One of the most important aspects of SEO and improving your SERP ranks is link building. It is also one of the hardest ones since you can’t have full control over it. In this blog we’ll briefly introduce you to this topic and explain what it is.
Link building
In general, link building is generating links to your website. It’s as simple as that. They don’t have to necessarily link to you homepage, but it can be any other page. We do make a distinction between two types of links:
- Internal links
- External links
Internal link building
Internal links are links within your website that link to other pages on your website. For example, from your contact page to your help page. These are the easiest ones to get since you have full control over it. You can just simply add new internal links whenever you need to.
External link building
External links are links from different websites towards yours. These are harder to get in comparison to internal links. There are several methods on getting these, some of these are:
- Posting quality content: This can be writing a blog post with useful information, posting infographics, etc. Anything that is posted to genuinely inform. Eventually others will link to your posts or images, giving you external backlinks. This is the most rewarding method that Google likes.
- Guest blogging: A common thing is to guest blog on other people’s website. This does not only lead to exposure, but also a possibility to add a backlink.
Be careful with the method that you use to get backlinks, Google doesn’t like all of them. External link building can be further divided into two:
- Black hat link building
- White hat link building
Black hat link building descended from when Google used the number of inbound links as a gauge. People came up with different (shady) ways to get as much external links as possible. These included some abusive techniques. To fix that, Google (and other search engines), started looking at the quality, which leads us to white hat link building.
With white hat link building, you want to add value to people who then will eventually link to your website. This is the recommended method. Even though white hat link building will take longer, it will eventually be more rewarding in the long run.
Why do I need link building?
Whenever different websites link to your quality content, Google will recognize it. And by doing so, they are likely to increase you SERP positions. This will then lead to more clicks and more conversions.
Conclusion
Link building is generating links to your website. We distinguish two types of links: internal links and external links. Internal links are links from within your website to another page on your website. External links are ones from a different website to yours.
The best way to gain external links is to write quality content so others will link to your website. This will eventually lead to your website ranking higher in the search results
