Today we’re going to talk about link building, but first, let’s take a trip back in time.

It’s the late 1950s. And in this reality, you advertise your business with a billboard on the side of a sleepy country road. If you’re lucky, maybe 40 people a day drive past it.

Then one day you learn that the quiet country road is going to become part of a new interstate. The number of people who see your sign each day will jump from a few dozen to a few hundred.

What does this have to do with link building? Well, think of your company’s website as the billboard, and Google as the new interstate.

But unlike what happens in this scenario, Google isn’t just going to swoop in and start boosting your domain authority (or your site’s reputation). That will require some work on your part.

Network link building

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your site. But it can’t just be any website. Google gives each site a quality score.

The higher the score, the more value they give the link. Google considers the quality score of the site linking to yours and assesses this in relation to your own quality score.

One of the things Google considers when determining where a site sits within search results is how many sites link to it. A site with a lot of incoming links is one that Google deems higher value.

Search engines need to know the sites that make it to the top of the results page are a good fit. If users don’t find relevant results, they’ll find a different search engine.

There are two big reasons. Like we just mentioned, it helps your company’s domain authority (i.e. its relevance to your industry). Search engines have been shown to rank pages that feature incoming links higher than pages that don’t have them.

Secondly, linking out to other sites demonstrates that you’re part of a larger community that values what you have to say.

How do you get high-quality links back to your site? Some methods include:

  • Creating and publishing content that’s both unique and relevant to your industry gives people a good reason to link their site to your site. This includes blog posts like this one, as well as images, videos and infographics.
  • Look for the chance to comment on blogs, taking care to include helpful information and link back to your website for even more info.
  • Seek out high-quality sites that are within your industry, but don’t compete with your business and see if they’ll link to you. These links can often come in the form of pages about partner relationships, or directories.

Before you request links from outside sources, make sure they’re a site that’s relevant to your industry. And ask yourself how much authority they have. A site that you came across on the sixth page of search results might have good material, but it won’t be your best bet in terms of boosting your authority.

All of this can take some work. We spent a lot of time here on link building and making sure the connections we make are ones that will get our clients their ideal customers.