External Link Building Still Helps SEO Strategy

External link building is an online marketing strategy that boosts search engine optimization for a site, although it has lost some impact in recent years.

It also is a tedious, often frustrating and sometimes rewarding job.

It is tedious because it takes a great deal of research to find a high-quality site and then a high-quality page on that site to place the link. And that assumes the site is willing to accept a request to link.

The process is often frustrating because finding such a site is becoming more rare and difficult. Managers of sites that have quality rankings certainly won’t hand out links to anyone.

Even if they did, then the problems continue — whether to get dofollow or nofollow, the prominence of the external link and the anchor text in the link.

Go looking for blogs, forums or articles that list sites offering high-quality link building. It’s highly unlikely anyone with a decent sense of online marketing will reveal those sites because they are precious commodities. Competitors don’t share for obvious reasons.

Creating High Quality External Links

Google employees who share their thoughts to the public often recommend that publishers simply focus on building high-quality content. It will attract the external links.

The truth is, the majority of back links that appear naturally without asking for them are low quality. The site or page may vanish one day because the owner decided to shut it down, retire, get another job, etc.

Major top quality sites do get links from other sites. But what about the rest of us? We can create our own top-quality links via:

• Our own external blogs
• Social media accounts
• Content marketing
• Guest posts
• Photo sites (i.e., Flickr and Pixabay)
• Forum postings
• Blog comments
• Video sites

It’s the usual list. But the important point is not just creating backlinks, but high quality backlinks.

High quality links have a few things in common.

The page where the link resides has substantial and original content, such as a blog or guest post. There is low competition in the search engines for the topic in question, which is becoming more rare for any content on the Internet.

The page receives a high level of visits and redistribution via email and social media buttons that lead to more clicks on the link. A high level of comments will increase its visibility.

A page with a low bounce rate and exit rate will rank higher when combined with quality backlinks.

The best links of all are “do follow”, which means they distribute “link juice”, which is a fancy SEO term for meaningful value.

Throwing the Dice

If we create a page on a well-regarded site that accepts external content, we can increase the link value with the quantity and quality of the content that goes on the page.

We may do a good job of optimizing the page for search engines, but what if there is too much competition for that subject? If the page gets buried, it won’t receive enough visits, comments or distributions to improve that ranking.

The end result is a page with a back link that took a lot of work. But in the eyes of the search engines, it is not a top-quality link no matter how much work goes into it

The only thing left to do is keep building external links. Sometimes the throw of the dice is lucky, and sometimes not.

But when the throw is lucky, quality link building is quite rewarding indeed.