Your SEO Guide starts here:
Issue 1 – The first step – Choosing your keywords
Issue 2 – Planning your site – Making the structure
Issue 3 – Social Media – Building your brand
Issue 4 – Tell search engines where you are
Issue 5 – Link building – Get your votes
Issue 6 – Write your articles – Blogging
Issue 7 – Building your network – The social kind
Issue 8 – Spending money – Paid advertising
Wait wait wait, issues 1-4 were super important so make sure you have read them first before you read this one.
So, what is Link Building?? See, links are like votes on the internet. And votes are what get you into power. Well, usually, maybe not in the case of the USA. Apparently the votes don’t count and something super complicated is how you become President of the United States.
So, anyways, I digress. Where were we? Links are likes votes. See, there are so many things that contribute to your ranking, and one of the most important one is who is saying your website is awesome.
As with all ranking contributors if you compare two websites that are exactly the same, and one of them has more links, that one will rank higher.
So, you need to build your votes. But as with all things SEO, it’s not really as simple as all that.
Get your votes in:
See, not all votes are even. Some votes are worth more. No one truly knows how important certain votes are, but there is a general idea. Here are some contributors:
- Quality of the domain extension – this is the .com, .com.au, .gov, etc etc. The basic rule of thumb is the harder it is to get the domain, the better the domain vote is. For example, it’s impossible to get a .gov or .gov.au website unless you are a Government agency. And so any link from a .gov website to your website is going to be the most awesome vote ever. But, a .com is super easy to get and actually you can get them for free, so by comparison, their value is not that high.
- Relevance of the backlink – If the website that is linking back to you is filled with important information relevant to your website (or the page it is linking to) then the vote will count for more. For example, a webpage about sheep husbandry that back links to a webpage about car engines is irrelevant and therefore the vote is not counted as important.
- A lot of links on one page – If a webpage is linking to you and has a whole lot of other links to different pages, that page is not going to be counted as a good vote. So, in the good old days, you could list your website on a whole bunch of directories and get yourself a whole bunch of votes. But recent Google updates have meant they’ve reduced relevance to this, so although you’ll get a vote, it’s not as important.
- The overall quality of the website – if the website linking to your page is following all the rules for SEO, then it will be counted higher. That means it’s important to check where links are coming from for their quality of page.
There are so many tools on the internet to check what your backlinks are, and in Search Consoles you can even inform them if you find a bad link pointing to your page.
Make sure you are monitoring this, or better yet, ask DigiGround to do it for you.
