If you find yourself spending a lot of time searching for inbound link opportunities for you website, then you are most likely wasting your time. If you’re spending a lot of money with a link building agency, then you may be wasting your hard earned dollars. The days of low quality link building as an SEO approach are behind us. While search engines return results largely based on diverse links from high-authority domains, it is vital to understand the methods to obtaining valuable links.
The first objective is to stop trading or purchasing cheap link building services and adjust the mindset to earning links. In the long run, you will be much better off and see a substantial increase in profits. Below are three reasons why you should adopt a link earning strategy for your next link building campaign.
3 Reasons To Start Link Earning
1) You don’t need a lot of links to rank high in search engines if you can acquire links with higher page/domain authority
2) You don’t have to cringe every time you here Google is about to release another update to their infamous algorithm, because you will be in good standing with the search engine giant already.
3) You don’t have to dedicate much time at all to acquiring links, because much of this process will happen while your working on other tasks and even while you sleep.
Earning links shouldn’t be complicated. If you apply a simple rule to your link earning efforts, then you will notice a difference in your online strategy. The rule is spend 90% of you efforts creating valuable content and then use the other 10% of your time to build relationships with a goal of eventually obtaining high authority links. Creating quality content can solve a lot of your link building problems. When you create quality content, people will want to link to your website naturally and even share your content socially. Great content will also attract higher quality opportunities for earning links. If you’re spending more than 10% of your time link building, then you could very well be wasting your time.
So why do we spend so much time and money searching for links?
We all want the covenant number one spot on Google for our desired keyword search result. Links are the number one determining factor when search engines return their results. Simply put, the website with the most relevant links and quality anchor text will receive a higher search result. This does not mean optimizing your website or researching long tail keywords won’t play a significant role in your SEO efforts, it just means links still carry the big stick, when it comes to search engine optimization.
How can link earning save time and win the search engine battle?
Think of building links as building relationships. Would you pay someone to create 100 relationships for you? Absolutely not! So why would you buy or trade for links that return little value? Again if your SEO approach is relationship building rather than link building, search engine optimization will become much easier. Find others within your industry or niche and open up a dialogue. Look for potential cross-promoting opportunities or even create partnerships that can be beneficial for both parties involved. Dedicate a few hours to sending quality link building outreach letters to websites or blogs, that you could see aligning your brand with as leaders in your industry. Linking to other great resources is something your readers will appreciate and search engines will inevitably find a way to reward.
Other ways to earn links!
If you’re just starting out, you could write a great post about a company you would like to work with, reach out to them and let them know about the article. If it’s a quality article, they will most likely share it, since we all like to hear about how great we are. Also submitting content to directories can still have valuable results. When you think about link building directories it’s important to think of sites like Yelp, Google Plus or other business directories, especially ones related to your field. Be careful here, as you don’t want to submit your website to just any directory. If the directory isn’t something your customers are likely to use or if the value of the directory’s link is low, then acquiring the link may return little to no value and at times could possibly hurt your rankings.
Consider creating content for another website in your industry by guest posting. Guest posting is a great way to build relationships by reaching out to others within your niche. This will provide you an opportunity to build a relationship with the content editor of that website. Of course, you don’t want to email someone and ask for something immediately. Start the conversation with your outreach letter and it will be a topic that can come up naturally. In fact at times, you’ll find people who would openly welcome free quality content. The trick to deciding which sites to guest post on is pretty simple and straightforward. Only deal with people who really care about what they post and stay away from websites that will post anything and everything.
Leaving comments can earn you links when they add insight to a particular topic.
You want to be careful about comments you leave on other websites; because comments can hurt your ranking if they seem like spam. It’s been popular lately to add comments to other blog posts within an industry in efforts to get a backlink. The problem with many of these links is they don’t add to the discussion and they look like spam. Also many people try to leave these types of comments on as many websites as possible thinking it will boost their link building efforts. Search engines are becoming wise to this tactic, so your comments better be authentic. If you try to entice others to come to your website to read related material, then the content better be worthy and definitely relevant.
Now What?
An expert link building agency should be aware of the crackdown on building links in large quantities over a short period of time and should be promoting content marketing. If this is part of your current digital marketing plan then you should be on the right side of the curve, as we will continue to see a shift in this direction over the next year. As always, if you have any questions about earning links or would like to get more information on SEO strategies, then contact PLUSH today!
