Link Building in 2020: What you need to know

Off page optimization (sometimes called “off site SEO”) is a search engine optimization tactic that helps boost your website’s search engine ranking. The goal of these efforts is to feature your content and/or URL in targeted places other than your website. This in turn improves your search engine ranking by raising your domain authority, driving more traffic to your website and other benefits. 

There are a myriad of ways to accomplish off page optimization and today we’re going to look at link building, one of the most popular methods. 

There are two major buckets of off-page optimization says StatCounter.com:

“Link building is the process of acquiring more links pointing to your website. This usually involves reaching out to site owners and pitching your content.

Non-link building includes activities such as finding unlinked mentions, promoting your content on social media, guest posting, and working with influencers to promote your content.”

Link building can be time consuming, so it’s important to understand the ideal outcome of each type of link building so you can adjust your efforts accordingly. You don’t want to spend all your time and resources on a tactic that isn’t going to move the needle for your website!

There are three main types of links according to the Moz Blog:

Natural links are editorially given without any action on the part of a page owner. For example, a food blogger adding a link to a post that points toward their favorite produce farms is a natural link.

Manually built links are acquired through deliberate link-building activities. This includes things like getting customers to link to your website or asking influencers to share your content.

Self-created links are created by practices such as adding a backlink in an online directory, forum, blog comment signature, or a press release with optimized anchor text. Some self-created link building tactics tend toward black hat SEO and are frowned upon by search engines, so tread lightly here.”

Low Quality Off-Page SEO Techniques

But be careful, there are low quality techniques that can be a waste of time – or even damage your ranking! It is believed that “SEO” began in the 1990’s and with 20+ years in action, it’s no wonder there are some bad actors out there trying to cheat the system. Because of this, it’s important to pay close attention to where you’re trying to get links. There are many low quality directories, news outlets, or blogs that can actually hurt your search engine ranking. Aside from these types of websites having low traffic, it’s also inevitable that Google will change how these backlinks affect your search ranking. Check out DigitalSEOLand’s top off-page SEO techniques to avoid:

Low-Quality Off-Page SEO Techniques:

  1. Directory Submission: (Stop DOING it)
  2. Article Submission: (A Useless Technique)
  3. Buying or Selling Backlinks: (Highly Risky)
  4. Private Blog Network (PBNs)

Now that you know the basics about link building, check out how we can take care of your content creation so you can focus on link building in 2020! Check out our services here.

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