In addition to content, your website will need to build links — a lot of it — in order to qualify for a good rank in the search engine results pages. Links are the second factor that is looked at by Google’s algorithm in determining a website’s relevance to a query using certain keywords.
Types of Links
Before we go any further, it is important to understand what kind of links you will be needing for your website. With this knowledge, we can then go forward to understanding how these links can be acquired or built.
Without further adieu, here are the three types of links that are central to search engine optimization:
- Internal
As the name suggests, internal links are ones that point from page in your website to another. When doing SEO, Vancouver experts focus on this one first of all. It’s highly important that the content you write for your website references other pages in your site so that visitors are encouraged to visit more of your pages. - Inbound
Inbound links are those links that other websites create that point back to one of your pages. You should not just create any inbound link, because the search engines are also looking at the quality of the websites that refer back to you. The higher the quality of the referral, the better the score your website receives from the bots. - Outbound
Outbound links are the opposite of inbound links. You’re basically pointing your users to another high quality site that they might find useful. SEO experts minimize the use of outbound links because it can actually reduce PageRank if done indiscriminately. A few links out to a website you think is relevant to you is enough, just to help your visitors along the way.
Now that we’ve got that out of the box, it’s time to focus on how you can build links to your website. Out of the three, it is the inbound link that is quite difficult to obtain.
In the old days, people simply created external websites through which they link back to their main website. This was overdone, with hundreds of properties created just to link back to a single site. These days, however, Google is more about calculating quality over quantity.
So how do you build quality inbound links?
Legitimate Ways of Building Inbound Links
As mentioned earlier, it has become more difficult to generate inbound links without getting flagged as spam by Google. However, here are some ways an Vancouver SEO expert could recommend:
- Maintain a blog
Fresh and interesting content is your tool to generating inbound links. If your visitors like your content, they will share. However, they’re less likely to share your main website, but they are more than certain to share links to creative content in a blog. - Reach out to influential bloggers
You can establish an outreach campaign and ask influential bloggers to allow you to make a guest posting on their blogs and link back to your website. However, don’t overdo this as it can look spammy. - Be on social media
Nowadays, there’s no better way to gain exposure than to maintain a social media account. Invite people to Like and Follow your Page, and keep sharing fresh and interesting content.
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