Outsource Linkbuilding or Do It Yourself?
Your organic position within Google and other search engines is incredibly important for your website. This position is largely determined by backlinks, which you obtain through link building. You can definitely do this yourself, but most companies will prefer to outsource link building. Wonder how it works? Read on!
By using SEA (Search Engine Advertising), you can, for a fee, ensure that your website appears at the top of certain searches. This can contribute greatly to, for instance, your organisation's brand awareness and it can also certainly lead to more conversions. Yet we see many consumers skip the top websites because they are ads. They may have read your organisation's name in combination with what they are looking for, which is incredibly useful, but they still click on the websites below it.
The websites that are at the top underneath the paid ads are at the top because of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). These are also called the 'organic search results' and they are ranked according to their score on three pillars: technology, content and authority. Technology refers to the performance of your websites - their speed and reliability among other things, while content looks at the extent to which your website contains content you are looking for. Authority is completely determined by link building. Link building is the process of creating relevant backlinks to your website. This can be quite a difficult and time-consuming job, which is why many organisations prefer to outsource link building.
So Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines judge your website by the other websites that link to yours. Of course, it would be nice if high-ranking, relevant websites did this on their own - and this does happen very occasionally, but in the vast majority of cases you will have to arrange this yourself. This does always require personal contact and sometimes even payment, which adds up to time and money. But how exactly does this work?
There are different ways of backlinking. One well-known way is to write a good article that is then taken over by another website, obviously with a link to the original page. This is something you should actively ask for yourself - most websites have contact details so you can discuss it with them yourself. You can also swap links with another website. After all, it doesn't have to be a whole article, you can also just have a 'link page' somewhere on your website where you have placed links from other websites. So you can agree with another website to both place a link from the other on a link page. You could also do this in the ABC link exchange way; here, a website (A) links to website B of yours, and your website C links to website A again.
What is mainly important in link building is that the websites linking to yours should be relevant in terms of subject matter and that the websites rank well according to all the pillars of SEO. This requires knowledge, time and personal contact, which is why many organisations find link building outsourcing the best option.
Outsource link building?
At The Dare Company, we have extensive experience with all forms of link building, so we are happy to take this off your hands. If you have any more questions on this topic or have otherwise become interested, we would love to hear from you!