You have invested in a quality website; it looks great and it’s working well. Now the traffic will come flowing in.
Unfortunately, it rarely works like this. When you first build a website, it is like setting up a shop on a backstreet. To move it to the shopping center, you need a link-building strategy – and specifically, a plan for creating one-way links. Read on to find out how…
What Are one-Way Links?
Links to your site from other sites, particularly sites with a higher domain authority (DA) than yours, are useful because they demonstrate reputability to search engines. This means those all-important algorithms such as Google’s, will deem your website to be authoritative and useful because other sites are linking back to it. One-way links – where you don’t have a link back to the source from your own website – are especially important because they carry less risk and are valued much more by Google. This means they can have a significant impact on your search engine visibility.
Reciprocal links, on the other hand, carry a few potential problems to be aware of. Firstly, they form part of a two-way relationship, whereby you link to the other site in return. The problem here lies in the fact that visitors to your site might become distracted and click on one of the links you have posted. Once you have traffic to your site, the last thing you need is them drifting over to another site! Equally, reciprocal links can be perceived as an attempt to manipulate the search engine, especially if these link exchanges are carried out on a large scale. This is against Google’s terms, and you could end up being penalized.
How to Create one-Way Links
So, now you know what kind of link will benefit your site, let’s explore how best to create them. While you can achieve one-way links through a number of relatively straightforward strategies, to maximize their success, it’s best to use a variety of different techniques.
Launch a Guest Posting Campaign
Posting original, informative content on blogging sites with an appropriate link back to your site is generally considered to be the most powerful link-building strategy. A word of warning, though: the content must be useful and relevant, both in terms of being accepted by an authoritative site, and of course, to maximize the likelihood of it being read. It cannot be promotional, as bloggers will refuse it. If your content is original and informative, readers are more likely to share the post on social media. This leads us on to…
Social Media Link
Having a range of links on social media platforms is an excellent, cost-effective way of boosting your SEO. What’s most important though, is understanding how each platform works in order to best use its features. On Facebook, for example, you can create a description of the link within a post, whereas, on Instagram, you need to post a link using the ‘Story Editor’ feature. Links on Reddit posts can also be useful if they’re posted in the right ‘subreddit’, but beware – what you post must be informative so that it achieves ‘upvotes’ within its community.
Build Multilingual Links
If you are branching out into different countries, it is vital that you develop a multilingual link-building strategy. If you have websites within different language zones, keeping track of the SEO for each one can be a minefield. What works well in one country may not be effective within another, so using an international SEO partner with expertise across a range of countries – and the cultural expectations within them – can be a useful solution.
One company that offers this SEO service in most European languages is indigoextra.com.
Submit to a Directory
Submitting to a business directory creates one-way links which influence your search engine ranking. And, as long as you submit your listing to the right category, and your site functions well without any broken links, you are very likely to be accepted. Directory submissions can be particularly helpful for local search, as the Google algorithm tries to offer the most relevant results depending on where you are.
If you choose this route, focus on the top directories, particularly those relevant to your industry and use unique company descriptions for each one. There’s no benefit to having hundreds of links from directories that no one ever visits.
Summary
While one-way links are without a doubt a necessity for gaining relevant traffic to your website, achieving these links can feel like a minefield – especially at the outset. Once you have started implementing a few of the techniques outlined above, you will begin to see your rankings improved as well as an influx of traffic to your site.