This is the fourth part in a series of six articles about SEO. Stay tuned to Schoolhouse Marketing for the full series on optimizing your marketing channels for the homeschooling market.
There have been some shady practices when it comes to link building for SEO and many debates on the effectiveness of this practice. It can be a difficult and time-consuming task that does not provide huge immediate results. However, this long-term growth strategy will provide an ongoing source of organic traffic and brand awareness that is well worth the consistent effort!
What is link building? Simply stated: get other websites to link to yours. There are many different ways to do this, and you’ll find the top methods below. But first, here’s a brief summary of why you’ll want to take the time for this effective SEO strategy.
Why You Need Link Building in Your SEO Game Plan
If you have a website, you want to have traffic going to it. Your website is comparable to a physical business location where you want to have many visitors walk through your doors. All SEO tactics are about getting more traffic from organic search results, and link building is no different. But having links to your website on hundreds or thousands of other websites is also increasing traffic straight from these websites. Whether you have links you’ve put on your social media profiles or other social sites, have quality content that other people find to link to, or you strategically work with others to place your links on their sites, they will all increase your visibility and opportunities for people to discover your website just by clicking a link.
Of course, you want all these links to be from reputable sites and to be in the right context, but there are a lot of options within the whitehat realm of link building. Read more about the importance of whitehat link building from CopyPress where you’ll also find more ideas to get those good links working for you.
Now that you have a foundation of what quality link building is, review these top techniques to consistently include in your SEO strategy. There are several no-cost ways to get links back to your site, but there are also effective paid options to have your online location sprinkled throughout the World Wide Web.
Top 6 Link Building Practices
- Write blog posts for popular blogs in your industry. Generally, your author bio at the end of the article will have one link to your site, but it’s also possible to include other relevant links to your site throughout the article. Guest blogging is great for link building, but this is also highly effective to position yourself and your brand as an authority in your industry.
- Contact other companies that are related to your business, but not competitive, and see if they have a page on their site that would be appropriate to have a link to your site and offer to do the same for them.
- Add a page to your site or a widget to your sidebar with the pure intention of suggesting that visitors share your page. You could call the page Link to Us or title the widget Share Our Site and include graphics like badges and banners that brand your company along with HTML code that can be used to easily add your info to a web page. (See how we do this in the sidebar of our Homeschool Review Crew site.)
- Submit your website to relevant free industry directories or buy advertising that offers long-term links to your site like year-long banner ads. Our advertisers get exposure through our rotating banner placements but also get a permanent listing (for the length of their purchase) on Our Sponsors page. You may also find paid directories in your niche that offer much more than just a listing like we offer in our Higher Education directory.
- Do you have a YouTube channel or Vimeo profile? If not, choose at least one and put your links in the description of your videos. If you’re feeling a bit shy behind a camera, then make your videos out of PowerPoint presentations, recorded webinars, or screen-sharing tutorials.
- Find people to review your products and post the review on their site in exchange for receiving your product for free or buy advertising products that arrange these reviews for you, like our Homeschool Review Crew package.
Link building is a slow and steady process which produces a return on investment of time and money for years down the road. Don’t leave out this important SEO strategy that can directly improve your search engine rankings and provide other big benefits like establishing authority and developing brand awareness.
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