Link building is an important part of SEO.

It can show Google that your site is relevant, plus it brings in referral traffic from other sites.

Unfortunately, link building isn’t quite as easy as plugging in some keywords or filling out your meta description.

Let’s look a little at exactly how link building works, and how you can do it right.

What is Link Building?

In an easy-to-understand nutshell, link building is getting other websites to link to yours. These links help search engines and readers find their way around the Internet and navigate from page to page.

Like researched keywords, link building is an important part of SEO. While we may see just the anchor text, search engines see it as a referral. Like with any part of business, the more referrals you have, the better. The more websites you have pointing to your own site, the higher your page ranking.

How to Build Your Links

There are a number of ways to gain links to your site. And you may have heard you can buy backlinks. And while this may be a quick and easy way to get them, according to Google, buying or selling links can actually negatively affect your page rank.

Instead, focus your efforts on other methods. While it may take a bit longer, you will gain quality backlinks honestly, and make some beneficial online connections along the way. Here’s what to do:

Write posts worth linking to. The first thing you should do, is write posts that other businesses want to link back to. This means thorough how-to articles that benefit not only your readers, but others in your industry. Look for other articles in your industry and strive to write posts that go above and beyond.

Reach out to other websites. As you are building these posts, look for others sites that have linked to posts similar to yours. Once you have published the post, reach out to those sites and ask if they’d consider adding your link. You don’t have to go into detail, in fact, busy business owners and bloggers would rather you not write an extremely long email. Something short and sweet like:

I really liked your post on ___, and I liked what you said about (something you liked). I wrote a similar post I thought you might be interested in: (add your link)

You don’t even have to actually ask for something. Because if you did your job and wrote a post worth linking to, they will link to it.

Guest post. Lastly, write posts on other blogs. When you write valuable content on other sites in your industry, you get an author bio, with a link back to your site. Some sites will even allow you to link to relevant articles you have written within your post. If the site you are writing for ranks high, these links back to your site look very good in Google’s eyes.

Getting links pointing at your site is great for traffic and SEO. It shows both readers and search engines that your content is worth reading. Build your backlinks the right way by writing good content, reaching out to others and guest posting.