Why Links are Crucial to SEO Marketing

If you have been keeping up with the updates to Google over recent years, you may find yourself thinking that links are not as important as they once were. In fact, a number of online forums and blogs believe that links are not important at all, nor is SEO marketing. However, these beliefs are a mistake. It is important to understand the truth regarding links, as simply accepting the myths floating around the web can be enough to destroy your website ranking.

The History of SEO and Google

When the concept of SEO first began to emerge, websites could rank high simply by gathering as many links as possible, which led to a great deal of “black hat” behaviour. In simple terms, if you wanted your site to rank high quickly, you only needed to buy thousands of links. However, Google quickly decided to crack down on this and other shady practices with a series of updates. Link farms were affected, alongside other negative links from article directories, causing a major problem in the SEO world. Some websites started to overreact, concluding that links were now unimportant in online marketing.

Helpful Linking Practices

As it stands today, some links are relatively neutral, whereas others are downright harmful. It’s important to remember either way though, that quality links are just as crucial as they ever were. There are a few important factors to think about when you’re assessing the value of your potential links:

Capture Links Through Images:

Images are the most underrated form of content, but they can be used to your advantage in multiple ways. In link building, you can use your images to gain backlink opportunities by finding websites that are using them without your consent or providing any credit. It may seem daunting to find sources that contain images that belong to you. However, you can get your hands on an image finder that eases up this process by allowing you to search for similar images. It simply asks you to submit the image and reverse searches it to find platforms that contain it.

Authority Sites:

High-traffic websites and those with awesome PR will always provide great links, even if the site is totally categorized as being in your “niche”, most sites that are general, or news-related can provide a truly valuable link.

Relevance:

Always look for links from m a website relevant to your specific niche. With the Hummingbird algorithm, Google has grown more accustomed to grouping keywords together, meaning your website gains a much higher rank for more relevant connections.

Guest blogging:

Links obtained through guest blogging are neither necessarily good nor bad – it just depends on the blog in question. Guest blogging on high-traffic web blogs can be incredibly useful, whereas the association with spammy or irrelevant blogs is something you should definitely avoid.

Content Marketing:

This is by far the most valuable method of gaining links in 2015. Essentially – it is the most white-hat form of link building you can access, as you’re not directly building any links yourself. Instead, you create compelling content that people link to naturally – because they want to.

In conclusion,

it’s fair to say that links remain an important part of the process for ranking on search engine pages. This is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future. Just remember that Google is watching all of your online marketing practices very carefully, which means that you will have to be more strategic than ever before.