used frequently in meetings and presentations. They are also a great opportunity to promote your brand online and acquire a backlink to your website. Putting together a presentation that has helpful and interesting information and adding it to a portfolio website will further strengthen your link profile and help your SEO.
We also build links via press releases, guest posts and other methods, however for the purpose of this article, we have summarised the ones we group within ‘strategic link building’ practices.
For more information on our SEO services, get in touch today.
