11 Real Benefits of Link Building

Traffic is necessary if you want your website to be successful. Link building remains a critical component of any online marketing campaign that includes search engine optimization (SEO). There are different types of links including back links which are links from other sources to your site. These in-coming links are crucial for your site to be effectively optimized for search engines.

Links are built through various online activities. Some techniques are specifically designed to establish links. For others, link building is a secondary outcome rather than the primary focus of the activity. Regardless of how links are built, they offer real benefits that cannot be overstated.

1.     Establishes Your Reputation

One way to build links is to engage in online activities that allow you to leave your virtual DNA. You can leave comments on other people’s blogs or websites and link back to your site. This is a natural way to drive traffic to your site so they can bookmark it for future visits. As long as your comments are meaningful, relevant, and hopefully related to your site, you can quickly establish yourself as an expert in your niche. The more of this you do, the faster your reputation begins to form and take hold. When sites of authority link to your site, your reputation becomes even more established because they are in essence given you their vote of confidence.

2.     Showcases Site Blog

Blogs are a great way to establish your authority in a particular niche. It is the mouthpiece for your business. You share opinions and insights that visitors find useful. This creates natural back links to your site as they routinely visit your site, bookmark it, or send a link from your site to their colleagues and friends. Allow your blog postings to be republished on other sites and you will see an increase in back links. To keep the link building going, be sure to take time to respond to comments posted on your site. People who post comments like to engage with the original poster. As a marketing tool, blog postings that have loads of back links can quickly go viral. This is most likely to happen with postings that are controversial in nature.

3.     Includes Social Media

Now that social media has officially taken over the world, link building just got a bit easier. You can incorporate social networks in your link building campaign and since they have significant numbers of followers, you can link much quicker than with traditional avenues. You can also use social media to get your content viewed by users. Many social media tools limit the number of characters that can be used in a communication so the next best thing is a direct link to content. But it takes more than links to be successful here – you need to create a solid profile on social networking sites that reflects your business reputation. Deciding not to play the social media game is becoming less of an option.

4.     Optimizes Entire Site

Your entire site benefits from a link building campaign. Search engines index all web pages, not just your homepage. This means you can back link to as many of your web pages as you want during your link building process. Links can be an ongoing source of traffic to your site because web pages tend to remain published for a very long. Your site remains optimized during this time as well. Search engines will index your site faster if you have a lot of quality back links. And quality does matter here. If you have lots of links that are not relevant to your site, you risk being penalized by the search engines.

5.     Increases Site Rank on Search Engines

This is directly related to the previous benefit. Indexing is how your site is included on search engine result pages (SERPs). This is good news! But, really, you will only get visitors if your site is ranked high enough, say the first page or so. Back links directly impact your SERP ranking. Search engines typically view a high number of back links as proof that a web site has quality content. Obviously this is not always the case. Don’t waste your time worrying about those sites that rank higher than because they have found a way to mislead the search engines. At the end of the day, as long as you provide good content and have quality back links, you will be ranked high as well. And the more links you have, the higher your rank. Over time, your site will even be ranked by search engines you did not submit to for indexing.

6.     Boosts Traffic Volume

The ultimate outcome of the high SERP ranking is traffic. The more links you have, the greater number of visitors you can receive. One way that a link building campaign can increase traffic is with link baiting. This involves adding some type of promotional content on your site for the purpose of baiting or drawing other sites to link to you. There are many ways to do this such as offering a link to a free e-book that other sites can take advantage of – whatever the exact resource, it must be meaningful enough that other sites are willing to send their traffic to you.

7.     Improves Quality of Traffic

Quality links means quality traffic. By verifying the quality of the links you are connecting to in your link building campaign, you increase your chances of getting quality traffic. These are visitors who do more than click the link to your site and then immediately exit. You should be attracting the right type of traffic – visitors who are interested in the type of website you administer. If you are benefiting from link building in other ways, you should also be receiving more appropriate traffic to your site.

8.     Results in More Conversions

As long as you have a good website, you will benefit from the increase in traffic by getting more conversions. Conversions mean revenue or some other concrete benefit to you. Site visitors convert to customers when they make a purchase or otherwise accept what you are offering. To do this, they have to stay on your site long enough to know what you are selling. This can be an actual product or service, an idea, or campaign promise. The whole point to increasing site traffic is so you can make money, register visitors to receive information, or get people to sign a petition. You want visitors to take action in some way.

9.     Widens Web Presence

The more links you have, the greater your web presence becomes. As long as web users see information about on other sites that link to you, your presence will grow. The more they see you, the more credible you become to them until they finally click that link to your site. The increase in traffic resulting from your link building campaign is also improves your visibility. As more people visit and talk about your site, your online presence expands. You can see how a continuous link building strategy is critical your business growth. Customer loyalty is great, but businesses grow through a combination of returning and new customers.

10.     Makes Site Competitive

Combine all of the previous benefits and you end up with a site that will give your competitors a run for their money. You can take it a step further and research your competitor’s back links. You can learn what anchor text or keywords they are using to obtain quality links. This information is invaluable if you want to remain at the top of your particular niche. You can see how important link building is for online marketing. And yes, to stay competitive, you will need to continue your SEO plan which should always include link building.

11.     Builds Site Brand

It’s just logical that as you become more competitive as a result of the increased traffic that comes to your site because of your link building campaign, you are simultaneously establishing your online brand. This is not to be taken lightly. Make sure that the brand that is being built around your site is the one you want. Not all brands come into existence through deliberate planning – some are accidents, happy or otherwise. Do not let this happen to you. Take charge of your brand and then actively protect it so it can continue to flourish. You can even build links and your brand through creative customer loyalty programs.

As you can see from the list above, link building is a time consuming activity that requires strategically targeted actions to be successful. This can turn into a full-time job for an inexperienced online marketer or site owner. If you do not have the time or interest to perform a link building campaign, it is essential you consider outsourcing the task. A reputable SEO firm that specializes in link building can help make sure your site is properly optimized with back links so that you can attract quality traffic.