What is natural link building and how does it affect SEO? Is it another myth or does it happen for real and what is the impact on rankings and traffic?
I will try to provide answers to the above questions using the blog you are reading now as a case study and also give you examples of natural links.
What is natural link building?
Natural link building is exactly what the name suggests i.e. links that are created naturally without the website owner having to go and generate them either through guest posting, or other forms of link building practices.
In simple words, natural links happen when other webmasters, bloggers or website owners link to your content (blogs, images, products, videos etc) because they think is useful for their readers and adds value to their websites or pages.
Is natural link building important?
It is widely accepted in the SEO industry that having natural links is the best, safest, fastest and among the most efficient ways to promote a blog or website.
With natural links you can feel secure that your content is good and that your rankings and traffic will not be affected by a Google algorithmic change.
Is it another SEO Myth?
One of the things I had real trouble understanding when I first started with blogging was ‘how to get natural links’. I did not know what I had to do so that other people find and link to my content. I always believed that this was a myth and that the only way to get links was to build them.
The problem with building links though is that sooner or later Google will find out that the links are not natural and you will end up losing both your rankings and traffic. Even worse, they may also impose a penalty on your domain and that will make it even more difficult for you.
So, the only way to gain rankings is to avoid bad practices but follow pure white had SEO techniques and natural link building is one of them.
What were the actual benefits from natural links?
- Traffic – All the above websites have lots of traffic and the day the posts were featured on their home pages, I got a good amount of traffic coming to my blog.
- Industry recognition – It is always good to get referenced by some of the top blogs in your industry.
- More natural links – When the big guys link to you, other blogs link to you as well. If you are important for the big blogs, you are also important for the smaller blogs.
- Courage – Similar to the 2nd, but when you see those natural links flowing in, you get more courage to continue what you do.
- More social shares – The posts that attracted natural links were the ones that got the most attention in social media networks as well.
- Better rankings – Incoming links do affect rankings and the pages that received those links enjoy good first page rankings.
How do you get natural links?
Obviously this is the most important question of this article. The benefits of natural links are all great but how do you get them? It’s a three step process and one that I am sure you heard before but let’s review it again:
#1-Write/publish/create good content – If the content is not good then nobody will naturally link to it. If you are still at the beginning and nobody is reading you content don’t get disappointed; write like your articles are read by thousands of people and try to make them better and better. Don’t just look for the present but try to plan for the future. When the time comes and traffic will start flowing in, you have to be ready with good content to keep your visitors engaged