Whether you are a small business owner or a multinational corporation, it is very important for your business that it ranks high on search engines. Adopting strategies to boost your search engine optimization or SEO ranking is therefore a necessity if you want to raise awareness amongst your target audience, gain considerable traffic to your website and hopefully convert a good number of this traffic into paying customers.

To improve your SEO, you definitely need to have quality content to offer on your site and this can be by way of blog articles, infographics or even marketing and explanatory videos. But another thing you need to have in order to boost your SEO ranking is link building.

What is link building?

Link building is where you aim to improve your ranking on search engines by having relevant websites link to any of the pages available on your site. Note that for search engines, quality takes precedence over quantity, so in order to have top-notch websites link to pages on your site, you will need to churn out highly relevant, informative, educative and entertaining content which would be prime candidates for receiving comments or being shared and linked by other websites.

Search engines like Google will give your site a high ranking on search engine results pages or SERPs when it sees that you have content that is being linked on various webpages on the world wide web.

As mentioned before, quantity really doesn’t matter, but quality does. So what matters is the value and quality of the links and not the number of links there is.

Imagine having your website content being linked by a site that entertains hundreds of thousands of visitors and views on a monthly basis. This is indeed a mouthwatering prospect and one that search engines like Google tend to give a lot of preference over when it comes to SERPs.

Link building is all about establishing relationships

Webmasters tend to check out the sites that are driving traffic to the website they manage. If a webmaster sees that your site is providing rich, relevant, superior and valuable content that will be highly beneficial to the visitors to their own site, you may even be contacted to know if your content can be reposted on their site.

This is a relationship you would want to build, as you could also be requested to provide content directly on these sites as a guest contributor which would ultimately be beneficial to your own objectives.

Meet industry relevant influencers

You can get started with building relationships by coming up with a short list of possible influencers that you believe would serve as fantastic partners for your link building objective. There are free tools that you can use to help you in finding those influencers that you can partner with to help promote your website content.

However, to establish such relationships, you can join industry relevant forums where you will get to meet influencers and strike up a conversation with them starting by letting them know who you are and what exactly your business is all about.