Link Building: Dead or Alive?
Back around 2014, high-ranking Googler Matt Cutts sent panic waves through the internet marketing world when he announced that guest blogging and link building were on the verge of becoming an ineffective means of improving search rankings and online visibility. And while he certainly had strong words for spammy link building, his words ultimately got taken out of context. They were exaggerated and overstated. Before too long, a myth began to take root in the industry. It goes a little something like this: Link building is dead. But that’s not entirely true. In fact, it’s patently false. Link building is more important and effective than it’s ever been. And if you want to drive traffic to your website, it needs to be a focal point. Recent research supports this idea. In a study of nearly 12 million Google search results, it was discovered that the number of linking domains a website has is strongly and directly correlated to rankings – more than any other SEO factor, including schema markup and rich snippets. The data also shows that 99 percent of all top-50 search results have at least one high-quality backlink from an external site. Most have many more. You can even study Google’s very own patents and you’ll notice how strongly they believe in backlinks – even if they’re squeamish to say as much publicly.3 Tips for White Hat Link Building
The key to link building is to do it the right way. A good link building strategy will provide a healthy ROI, while a spammy strategy will leave you penalized and reeling. How do you ensure you do the former and not the latter? Here are some helpful suggestions:- Create High Quality Content
- Encourage Organic Sharing
- Build Relationships
