Link building has been a popular SEO strategy in the past and will continue to be an integral part of any SEO package or campaign. Put simply, link building is the process of getting other sites to link to yours, which is a major part of any search engine optimisation strategy in 2022. This article takes a look at the benefits of link building for SEO in 2022.

To start with a good link building strategy, you will want to develop valuable content relevant to your industry or niche, services or products. When you develop your content, make sure it is a high quality with both the value of the content, and the way it is written, paying attention to relevant subheadings, keywords and grammatical errors.

Developing new, quality content on a regular basis is the key to building a strong backlink profile.

Content and how it Benefits Link Building

The more useful and relevant your website content is, the more valuable your links will be and the more successful your search engine ranking will become. This in turn will result in a good amount of website traffic, not just from those looking for particular services, but also from people searching for information about those services.

What happens once a visitor clicks on your link is that they are directed to your website. If they like what they see, they will most likely use your website as a future resource. The more website traffic you receive, the higher the chance of content shares, links back to your content, and enquires or sales through your website.

Aside from the more obvious benefits of link building above, links achieved through amazing content and SEO copywriting will have a positive impact on your SEO. Showing search engines that your content is credible, authoritative, and worth linking to.

A link to your website, is effectively a vote of confidence.

And, the more links you have, and the higher the quality of the websites linking to you, the better your own website will rank. You are demonstrating to search engines that you are a reputable source of information for your industry or niche.

Benefits of Link Building

There are a number of benefits of link building, which all serve to increase your search engine ranking. One benefit is that it increases your chances of being listed high in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Backlinks can be from any website, but the most effective will be websites related to your own. Google and other search engines are able to establish whether the linking site is related to your industry, the quality or the linking site, and how many other sites the website links to. Plus many other factors. In short, Google knows a genuine link, or referral.

One of the best benefits of link building arises from how it builds your reputation. This is because it is often a difficult to obtain good quality inbound links. You will often need to submit articles and other materials to directories, create forum discussions or participate in discussion boards. Each of these processes will work to build your credibility, which is important because this will work to increase the trustworthiness of the information that you provide.

Quality Links over Quantity

As I mentioned above, the best links are those that are genuine and link to something providing value on your website. These are often referred to as ‘earned backlinks’. Put simply, someone has found your content online, and decided that it is worth linking to from their own material as a valuable resource.

Often, too often, website owners and even some agencies will buy backlinks in bulk. My advice, don’t do it!

Bought links are most commonly done via the use of PBNs or Private Blog Networks. These are essentially farms of WordPress blogs, filled with spun or scraped content. Links are usually inserted as anchor text through an automated process. Viewing one of these linking articles will uncover a mess of irrelevant text, poor grammar, and anchor text peppered across the article, making no sense.

Google is wise to these practices, and with every core update the search engine builds further on identifying poor quality links . And commonly today, they are completely disregarded as links to your website. In some cases, penalties are issued in the form of Manual Actions. These are penalties following a manual review by Google staff.

A handful of quality, earned backlinks, will outweigh hundreds of bought links.

Conclusion: Benefits of Link Building

Link Building is by no means an easy or straightforward process. But it’s a factor that has a huge impact on how your website will fare in organic search. The importance only grows year on year, as search engine work to reduce websites trying to manipulate the system for ranking gains.

It’s always worth taking the time to do it right. Those competitors that have seen short term wins by buying backlinks in bulk, will soon start to free fall down the SERPs.

Be the go-to source of information in your industry or niche. Include informative articles, case studies, facts, stats, infographics, and stand out from the crowd.

Invest the time in your content, and the links will find you!