In the past, online marketers used link building to create tons of backlinks to their website to increase search engine rankings. And it worked. But, in 2012, the Google Penguin algorithm update stopped websites from spamming their search results. In particular, those websites that bought links or obtained them through free link building sites designed to improve their Google ranking.

So does this mean that link building for your website is almost dead today? Far from there!

Don’t dismiss link building for your website

Building links for your website has always been an important factor for it to rank well in search engines. Links to your website provide strong signals that your site is relevant and popular.

The focus for any website owner now is to create quality content and then link to that content from other high-quality, relevant sites.

How to do Link Building with content

In general, increasing the number of backlinks pointing to your website will improve your website’s search ranking. For more links, contact authorized websites or blogs to see if you can provide a guest post or article. That post or article will contain a link to your website.

It’s much easier to build links to your site when you have high-quality content. Remember that without good content your online business has no value for your audience. It doesn’t have to be a literary masterpiece, but it should be relevant and interesting.

evergreen content

The content can be an article, blog post, report, e-book, online course, video, or audio. The best type of content is the one that is classified as ‘evergreen’. This means that the information presented does not go out of date, so it will remain relevant for years to come. That means you’ll still have content on your site that’s worth linking to.

social networks

It is true that Google still relies on ‘traditional links’, ie links from other authority sites. We are now seeing a shift towards Google and Bing being more interested in what is happening on social media.

What social media links are great for is reaching your real customers live. This is a way to drive traffic to your site without having to worry about what Google or Bing are doing. Once again, content is king. If you continually produce high-quality content, your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ will share, comment, and vote on these posts.