Links to your site from other places on the web matter, a lot. It’s one way the search engines tell how popular and authoritative your site is, and popular, authoritative sites rank higher in search.
If a lot of people like your content, link to it from their own blog posts or websites, and reference your content in research or news articles, it will help drive traffic. Google and Bing are going to reference your content more often in response to queries. Sounds magical. It's a lot of work, but that's how all the big websites keep, and grow, traffic.
Link building done right takes a concentrated effort in outreach. Gone (mostly) are the days where you could buy links. There are still link schemes out there, but Google is on the lookout. When they are uncovered, the links end up either ignored or penalized, and you could lose lots of traffic if that happens. We don’t recommend that.
Dozens of low-value links (from sites with no traffic, or sites that have nothing in common with you) will not have an impact on your site ranking like just a few high-value links can have. That’s why you should avoid “get-links-quick” schemes that link your site to low-quality websites. Instead, seek out links from authoritative authors and websites that are involved in your market.
BUILDING LINKS WITH REAL VALUE FEELS A LOT LIKE PUBLIC RELATIONS, BECAUSE IT IS.
They can. Press releases are a public relations necessity, but they don’t have much of an effect on backlink building (Google doesn't think much of press releases) unless they get picked up and referenced by other publications. Most web release services issue “no follow” links, which aren’t links, but “mentions” or citations. They have less value than an actual link to your website, but they can still help.
This is when your relationship with editors and influential bloggers comes into play. After you release, start calling and emailing. It's critical that releases are announced on your website and cross-posted on social media. You want to ensure every chance your release will get referenced, and one of your relationships might just give you that elusive live link that will drive traffic.
To be truly effective, press releases need to be about an important new product, service or concept, maybe a significant sale or contract, a merger, or that you hired someone who already has a significant web audience. The last thing you want to do is spam your market with dozens of releases a month with little value. Those quickly get buried. Eventually, editors and writers will ignore your releases even if they are important. Quality beats quantity.
This falls into a slightly different category, but you’ll notice that a number of the pages of this website include lists that can easily be referenced by search engines and other authors. Examples would be “Two Reasons Content Fails” and “Six Steps to Local SEO Success”. They are our own live tests. We'll add schema where appropriate to help the search engines see that content. We’ll see what gets linked to, and then we’ll supercharge them. We’ll add infographics, or videos. We are firm believers in the best way to generate links is with great content, including the format that's used to present it.
There’s another basic way to venture into backlink building, and that’s with Internal Links. The easiest way to start link building is to start within your own site with internal linking, or anchor text, on a phrase in your content that points to another page on your site. It’s part of good content development but it also “crosses over” into a simple link strategy. Tying your own content together lets the search engines know how important this content is on your site and that viewers can follow those links to learn more (assuming the linked content adds value).