Once upon a time in the world of search engine optimization a link was pretty much a link. Adding links to your website could seriously drive up placement in the search engines and ultimately increase traffic, and where these links were pointing to pretty much wasn’t of much importance. Entire web pages were stuffed with links from start to finish, and this would help websites gain significant placement in search results. This time is long gone. It is 2013 and if you want to build placement in search results linking is still key, but the quality of the links will need to be pretty high if you want it to get past Google’s sharp sensors.
The one thing being heard over and over again about SEO in 2013 is the importance of quality. To increase your search engine placement you will need quality content, quality keywords and, you guessed it, quality links.
Building Better Links in 2013
Building high quality links might sound difficult at first, but by becoming a bit innovative with the process you may find that gaining links to your website is not as hard as you thought it would be. A positive link building strategy can help you in this department by providing you with guidelines and networking tools to put the internet to work for you.
Here are three simple strategies for building better links to improve your websites SEO:
Network with other websites.
You need links from reliable sources with high quality content. One of the best ways to do this is to network with people who already have that content and see if an arrangement can be made. Try offering your own services, either in the form of guest blogging or through promotional materials that are relevant to both your company and another website. This can give them reason to direct links back to your site, giving you more credibility.
Get placement in directories.
Directory websites are created to guide users to where they want to be. These are especially common for large industries like banks, medical services and online colleges as they bring users to one location and then provide them with a great deal of general information about the topic at hand. Directories sell placement as a way of providing links back to websites, but unlike the link-farms of ages ago, the directories are playing by the rules and offering a quality product where the links are housed.
Do a search for directories in your industry and content the owner to find out how you can obtain placement in their program.
Purchase display ads.
Display ads are a form of pay-per-click advertisement that are highly targeted. These ads appear across the internet to browsers who are viewing, or who have a strong history of viewing content that is relevant to your own. By purchasing this type of advertisement you can buy clicks across the internet without running into trouble. Ads are generally looked at as a way to drive sales through the customers being advertised to and are not always looked at as the wisest choice of marketing, but the use of pay-per-click ads as a link building exercise adds value to this SEO strategy.
The internet is well known as the World Wide Web for a good reason. Websites are attached to one another like a virtual spider’s web, and links are the threads that will drive visitors to your site. Beyond the physical function of delivering browsers to your website, quality links tells search engines that your site has credibility and that others may benefit from visiting it. This is why building quality links to your website is such a valuable SEO strategy.