SEO is a constantly changing industry. However, one thing has remained the same — over the years backlinks remain the most powerful Google ranking factor. If you want to substantially boost your site’s SEO and improve your Google rankings, link building is one of the best ways to do it.
Until recently, the goal of link building was to get as many links to your target page as possible. Links from low-quality sites, discussion forums, and comments that you left on other sites were all fair game. Now things have changed and you need links the search engines trust. Getting links Google will trust is much more difficult. Content marketing has helped, more than anything else, redefine link building.
What is Link Building in 2018
Link building is the process of getting links from other websites, and nowadays content plays a key role in this process. However, not every type of content will provide you with backlinks. The internet is filled with so much content that it’s hard to know where to look. Simply publishing content and waiting for people to link to it simply doesn’t work anymore.
Content marketing as it exists today also presents a unique problem: plenty of content is getting shared, but only in the form of mentions, instead of backlinks. Authors, businesses and publications are given attribution in the form of quotes and maybe links to one’s social media, but they are not always given actual in-content links. As great as a shout-out is, without an actual link, you won’t get any SEO or traffic benefits.
Getting your content published on the right sites also matters more than getting it published on a lot of sites. If trustworthy sources send backlinks to you, your site will be regarded as more trustworthy. Google definitely focuses on quality over quantity and getting those quality backlinks are much more difficult to obtain.
Keeping all the above-mentioned in a mind, there are two link building rules you should follow:
- Create valuable, quality content that is engaging and likely to be linked to.
- Get your content in front of the right people by distributing it through the right channels.
So, the challenge is to get great, popular, high-authority, and trustworthy sites to not only notice and love the content you create but to also provide backlinks to it. The first step in accomplishing this is to create linkable content.
How to Create Linkable Content
What makes content linkable? The first step is to understand why people might link to your material and find ways to gain their support. Your content might help someone else; here are some examples of how this could be done:
- Support an article with a reference.
- Share authoritative content (e. g. research).
- Share valuable content (e. g. guides or ebooks).
Another way to make sure that content brings value to your readers is to think about the types of articles that could be useful to them. The more helpful you can be to them the better. But keep in mind, there are some content types that are more likely to help rake in the backlinks. Let’s review some of these…
1. Original Research with Insights
Original research provides unique statistics and data. So when somebody wants to mention the information presented in your study in an article, for example, they have only one way to do it — to backlink to you.
The quality research should answer vital industry questions and provide value to your audience. Before attempting an article like this, you should understand what your research hypothesis is and how this data will help your target audience. This type of content can take a lot of time and effort to create, but it often results in high-quality backlinks.
2. Visual Assets
Supporting your content with great images and video offers value that makes your content more link-worthy. Visual assets attract visual learners, makes text less boring, and is easy to link to.
Link-worthy visual assets might be:
- Infographics: Which plenty of businesses may use in their own blog posts, especially if they contain helpful information, research or statistics. Place a link to your site in the embed code of the infographic to make sure that you get a backlink when it gets posted on other sites’ blogs.
- Charts and diagrams: These simplify the understanding of complex data and ensures that the reader will fully grasp the information they need.
- Videos: The importance of video increases daily as video continues to dominate content marketing and social platforms. Videos are much more difficult to plagiarize than a blog post, and a lot more time consuming and sometimes expensive to make; if you are able to create a great video, other influencers will share it.
3. Ultimate Guides and eBooks
Guides, eBooks, and white papers often contain valuable information about a specific topic, which gives you more room for in-depth content. A well-researched and planned out piece of content can make your guide a go-to resource for readers. As an added bonus, it can be a powerful lead generation tool.
After you have created an amazing piece of content, you will need to think about a distribution plan to ensure that it gets noticed by the right people and doesn’t fall flat.
Read the full guide on our blog to get insights on how to build a content distribution plan that focuses not just on getting results from customers, but also for an SEO impact and valuable linkbuilding strategy.
