While the SEO work that provides strong search engine rankings has taken a shift into focusing more strongly on content in recent years. Ensuring that your website is promoted and popular across other sites on the web is still a strong factor that is considered when search engines calculate their rankings.
Unfortunately in the past, due to some less reputable Saudi Arabian SEO firms, building inbound links was something that gave the SEO industry a bad name. This was because links were being built with the intention of improving search rankings without the consideration for quality and relevance resulting in poorer experiences for web users.
Fortunately search engines have now cracked down on this link spamming and no longer benefit the cheats, they now actually penalise sites for displaying link techniques that are outside of their guidelines. Link building is now strongly based in quality not quantity. A great rule to live by is “Only build a link if it will be useful for web users”. This way you also double up your promotion in creating referral traffic from other sites at the same time as helping your search engine rankings.
The most efficient way to obtain inbound links is to create content that is unique, engaging, and informative and above all else, something that users are interested in. I love the moment that I find a gem of a topic that, through keyword research, I have identified that users are searching for, but no one has yet created any web content for. Also please do not fall into the trap of thinking that content is just the written word, this can include, images, infographics, stats/data/graphs, videos or even a piece of useful software. If you are able to provide something useful to web users that no one else has, other webmasters will link to it.
Many businesses that have approached us over the years have a hugely impressive offline reputation, yet online their website and online presence does not represent the quality of their company. One of the quickest ways links can be obtained is to talk to offline contacts.
There are literally thousands of different websites on which your business can be listed. However you do not want to just blanket list your site across as many as possible, because while listing on many sites would be a waste of time. This also appears unprofessional to both users and search engines. Also when you change address/phone No etc how it is unlikely you will be able to keep up with all of the listings and you will have conflicting information across the web. So the best solution is to create listings across only those that are:
Likely to generate traffic for your site
Keeping these rules in mind, this will generate a nice sub-section of listings that will benefit your business.
Similarly, there are also thousands of sites you can submit press releases, articles and provide guest blog articles to. Ensure that the same rules are followed, only using sites that are:
Likely to generate traffic for your site
Also you need to ensure your articles are:
Good quality and contain information that is important to visitors of the site
Not directly copied from your site
the most beneficial, but also the most time consuming forms of online marketing is to identify relevant sites, blogs or social accounts where there is a strong following, then take the time to connect with the webmaster allowing you to promote your business through their channels. Offering incentives to the other webmaster can often be strong, or offering great quality, original content for their site.