The Dos and Don’ts of Link Building for 2021

by Alchemy Interactive Digital Marketing Agency

If you are a digital marketer or an entrepreneur, looking to boost your brand’s SERP rankings though link building, then you are on the right page.

Link building is a great strategy as it not only helps increase the credibility of your website, but allows you to develop a network of access across myriad web pages and publishers.

In essence, link building is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique that enables readers to find informative content they are looking for on the internet through other web pages. It also helps brands to be found easily within the colossal online content reservoir. It entails getting different webpages to link back to a specific page to serve two basic purposes:

Drive traffic to webpages to generate revenue

Facilitate search engines in crawling the web to find and rank a webpage in SERPs

As a marketing professional, it is obvious for you to wonder how link building is crucial and if it holds any importance in 2021. Well, let us tell you that a new SEO study, based on the analysis of 600,000 keywords from the global base of SEMrush, emphasized the importance of backlinks. Besides, there do exist enough case studies to further corroborate the importance of link building.

If you want to leverage link building to increase organic website traffic, it is critical to understand how to do it the right way! Here are a few dos and don’ts of link building for 2021 to help you achieve your SEO-specific business goals.

DO include long keywords during link building: This is basically link building 101. For instance, consider a blog on making pasta. You can either mention “click here to learn how to make pasta” while hyperlinking the term “here” on your website’s homepage, or you can incorporate the phrase “as I suggested in my previous blog on quick pasta making trick for beginners” into a different content piece. The second option is better as it includes a long keyword, which could help search engines to better understand the link, contextualize it and display it to the most relevant readers.

DO increase social media visibility of your pages: Social sharing is great when it is about driving more traffic to a web page and motivating readers to link back to the same on social media. High-performing pages on social media platforms are beneficial in terms of SEO too. Hence, it is suggested to embed active sharing buttons for all popular social platforms at the top and bottom of your web pages.

DON’T go for sponsored or purchased links: From an SEO point of view, the goal of link building is to reach maximum number of websites with hyperlinks to your very own website. In an attempt to do so, marketers often turn to buying links – a strategy that has largely been disapproved by Google. You link building strategy for 2021 should ideally include the rel=” sponsored” tag for compensation-based agreements.

checkout too - WHAT'S THE VALUE OF SEO?

DON’T repeat the very same keywords many times: There are myriad ways to hyperlink an article. Let’s reconsider the example of “quick pasta making trick for beginners”. Rather than repeating the very same format across multiple web pages, try its semantic alternatives , such as “quick pasta making hack for dummies”, “you too can prep pasta in no time”, or “instant Italian pasta making tips for novices”. This strategy will also let Google better understand the context, which will eventually make your SEO efforts even more efficient.

Following a link building 101 guide can be a fully manual process. However, as your business will grow, the number of articles, pages and social accounts will subsequently grow. In such a scenario, SEO tools for link building, such as SEMRush and Ahrefs can aid you in creating a balance between quantity and volume. It is also recommended to keep a constant eye on your website for broken links to ensure consistent SEO performance on Google.

We hope, the tips above will surely help you ace your link building strategy for 2021.