One of the most important elements of your online marketing and SEO efforts involves link building. Along with creating new, fresh, and pertinent content and having a website that’s easy to navigate and doesn’t contain missing pages, you need to have external links from reputable individuals and/or companies that point users to your website. Remember, it’s all about the search engine algorithms. If they see that your site is being referenced as a place to get solid, timely, and useful information, you’ll index higher (hopefully higher than your competitors).

Of the 3 aforementioned elements of a strong SEO position, link building is the most challenging. You are relying on others outside your organization to point to your site as one users should go to get good, reliable, and useful content.

Create a persona

First, think about the person, or persona, you’re trying to attract. Are they homeowners, people of a certain income level, specific occupations or ages, etc.? It’s your ideal customer, those you’re writing for when you create content, collateral, case studies, press releases, and ads.

Get a hook

Determine what exactly is going to hook your ideal persona into going to your site. What will attract them and get them to go to, and link, to you? These hooks are called assets, and can be products, services, information, and content, to name a few.

Set goals, realistic ones

Set your link-building goals and make sure they’re realistic. Sure, you want to have a lot of external links directing users to your site, but you want links that pertain to your business, products, and solutions. In other words, you want links to attract the right persona(s).

Keep this in mind―link building, at least in terms of achieving results, isn’t something you’ll see immediately. Once external sources are directing users to your site, that doesn’t mean visitors to your site will immediately double or triple. And, like everything related to SEO, you can’t set-it-and-forget-it. Maintaining a good SEO strategy is like working out. If you get in shape, you won’t stay that way if you stop. Oh, also, it’s not easy to track the results of your link-building campaign.

What type of links do you want?

Are you looking to link to your home page, product page(s), ones that contain the keywords you’re targeting, etc.? There are a number of free sites that will gauge your link-building efforts by simply typing in your URL. You’ll get quick information about your links, both internal and external, how they compare to your competitors’, and how you’re doing relative to your keywords. For instance, are there links directing visitors to your website that contain a particular keyword that’s important to your business? There need to be.

Don’t get discouraged. Building links is not easy; in fact, it’s the hardest element of SEO

It’s not terribly hard to get users to read your content, but it must be good and pertinent enough to get them to send it to others. That’s the part that is tough. It’s easier to do on social media, but harder as it relates to content on your website. Remember, you’ll need some kind of hook, something that, as people read it, makes them think I need to share this.

Questions about how to build links to your site?

Talk to the highly experienced professionals at d2 Designs. d2 is the most innovative digital marketing agency in D/FW. We create, execute, and manage multi-marketing solutions for customers with a focus on brand engagement that optimizes the digital experience through traditional media, video production, social media, lead gen and key analytics, and e-commerce and experiential events. Check us out at d2.design, or email us at info@d2.design. And please follow us via social media for more great, informative digital marketing tips and suggestions.