Ever since Google was the first search engine to start using links as a method of ranking websites, link building has been a vital part of Internet marketing. SEO companies and marketing departments have spent countless hours seeking out websites with which to build links to their own sites, and the more unscrupulous would go down the ‘paid links’ path – something which has always been against Google’s Terms of Service and, thanks to the recent Penguin updates, has even begun to have a detrimental impact on websites.
One problem is ‘link building’ takes a long time, and isn’t natural. Also, the quality of links you tend to get from seeking links is often lower than the quality of links great websites naturally acquire – so a far better method is to attract links, rather than build them. By attracting links you’ll end up with far better links than you could have built naturally, possibly even from national tabloid and news websites, the BBC, and industry giants.
So how do you attract good quality links? Link attraction requires something of substance, a reason people want to visit and share the content. This is the essence of Google’s recent changes. Google wants to know who can build up the best content which, in turn, is shared and linked to from important websites and social channels.
The sort of quality content needed includes news, how-to guides, infographics, calculators, tools, videos and much more. Kevin Costner once heard the phrase ‘If you build it they will come’. For a long while that didn’t hold true on the Internet, as you also had to advertise it with links – but no more. Now, building is sufficient – so long as it is built the right way and has the right content to attract them.
Turn your website into your field of dreams.