What type of content should you publish for an effective link building campaign?

Link building is an important part of improving your SEO because it helps Google gather all the “real” recommendations and validations and then evaluate your website or blog accordingly.

You can call it ranking outsourcing.

What is link building?

Many online marketers and SEO experts confuse link building with getting lots of websites to link to your website.

Although, in theory, this is the exact meaning, actually what it means is, having so much valuable content that people want to link to you as a good source of information, or any other form of valuable derivation.

Google, and also some other search engines, realized that it is very easy to manipulate search engines because after all they are a collection of algorithms, and whenever you have algorithms, you always have people who can beat them.

So they started taking human help.

In order to improve your rankings, it is important that more and more people link to your website in appreciation of the content you have published.

Benefits of link building

As mentioned above, search engines like Google want some sort of validation. If many people are linking to you, the search engines assume that you must be publishing great content. This is one reason.

The second reason is that link building creates multiple traffic streams for you. Once you have traffic coming from different sources you no longer solely have to depend on search engine traffic.

Finally, it helps you reach out to more people and people begin to recognize you as an authority figure.

Pitfalls of link building

Link building is a double-edged sword – it can work in your favor and as you must have seen after Penguin and Panda updates, it can also bring disaster to you. It all depends on with what intention people link to you.

So while you’re working on your link building campaign, make sure that your links don’t come from spammy websites because this can totally drop your search engine rankings instead of improving them. Another indication that you may be running a less than legitimate link building campaign is suddenly lots of links coming to you within a few hours or a couple of days. This can also adversely impact your search engine rankings.

From where does content come in and why it is important

As I have repeatedly written on this website don’t create content for just link building and SEO. Your content should provide information about your business or organization. It should explain what your products and services stand for and how your customers and clients benefit from them. The compelling and great traits of your website content are:

• It addresses concerns of your prospective customers and clients
• It establishes you as an authority
• It provides information about your business or organization
• It turns your website or blog into a specialized source of information
• It gives Google and other search engines more pages and blog posts to crawl, index and rank
• It helps you create buzz on social media

Quality content leads to legitimate link building

Since the basic purpose of taking backlinks into consideration while ranking your website is to know how valuable your content is, the most natural way of building back links is creating that valuable content.

Suppose you sell Samsung mobile phones from your website. Do you merely list your inventory or do you also regularly publish blogs and articles explaining why people should purchase these mobile phones, what their salient features are, how they fare better compared to other brands and how various problems can be solved once people start using these phones. Explain to them how they can increase the battery life of their mobile phones, how they can upgrade their operating systems, from where they can get useful apps, how they can make various configurations, and such. This way, whenever someone wants to link to a website containing comprehensive information on Samsung mobile phones, he or she will know it’s your website.

Instead of approaching bloggers and webmasters to link back to you just so that you can improve your search engine rankings (it never works), create enough quality content to encourage them to link to you on their own. This is the real way of link building.

But how do they know about your content? In order to link to your content, first of all they have to find it.

This is where blogger outreach and social media interactions can help you. Initially, when you don’t enjoy good search engine rankings (due to various reasons) it will be difficult for people to find your content and then link to it if they appreciate it. Interact with more and more people on social media, on blogs and on online forums. Don’t just wait for things to happen. You will have to create a schedule. You may even have to hire people to increase your level of networking and interaction. Whenever you create a new blog post or a new article on your website, post it on Facebook, Twitter and Google plus. Encourage people to read it. Pitch your links whenever you think it makes sense (again, don’t spam people’s timelines and blog comment sections).