Building backlinks is one of the most important parts of a functional automotive SEO campaign.
If you are new to search engine optimization, however, you might not really understand how to do it.
How do you find websites that might want to include your link on one of their pages?
How do you reach out to the webmaster of those sites?
How do you even evaluate a website to determine whether or not putting a link on that page would help you?
If you are new the world of link building, do not fear.
Here are the three skills you need to develop if you want to become an expert link builder:
1. You are first concerned with relevancy before anything else.
For example, you might find a webpage that is very high the search results.
It is on the first page, it gets thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of unique visitors every month.
It is, however, not strictly relevant to your own website.
But it gets lots of traffic!
But if the website is not extremely relevant to your own website, there is absolutely no reason for your link to be on that website, which means if you do somehow convince the owner of that website to include a link back to your website, it is going to look like spam.
It is not supposed to be there, because it is not relevant, so Google will flag it and both you and the website hosting that link are going to be in trouble.
No matter what process you are using to build links, if you really want those links to mean something, they have to be place on websites that have a high degree of relevance to your own.
The basis of the entire internet is links.
Search engines are built around gathering links and providing them to searchers so they can find the information they need.
If you want to be a part of all of this, you have to actually find your place in it.
The internet follows the law of the jungle. If you stay in your corner, you’ll be fine.
You’ll succeed. If you try to reach your hands into honeypots that have nothing to do with your industry, you are going to get struck down by one of the search engines.
2. You are great at communicating.
A huge portion of your job when it comes to building links is going to be communicating with other people.
One of the most common things you are going to have to do is to email other websites and ask if they might be willing to put a link back to your website on one of their relevant pages or blog posts.
You have to know not only how to find the contact information you need, but how to write a compelling email that gets someone to want to help you.
You are, after all, asking for their help.
Even if you are offering to write a guest post for their blog, you are, in the end, getting the better end of the deal and therefore should take precautions to make sure that you are communicating effectively.
Any form of communication you use should be tailored to your specific task.
For example, if you are trying to get a blogger to let you guest post on their blog, you need to demonstrate both your initiative (this can be done by researching, writing, and editing the piece you’d like to post, even before contacting the blogger) and your skill as a writer, but crafting an email that actually makes them want to engage with you.
You might even want to include in that email a list of ways your guest post would actually help that blogger.
You want to be seen as an expert communicator and your goal should be to convince the people that you are communicating with that they would actually benefit from doing you a favor.
3. You have real knowledge of what you claim to be knowledgeable about.
It is not enough to just appear as though you know what you are talking about. You actually have to know it when you are trying to build links.
The individuals who are the most successful with this facet of automotive SEO are those who know everything there is to know about the automotive industry.
They know who the players are.
They know what websites are the most relevant to their needs.
They know exactly how to write content that is both informative and accessible.
Your goal should be to disseminate the very best information.
This is probably a skill that you already possess.
You would desperately need this skill if you were going to be successful at selling cars.
You can easily translate the knowledge that you have acquired into written content that makes a link back to your website worth the while of the websites where you want that link.
The best way to get quality links is to have a website that is worth those links.
No one that you communicate with should look at the content on your website and have any question about whether or not you know what you’re talking about.
If you’re not currently an expert in a topic that you want to write about, make sure you become an expert before you actually do write about it.
Remember, the goal of landing a link on someone else’s page is not just to use some of their juice to improve your ranking, but to make sure the best information gets in front of the eyes that need and want it.
