Link Building Is Dead… Again!

If you haven’t already heard from our previous post, then I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but, link building is dead once again (hopefully this time it’s for good!). Although this has been coined many times before, the fundamental point is that no longer can we rely on building links to increase website traffic and if you’re disagreeing with this in any way, you’re probably still going through one of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and (finally) acceptance.

So, what do we do now?

You may be sat there thinking, so if link building really done for good, then what do we do next? Well, firstly, ‘link building’ was never the best of terms to begin with. When you build something there’s usually a tangible end result that you can proudly show off to world and be patted on the back for your obvious achievement, but when considering links, you can build forever and still may not have anything to show for it. Having said that, was link building really an efficient way of increasing traffic to your business?

It certainly wasn’t the only way, and there are still many methods that can be used in order to reach your business goals. For example, the wonders of social media marketing and networking, email campaigns and engaging content that will aim for your target audience. All of these are fantastic marketing tools that cannot be ignored, even when it comes to SEO. Google has transformed the way it searches for queries and, because of that, the world of SEO has had to change drastically over recent years. Although links are still important to rankings, but it’s much easier to rank without links now through the creation of shareable content.

Link Earning or Link Yearning?

Because of this, the term ‘link building’ (or what we like to call ‘link yearning’) has morphed into ‘link earning’ and this makes much more sense for the new search engine algorithms. We coin this term simply because you can ‘yearn’ for an abundance of links to improve your site’s rankings, but you have to ‘earn’ them in order to reap the benefits. Earning links can be done in a number of ways, but why not try some of the following:

• Interview experts in your field of work and make the information public.
• Be available to be interviewed by other publications yourself.
• Make sure the content that .gov, .org or .edu sites link out to is updated.
• Create engaging and interesting content that your users can connect to.
• Learn how to connect with the right people – what draws them in?

However, whether you use link building or link earning to improve your online visibility, bear in mind that search engines have changed so much so recently that it cannot be the only method used for success. Any professional will tell you that in order to reach the goals you have set out for your website it’s best to use a combination of methods that produce quality results!

Quality, quality, quality…

The quality of what comes from these aforementioned methods is paramount; low quality, spammy links will just not work any more. The content you display, whether it is on your website or throughout social media campaigns must be of the highest standard in order to interest customers and increase traffic. Envisage your content to be ‘bait’ and your website is your fishing rod, essentially you watch to ‘catch’ your audience’s attention by serving up content that your demographic will love.

All in all, SEO is just like anything else- put your best foot forward and you’ll reap the rewards. All you need to do is make sure you or the people you’ve hired to do it for you are not slacking on the job. Keep things up to date, constantly refresh your content and throw a bit of link earning in there too. With a healthy amount of each method, you and your business are sure to come up shining and you’ll be pleased with the growing success.