If you ask digital marketers, they’ll confess to having a love and hate relationship with link building. After all, it requires a lot of time and patience.
SEO link building is all about getting high authority sites to link your content because of its relevance, value, and usefulness. For many years, it has been the best way to increase a website’s Google ranking, but is it still the same for 2024?
SEO Link Building Is Still A Huge Ranking Factor For 2024
In 2016, SEO expert Ammon Johns said links and content are two of the most crucial ranking factors. However, what about this 2024?
Here’s the answer. Google has confirmed that links are still going to continue to be one of this year’s top ranking factors by stating that trying to rank without any link is going to be hard.
But something will change this year. When it comes to link building, quality is essential than quantity. It’s no use getting hundreds of low-quality links. A single link from a high-quality site can provide you with a better ranking.
Links are what connects different pages on the internet and show how each page are related to one another. Search engines check a website’s popularity based on its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of the sites linking to them.
If you have a website that is full of high-quality links from sites that have authority, trust, and expertise, expect that your web ranking will increase. On the other hand, having a lot of spammy links from untrusted sites will not do you any good.
What’s the difference between a low-quality link and a high-quality link?
Low-quality links are those that come from websites that search engines see as misleading, untrustworthy and useless to users. On the other hand, high-quality links come from websites with high expertise, authority, and trust score. If you have links from these kinds of sites, you get a good boost on your rankings.
Google, as well as other search engines, are getting better and better at finding websites that build links using shady practices so don’t even think about it. As such, it is quite essential that you always take a few minutes of your day to check your link profile. You never know sites with low domain authority, little expertise and lack of trust will link to your posts.
Improve your link building strategy with these tips this 2024
This 2024, it is about time you up your game and improves your link building strategy. Here are a few tips.
Creating Content
When it comes to link building, you probably already have tons of blog posts, videos, and social media posts. Before you go and email websites, you should first ask yourself whether or not your content is good enough to link to.
Here are a few guide questions to help you improve your content.
Are you only creating content to post on your schedule or are you providing fresh and new information?
Have you conducted a lot of research before creating your content? Are you linking to reputable resources? Take for example, if you write about blueberries and say that they can cure this and that disease, you better link a study that’s done to back up your claim. It should also have been done by an organization, or individual who have excellent credentials. If not, search engines will deem that you have inaccurate content thus decrease the ranking of your post.
If you find that your rankings are going down, your opportunities for long term link building will also go down.
Content Marketing Statistics
It is found that as much as 74% of B2B content marketers and 90% of the successful ones say that they have developed and used long-form content in the past 12 months. But how long is long-form content? Well, it’s at least 1800 words. These are what are currently ranking well on search engines. With this comes more link opportunities for your site.
Make sure your content is well optimized for mobile. Why? As of July 2018, 43.11% people use a desktop, and 52.95% use mobile. By making your pages mobile-friendly, you are increasing your chances of getting more users and links. Try installing the AMP plugin if you are using WordPress sites.
Try Guest Posting
Aside from creating content for posting on your page, you can reach out to websites in your niche and offer to write a blog post for their site. As you write the post, you place a link to your website. This is one of the best win-win situations. Why? You get a great backlink, and the other site gets free blog content.
Around 1 to 5 guest posts in a month is already enough. After all, quality is better than quantity. As much as 60% of companies do write in this number.
If you have a hard time doing guest posting, why not ask for some seo support 2024 to help you?
Ask For Links
Sometimes asking for links is just the last thing on everyone’s mind. Why? That’s because they might not know how to do it, they do not want to look desperate, they are scared of getting rejected.
Let’s clear those up. Asking for a link can be quite overwhelming, but by having a plan, you can quickly ask for a link. Backlinko has a detailed guide on how to do this.
Asking for a site doesn’t make you look desperate. Did you know that a lot of today’s most prominent bloggers are where they are now because they asked for links? Be confident about your content and reach out to sites for a link.
It would not be the end of the world if somebody rejected your link. When someone says that they are not interested, ask them how you could improve your content. Don’t think that it is the end of the world if nobody responded to your emails. Take rejection with grace and always be polite.
