As you delve into the world of marketing to grow your business, you’ve probably heard a lot about building out links on your content pages. But what does that really mean, and how does it help your business grow?

Linking is currently one of the top ways to boost your organic rankings on Google Search. There are a number of reasons for links – some direct and some holistic. Let’s dive into these reasons now.

 

Helps Google Crawl Your Pages

At a high level, there are two types of links: those that remain on your domain (i.e. internal), and those that are directed to another domain or website’s page (i.e. external). Internal links allow Google to easily pinpoint, or crawl, all of your individual webpages.

Google naturally lands on webpages through its algorithm, but it can take a long time if there are no links to your webpages. By including internal links to these webpages, Google will be able to follow the links and index your pages so they can be served up when someone searches a relevant keyword. It essentially removes a step so that Google can find your webpages quicker, and you can start receiving traffic from search engines.
 

Improves Your Organic Ranking Capabilities

Now that Google has been able to index your pages and serve them to searchers, link building will also help you improve your ranking on these search queries.

All of your pages have been indexed via your internal links, meaning that you’re likely to show up for any relevant searches, and including any relevant external links will improve your validity with Google.

Google likes to show the best content to its searchers, so by equating your own content with a strong and high-quality site through the use of links, Google is more likely to improve your own quality ranking.

Further, when visitors to your site arrive through Google and then they click the back button once they’ve finished with your webpage, (instead of clicking through to other pages) Google takes this as an indication that your webpage didn’t answer their question and will demote your rankings. By using links, the visitor is more likely to keep clicking through to continue to learn more information.
 

Improves Your Visitor’s Experience

Since Google takes a user’s actions in mind when determining search ranking, you want to include relevant links that will provide more information to the user. With that being said, you should consider this beneficial overall to the visitors or leads visiting your website.

If you are writing strong content that answers someone’s question, and can also provide further reading and information to help them continue learning, this visitor will likely return to your website to answer any of their future questions. Better yet, they might become leads and potential business for you.
 

Fosters Relationships with Other Startups

Linking to other startups is a great way to foster relationships. All modern websites are looking to receive links, and in turn traffic, from other domains and send traffic to others. Many websites are tracking who’s linking to them. By sending traffic their way, they are more likely to reciprocate, which helps build your audience pool and a digital community.
 

Developing Backlinks

Backlinks are links to your website from other domains. They are one of the strongest ways to improve your SEO and rankings.

When Google sees a link from a high-quality website to a smaller, lesser known yet relevant website, the algorithm will improve the rank and quality score of that smaller website, ultimately boosting their SEO and keyword ranks.

You’ve probably received emails from strangers asking you to link to their website on one of your blog articles. These people are link building, which you may consider doing in the future. They’re likely a smaller company hoping to receive links from you to help improve their own rank.

Though developing backlinks takes some planning and time, it will garner great long-lasting improvements on your own organic traffic, helping to generate more leads for your business.