Link Building Services

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What is Link Building?

Link Building is an arm of search engine optimisation, which is itself a major element of digital marketing. It is the process of building a network of links with the aim of increasing the rankings of a specific page of a website or across the site.

Link building is generally regarded as the process of building in-bound links to a website, either to the home page or targeted inner pages. By targeting high quality and relevant inbound links and building them in a natural way, the domain authority of the website will increase and so will the page authority of the targeted inner page(s). Providing all other elements of the on-page SEO, content and technical SEO have been fully optimised, then this increase in domain and page authority will improve the ranking of target key words. Link building also includes the process of internal link building which helps build the page authority of second and third tier internal pages by helping the search engines navigate the most important pages of a website.

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Why is Link Building Important?

Link building is a primary tool in increasing the ranking of your web pages which ultimately should lead to more visibility, more traffic, more leads, and more sales. A link is seen as a vote of confidence in the page. Search engines use links to navigate around the web. They use links to discover new pages which can be used in the search results, and they also use links to determine how well a page should rank in their search results. When a search engine crawls a new page, not only does it look at the quality of the content to determine how well it should rank, but it also looks at the number of links to that page from external websites and the quality of those links.

As a very simplified conclusion, the more high-quality websites that link to your website, the more likely you are to rank well in search results such as Google and Bing, bringing more traffic and more sales.

A Brief History of Link Building Importance in Search Engine Optimisation

Larry Page, one of Google’s founders invented PageRank, which was used by Google to estimate the quality of a web page using the number of links (alongside other factors) into the web page. This system was then utilised as an element of the overall ranking algorithm and became a prominent way of determining the quality of a page. It was shown that this was a significant factor in the search engine delivering more relevant search results, and this major invention is why Google began to dominate the search engine market back in the 1990’s. However, this simple factor of the more links the better was too easy to manipulate and it wasn’t long before PageRank and search results for target keywords started to be unfairly influenced. The problem, Google discovered, was although their algorithms were far more advanced than other research engines, they were still not very good at spotting the differences between a high-quality link and a low-quality link.

It was at this point that Google started working on ways to find websites that were influencing search results through poor quality link building practices and didn’t deserve to rank and to filter them out from results. As a result of this change, Google started to give a lower level of importance to many link building techniques that had prior to the 1990’s worked very well. This caused many SEO agencies problems, as prior to 1990, Google actively encouraged these techniques.

This process of actively discouraging certain link building techniques had significant repercussions for many sites as Google began to activity penalise websites that had been seen to abuse link building and that had been over-optimised.

This focus on over-optimisation started to accelerate in 2012 as Google released several SEO updates targeted at specific link building techniques The first being the well documented Penguin Update. From the moment the Penguin Update was released, low-quality link building techniques could damage a website’s ability to rank well in organic search results and be considered a complete waste of time.

Our Link Building Services

At Piranha we provide link building as either a stand-alone link building solution or as part of a full-service digital marketing package. All packages are bespoke and created depending on your goals, the competitiveness of your market and the level of activity required to make the required difference to your website’s visibility and uplift in rankings. We only use White Hat link building techniques, and they are all managed and delivered by our in-house link building team. We start with an audit of your link building to see what your link profile currently is, what past activity has taken place, the health of your link profile and how you compare to your competitors on a number of linking factors such as quality, quantity, and relevance. From this audit, we create a bespoke link building plan and strategy including self-submission link building, business directories, news releases, guest blogging, outreach, internal linking, and the creation of on-page content. We have a database of over 3,000 trusted sites, site owners and website administrators that we work with regularly to build quality backlink profiles for our clients.

All the sites are checked for Domain Authority, Page Authority, relevance, and spam score before engaging with the building plan.

Link Management Services

If you have ever carried out an audit of your site’s backlinks you will see a number of links that have resulted from marketing activity that has previously been undertaken, such as entering a business award, distribution of a press release or agreeing to an inclusion in a paid for directory. Generally, you will be happy with this. You will also see a number of links that you don’t recognise, but on further inspection, they come from reputable sites, adding value to your domain authority and SEO activity. These are often generated because you have ‘sharable’ content on your website (sometimes referred to as link bait) or the content has been picked up and shared from the sites that have published your content. You will also see a number of links from sites you don’t recognise that might have low domain authorities and high spam scores. This can often happen if you have created a link from what was once a reputable business directory site, and the domain name has lapsed and been purchased by another company or individual and repurposed for less savory activities. These poor links can also be the result of previous poor quality link building practices when the volume, rather than quality of the links, was of primary concern.

Here at Piranha, we provide a full link management service where we audit and then manage the quality and profile of your backlinks, removing unsavory links and building links from higher domain authority sites, with more relevance, and focusing on the right balance of follow and no follow links. If you have any concerns regarding your link profile, please get in touch.

Backlink Audits

When we take on board a new digital marketing client, one of the first things we do is carry out a Backlink Audit. This audit will show us a complete history of the backlink profile and will highlight at moments in time any unusual link building activities. We will see the number and growth of the backlinks, the number of referring domains responsible for these backlinks, the Top-Level Domains of the sites, the geographical origin of the linking websites, Domain Authority, Page Authority, spam score, and if the links are follow, no follow or classed as content links. We can also use the audit to see what keywords have been used to create the links and what pages these links are targeting.

This same audit can be used to understand the link building position and strategy of competitors, so we understand the tasks ahead to compete with them. We can also uncover specific, niche sites that competitors might have used to build links and target the same sites for our own links.

A summary audit report is produced each month for our clients so they can quickly see the progress being made against our link building strategy and goals.

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Internal Link Building

Internal link building is building links from any internal page to another. It is used for both site users and search engines to navigate around the site. The more links a target page has, the more importance the search engines will place on that page, therefore, a good internal link building strategy is a crucial element to on page SEO. However, like all elements of SEO, go too far and it can be seen as spammy and can do more harm than good. Some sources suggest the maximum number of links per page should be 100, however, from a customer experience point of view, links in text should be limited to well below this number.

At Piranha, internal link building forms a core function of our SEO services. It is part of our link building strategy and tied into our content marketing activities. You will see from the blog posts we produce for our clients that there is a clear link between the content of the blog posts, the internal link building strategy, the meta data, and off page SEO work, all designed to target specific key words and key phrases and improve key word rankings on the major search engines.

Link Removal Services

Not all links are good links and many sites suffered from the Google updates and were penalised for manipulating search results through the acquisition of low-quality links. 34% of SEO professionals have admitted to building bad links to competitors’ sites through negative link building and whilst Google has taken this into consideration and no longer penalises sites as much for bad links, there are still sites that slip through the net and will require removal to avoid negatively affecting your link profile. These links generally originate from the following scenarios: penalised domains, link directories and link farms, from ‘bad neighbourhoods’ (such as online gambling), and non-native language sites. Also, a large number of links from unrelated websites or a large number of exact-match anchor text links can have a negative impact. If you think your site has suffered from bad links or if you have suddenly suffered a fall in SEO performance, contact us today and we can carry out a backlink audit.

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Start Your Link Building Project with Piranha Today!

Starting your Link Building project today with Piranha could not be easier. Simply call our head office in Preston, Lancashire on 01772 888331 or fill in one of our website enquiry forms and one of our digital specialists will have a chat to you about your requirements. We may be able to provide a quick quote based on the outcome of the conversation, but we would prefer to come and visit you, or organise a Zoom call to learn more about your company, your market, your competitors and what your targets and aspirations are.