If you look up anything on link building, web content or SEO, you are going to hear many of the same, repetitious things. Yes, of course, good content is still critical. Search engine bots can’t crawl a website that contains no metadata and, subsequently, no data on its actual pages. That text must be relevant, pertinent, and engaging, not just for bots and ranking, but for actual human eyes. As much as SEO experts like to focus on the future, the fact of the matter is that the same elements that were critical 10 years ago are still the most important ones today. This is the reason why link building is still one of the key building blocks of SEO in 2019 and beyond.
Why Do You Still Need Link Building?
Link building is still important. In fact, it is crucial because it rests on the principle of trust. When an internet user goes to a website that they know is well reputed, they click on the links without even a glimmer of doubt. Although search engines work a little differently, they also use trust as a factor. Just in the same manner that you wouldn’t add spammy links to any website that you have painstakingly built, the sites that you should be linking to will follow the same rules. Considering it a circle of trust would be a bit cheesy, but that’s truly how it works. Go to a website that you regularly frequent and you will click on whatever link you find interesting. Your website also needs to use link building so that it becomes discoverable as well as trustworthy.
Building a Reputation
You can write content or pay others to do it, but it is undeniable that your website needs lots of well-written, well-researched, and unique content to be noticed. Even then, just writing and posting a lot of content is probably not the most efficient way to grow a new website. You want people to see it and maybe comment and share what they read. Eventually, you might like seeing some of your website’s content going viral. Videos and pictures can help with that a lot, but ultimately, link building is one of the better ways of spreading the word. Realize that people go on the web because they are seeking information. Their searches are meant to provide that information in the most efficient manner possible. That’s why they mainly use trusted websites where that data has already been vetted and curated for them.
Link building Is Critical for Niche Sites
A smaller website or a niche web property is going to have to rely on link building even more. A few years ago, you used to be able to search up the popularity of keywords with Google webmaster tools, but that information is a lot harder to find, especially for free. With link building, you can do market research and learn what traffic is coming to your website based on keywords as well as links. If you are looking to appeal to a very specific subgroup of internet users, link building can literally be the key to your success. Realize that link building campaigns aren’t something that you do quickly and expect the most noticeable results to come immediately. No, link building is like forming a snowball, then slowly pushing it downhill. With time, it will build in size, gain momentum, and keep on going without very much human intervention at all.
Creating an Internet Footprint
Normally, when people refer to internet footprints, they are referencing the trail that individual web users leave when they do things such as sign guest books or even leave reviews on Amazon. For webmasters, creating an internet footprint is more related to the soft yet indelible impressions they make on the web when their website gets mentioned elsewhere. For example, on forums, users may reference a website by name alone or by including a hyperlink back to the actual website. That is a footprint that will never go away for as long as the forum remains online. Even then, there are databases containing copies of websites that go all the way back to the very beginning of the internet. While this may not be an intentional form of link building, it can be just as critical. The only way that you get these kinds of footprints is by putting out good content, link building in the classic way, and running the kind of website that simply can’t be ignored.
The Internet Never Stops Growing
Since the inception of the internet, never once has it stopped growing, gotten smaller in size, or become stagnant. This is a fact you have to consider when you are deciding on whether or not to do link building or some other form of SEO. You may not be working on building links for your website, but you can bet your bottom dollar that someone else, likely someone in your niche, is. Indeed, the internet is not getting less complicated. This means that the web surfers you want to lead to your website are going to have a few more obstacles in their way, unless you grow with the internet instead of letting it grow around your website, potentially swallowing it up.
Consider how you use the internet each day to get to where you want to go. There are a few websites where you may type in the full address. Other sites you probably head to by using search engines and typing in a website name or a search term you know will lead you there. It is also likely that you keep a list of links for the websites that you visit most frequently. These might be websites that you found via other sources on the internet. What is guaranteed is that there are thousands, perhaps millions of web users who find new websites to frequent by way of backlinks. This trend will continue throughout 2019 and beyond as link building is the biggest tool within the reach of webmasters everywhere.