Link building is a vastly important aspect of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO); SEO helps to improve your website’s online visibility. Inbound links (links on another website that link to your website) are valuable for improving your SEO. It can be very tricky to improve the number of inbound links your website receives as it is something you don't have a lot of control over. Although this may seem a difficult task to master, there are other ways to build links between websites and improve SEO.

What is a link?

Anchor text: this is the visual, clickable representation of your hyperlink. For example, the word expert is the anchor text for ‘expert’, and the hyperlink, in this case is 'www.expert.co.nz'. This is the address that the word, when clicked, will take us to. This hyperlink - 'www.expert.co.nz' - is not visible to the website visitor.

Linking domain: the higher the number of inbound links that your website or webpage receives is an indication of its popularity. This does not mean that you should create a dozen phony websites and add your website's links to these pages. You will be penalised for doing this by search engines. You should be aiming to get links from popular websites. The more popular the website, the higher the ranking your website will receive in search engines from the inbound links.

Find the most popular pages on your website and ensure the content on those pages is fresh and exciting to encourage visitors to share and comment on your content. This will improve your SEO and will help generate more links to that page to improve its position in search engines. It will increase the authority of your overall domain (i.e. expert’s domain name is expert.co.nz or expert.services).

Link building

Link building comes down to your content creation. People enjoy reading content that is remarkable and will be more inclined to share this content. This will cause the number and quality of links to your web pages to increase. Actions, with these goals in mind, are known as link building.

Tactics to improve link building

Finding your website in Google

You need to submit your website for inclusion in Google's Index. This can be done at the following URL: https://www.google.com/submityourcontent/business-owner/. You will need to sign in with your Google account, or create a Google account to do this.

This will not instantly cause your site to appear on the first page of a search engine when you search for it in Google but it will definitely improve its ranking on the search page over time, making it easier to locate.

Submitting your website address to website directories

• Many free website directories to submit with
• Complete control
• Little assistance with SEO
• Easy and worth it

Content creation

• Creating content that is remarkable causing others to naturally want to link to it
• Blogs are perfect for publishing this content
• Don’t create ‘link bait’ that is created to purposely gain attention and is not authentic
• Provide content of value: research & data, videos, infographics etc.

Reciprocal or co-marketing

• You link to them and they link to you on their website or webpage
• Easily done with partners who your company has done business with, or industry or product complementary partners

Social media

• Share content that people will want to click on, driving traffic to your webpage
• Display your website's homepage on your social media pages for users to click on
• Prove that you’re worthy of listening to on these platforms by producing and sharing relevant content

Guest blogging

• Valuable and long lasting
• Fresh content
• Use someone with credibility in your industry or who will turn heads