Natural, relevant links to your site from reputable websites is what takes you to the top of Google. There are many ways to go about getting your site linked. SEO is the process of driving traffic from the ‘organic’, and ‘paid’ sources to win the rat race of ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). Negative SEO is an array of actions that a competitor can do to lower your SERP ranking and eventually, cause you an inevitable financial loss. In the SEO terms, these actions are mostly off-page (building spammy links etc.) Once all of your on page elements are fully optimised including but not limited to your Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions and H1 Headings, you need to start thinking about link building. You may have heard people dismissing this aspect of SEO. Some people have been penalised for not doing it right, others are paying someone to do it and nothing is happening. If done correctly, it can have an extremely positive effect on your rankings, gaining you the positions that have always seem impossible.

So, how to start?

One of the most common misconceptions is that blogging on your own site is going to help your SEO. SEO and content marketing are, technically speaking, two very different beasts, and yet, they go together hand in hand. One relies on the other for success, and vice versa. Dealing with a Google algorithm change like the page layout update can feel like falling into an abyss of constant web design changes over and over again. On-page SEO best practices allow us to communicate with search engines in a language that they can understand. Fortunately, search engines and researchers have compiled checklists based on common markup and important ranking factors.

SEO is leading the way

when writing for the internet, break up your paragraphs as often as possible. Lots of white space makes reading text on mobile phones a heck of a lot easier (more than half of most websites’ traffic comes from mobile), and clearly formatted articles are used as a Google ranking signal. Google is also now looking at things like bounce rates – how long someone spends on your website. And it is looking at how your site renders on mobile and how quickly it loads. You can now get penalized for typos and mistakes. Google’s mission is to organize the worlds’ information and make it universally accessible and useful. Therefore, Google wants to show a user the best result possible, the result that best fits their search query. Be careful not to include links within content that lead directly to the desktop or mobile version of a page. Even if the user will be switched to the correct URL based on their device, Google sees these types of links as a bad user experience.

Backlinks are still the most powerful tools in your kitbag

Links have always been a valuable aspect of an SEOs strategy, and many SEO agencies focus on building relevant links to get first page search results on Google. Machines are writing stories and that is often something Google is not a fan of. A focus on the formatting of your page can facilitate the crawling for search engines, while it also enhances the readability for your readers. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Editorial links can be some of the most powerful for SEO because they come from other publications in your niche mentioning your company. They can also come from thought leadership guest posts that you write and get published on third-party sites."

Do Forum Posting To Increase Brand Awareness

If you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link-juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a nofollow link. Google says it discounts the value of those links. I’m not convinced they discount them heavily, but other SEOs are so they seem to deter spammers if nothing else. If a search engine makes a page request that isn’t served within the bot’s time limit (or that produces a server timeout response), your pages may not make it into the index at all, and will almost certainly rank very poorly (as no indexable text content has been found). Any link to another part of the same site is called an internal link. As well as links you'd expect to find (within a site menu bar, for example) you can also create internal links by linking to past posts within newer ones. The secret to building a blog that gets crazy backlinks, ranks for awesome keywords and makes you money on autopilot?