Not too long ago—just five years ago, in fact—one of the best ways to earn that high-ranking spot in Google search results was to litter your page with outgoing links. It didn’t matter if the links were relevant to your page’s content or not. The big hope was that potentially you would be backlinked as well via the same method. Backlinks to your site were, and still are, equally as crucial to achieving that high SERP (search engine ranking placement). The blackhat way to get those backlinks was to buy them. But the good little whitehat and grayhat SEO experts threw links to the wind to see what would stick (bring a backlink). Throwing around anchor links was also quite popular, whether it was necessary for the page or not.
I’m sure you can imagine what a cluster that looked like on a webpage.
Since then, Google has gotten a bit wise to the outgoing link frenzy. It’s partially because of optimizers using these tricks to climb ahead, but it’s mostly because Google only wants to usher content in front of users that they want. Users don’t enjoy reading content full of nonsensical links. Users want content that is meaningful for them, what they are searching for, above all else.
Building links within your page is still important, especially when it comes to those precious, precious backlinks, but link building will not save your page from bad SEO.
Link building will not save your page from bad SEO.
Yes, you still should include links in your webpage. However, these links need to be meaningful to the content within the page. For example, if you’re selling business software and blogging about why the way your company implements Microsoft Dynamics 365 better than others, linking to random pages from various words on your page will do you more harm than good.
Instead, link back to any other pages or blog posts that might have mentioned a similar topic to what is in the content. From the example above, perhaps link back to the company’s page on buying Dynamics 365. Definitely include a contact link in a call-to-action. (You’ll see I’ll have that at the bottom of this post!) If there are outside resources that prove your point about your business’ method for implementing Dynamics 365, link to those. These links, both the self-backlinks and the outgoing links, are highly relevant to the content on your page.
And that, my friends, is what Google looks for; they want content that is meaningful to the user and what the user is searching for. To better serve your desired searchers, look to your content formatting, your keyword phrase, how the keywords are used, and your outgoing links. You don’t need many. They just need to be valuable to searchers.
Need help with your own link building? I can help with that.
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