Hello. My name is Michael, and I’m the newest member of the team at WTM Digital. As an SEO specialist, I feel it is my duty to inform the public of the dangers of underestimating the value of ongoing link building practices – as I myself had done in the past, as well as the small companies I worked for previous to WTM Digital.
Don’t limit your company to just a “web guy”.
As a guy who has been working in the Internet marketing industry for several years, mostly in generic positions called “the web guy” by the small companies who employed me, I had unavoidably heard about link building and its importance.
Just because he knows how to use a computer doesn’t mean he has all the time in the world.
One of the reasons I hadn’t gone too in-depth into link building as “the web guy” is because the role of being the one technologically savvy person in the building kept me busy enough, switching between tasks like updating products on the website and reviving a frozen Windows 2000 system in the customer service department that the owners refused to update (it was the year 2010 for the love…).
This kept me busy to the point where my link building strategies basically included two things:
- 1. Finding a relevant, trustworthy site, and presenting them with the age old proposition: “I’ll show you my link if you show me yours.”
- 2. Donating custom products to educational or other organizations and having them display our logo and an anchor text link on their site, listing us as a sponsor or donator, pointing back to our site.
Don’t get me wrong, the second tactic is not a bad one to this day, but not everyone has a product to donate, and the sites you might donate to are not always relevant to your own, which can reduce the impact of the link. It is for this reason that my suggestion is to generate some valuable content that other people on the Internet will share with others – thus creating links pointing back to your site.
Content Creation is a Form of Link Building
By creating content that helps and informs your site’s visitors, you are creating chances for people to share this content with their friends and colleagues. How do people share information in today’s world? They share a link on their website, their Facebook page, or any other number of places they connect with people online.
If you came up with a useful list of things, your link could be shared, too.
These links are incredibly valuable. The more times a link to your content shows up on other websites, especially sites that bear some relevancy to your own and are NOT spammy, low-quality sites, the more juice Google will give you – propelling you to the top of the SERPs. It is crucial to remember that trying to “game the system” by spamming your links out all over the internet in unrelated places just to get the link out there is the best way to get your site black-listed by Google. In other words, Google will remove your site entirely from any search results if it feels you are not creating content and sharing links in a natural, helpful way.
Continued results require continued efforts.
As you may be aware by now, Google has an incredibly complex algorithm which determines the value of websites and places the websites on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) based on a wide variety of factors. While nobody knows exactly what parts of the algorithm carry exactly how much importance over another, one thing is certainly clear:
If you want to show up on the first page of Google, you’re going to have to work hard to create content and gain links from other sites.
Keep after it. Maybe someday you’ll make this little guy proud.
But don’t think the results require a one-time setup fee of your time and energy, friend. Another part of Google’s algorithm encourages us all to constantly be updating our websites with fresh, quality content that engages our users and provides them with useful information. After all, if we don’t constantly help the users, why would Google constantly put our website right in front of them?
My point is: if you want to get to Google’s front page and stay there, you better trust that you need to have someone in your team constantly working to produce high quality web content with the aim to provide value to your site’s visitors, which will in turn generate valuable links that point back to your site.