Is Link Building Still Important for SEO?

link building in seo
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Last updated on September 28th, 2022 at 01:13 pm

After a couple of years of having a website and keeping up with SEO strategies, you are probably starting to wonder how many of these factors begin to go stale over time, or do not work as well as they used to when you started your SEO journey. Let me remind you that the importance of these factors alternate a lot. Especially if it’s the Google front page you’re focusing on ranking on – that’s because Google changes their algorithm, on average, about 500-600 times a year!

However, links are still one Google’s high-ranking, most important factors. But not just any links, high-quality links are top of the game right now. Content quality remains important and will bring in links naturally, so focus on good quality and helpful content, not link quantity!

Now that you know the importance of link building, let’s have a look at what link building is and how it works.

 

What is link building?

Link building is the term used for getting other sites and blogs to link your page content. Link building has been considered one of the top effective SEO ranking factors for years. For a long time, it was believed to be the number one way to increase your Google ranking effectively. But beware, there are good links and bad links, and it’s highly important you focus on only getting high-quality links. The quality of a link is also impacted by the authority of a site. This is because these authorized sites are trusted by Google, and considered helpful and informative which is exactly what you want in your ranking.

link building

How link building has changed over the years?

In short, the biggest change of how link building affects your ranking comes from the fact that Google is getting better and better at finding and killing off spammy pages with way too many low-quality links. In the beginning, it was easy for people to cheat the system when the amount of links you had was an important factor. Not saying it isn’t good to have a decent amount of links, but now Google prioritizes content quality and authority over quantity.

This means that all those sites that have spent hours and days flooding their pages with as many links as they could have really just wasted their time getting their site set up for penalization. Although high-quality link building takes more time and effort, it’s definitely worth it for long-term success of your site.

 

How to get links to your site?

Now you know the basics of what and what not do on your quest to build good quality links. So, how do you get links to your site? There are a few ways to do this. One of the most obvious ones to mention is; creating quality content on a good site will start to get links naturally. So don’t forget to keep creating the best quality content you can. More tips:

  1. Guest Blogging – This is when you offer to write a post for a high quality, trusted site with your link included in the content. This is a great way to build quality links if you choose a trusted site to write for that could definitely help boost traffic to your site. It’s a fair game too – you get a quality link, and they get a good quality post for free!
  2. Asking for links – it may sound like something you’d rather not do, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone needs quality links to improve their ranking and there are only so many ways to get them. Don’t be shy to ask. Some people may be more willing and kind to accept and others might just ignore you altogether. But make sure you’re confident in the quality of your content so others see the value in it too!
  3. Resource page links – a great way to build quality links to your page is to get added to high-quality resource pages. A resource page is a webpage of links that are useful for providing more sources on a particular topic. Digital SEO Land has a great step by step article on explaining how this works.

 seo link building

Conclusion

Link building is still an important factor of SEO. But not for how many links you have, but rather how good the content and quality of the links are. No matter what part of SEO you’re focusing on more, your content quality still has the biggest impact on how successful your SEO strategy will be.

With that in mind, it’s important to remember to update your old content. Over the years, facts or links used in your content may become irrelevant or get removed. Check through your old posts where you’ve used external links and make sure you’re not linking to any pages that go to 404 Error Not Found. Also, check that internal links used across your site are all working!

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