The Importance of Link Building
In the processes of optimizing dental website content, people often ignore an important cornerstone of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): link building.
Most people tend to look at link building as a futile endeavor that takes too many efforts and returns too little. But in reality, link building can make-and-break your SEO strategy.
What is Link Building?
Link Building refers to acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. As a strategy, it pertains to ensuring that other websites insert links that re-direct towards your own website.
Another type of link building is the internal link building. It refers to the links you build to your own webpages. Internal link building is useful in bringing some equity between the webpages, in case one webpage has been linked too often while others have not.
The Value of Links for Search Engines
Technically, the first utility of a link is to introduce a new website or webpage to a search engine. Search engines index most websites via links on other websites.
Beyond this first encounter, links only serve as a counter. Search engines keep a track of how often a link was created towards a particular website and adds the number to its index of that website.
Importance of Link Building for SEO
Google’s first PageRank algorithm significantly depended upon link building, but with time it became more sophisticated in its approach. Google’s web crawlers, while making searches, go through the websites and note all the links made to specific websites. The number of such links is used to deduce the authority of the website in question.
In simple words, Google evaluates that if your website is reliable enough to be cited by other websites or not? For this, Google checks the backlinks of your website on other sites. If you have created quality backlinks on many relevant sites, Google will definitely prefer you over most of your competitors. This translates into a better rank in search results.
Among all the ranking factors that Google’s SEO depends upon, the two largest are about link-building. Domain-Level Link Features and Page-Level Link Features together carry a weightage of 40% in deciding your SEO score (a 2015 estimate by Moz survey).
Importance of Link Building – Some Important Tips
Like most of SEO, there is no single strategy for an effective link building campaign. However, there are many strategies you can adopt to achieve a common goal:
- Create Good Content: Creating good, engaging and viral content is perhaps the safest strategy. When your content is compelling, people would automatically show interest in sharing your content. Of course, you would need content marketing to ensure that your content first reaches the right people.
- Link to High-Authority Websites: Networking with reviewers or social media influencers can be another effective strategy. If high-authority websites agree to link to your website, it would be significantly better in improving your SEO rank.
- Use Keywords as Anchor Texts: Suggesting the right anchor text can help you in long-term SEO. If the anchor text of the link is also a keyword you use or will use in the future, it will be much better for a higher search engine ranking of your website.
Importance of Link Building – Bottom Line
Link building certainly takes time and effort, but the rewards are significant and long-lasting. It should certainly be a cornerstone of your Dental Website SEO strategy.
Link Building Resources
- SEMRush – Enhance your SEO with Semrush’s powerful backlink suite (Free 30 Day Trial)
- Moz Link Explorer – The world’s best backlink checker with over 40 trillion links
- Ahrefs Backlink Checker – Try the free version of Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker. Get a glimpse into the power of our premium tool.
