International link building

INTERNATIONAL link building

International link building for your global online expansion

For most global search engines, links from one website to another serve as a kind of tacit endorsement. As a result, the number and quality of these links from other sites (‘backlinks’) are an enormously important factor for SEO. Google and other search engines use these links as indicators of the importance of your website in the respective market. As such, backlinks have a direct influence on the ranking of your website in the search results and, consequently, the ease with which it can be found by potential customers. The greater the number of inbound links to your website on other well-performing and reputable domains, the greater your chance of being ranked favorably on the search engine results pages. The better you rank, the easier it is for you to significantly increase your visitor numbers and sales.

‘Natural’ international link building as a continuous process

Generally, other website operators prefer to link to attractive websites with engaging content. By ensuring that your website fulfils these criteria, valuable link relationships can gradually be formed – preferably with other respected, highly-visited sites that already have ‘authority’ on the net.
By keeping these principles in mind, link structures can gradually arise of their own volition: in a ‘natural’ way. However, this process is lengthy and is governed by some rather vague additional factors. If you don’t want to wait forever and rely (partially) on fate, you should also make use of active link building – including in the international context. An efficient link building strategy allows you to continuously enhance the prominence of your global website in all target markets and to gradually expand your market position.

Unnatural links are subject to punishment

Notwithstanding the above, link building that is patently of an ‘artificial’ nature should be avoided at all costs. This could involve links being purchased in large quantities or, for example, inserted without permission into comment fields on large websites. Google recognizes websites with such ‘inorganic’ backlinks and penalizes them with significant down-ranking.

Your link building strategy

Different search engines dominate different global markets

International link building must play by the rules of relevant search engines in the target market

International SEO is as diverse and complex as the individual markets you wish to conquer. This also applies to the search engines used by target groups in your desired markets. In Germany, Central Europe or North America, Google is top dog and is often synonymous with the notion of a ‘search engine’ itself. In other regions of the world, however, a small number of other big players dominate. The Russian market is led by the search engine Yandex, while Naver takes pole position in Korea. Businesses wishing to gain an SEO foothold in mainland China must engage with Baidu – though this comes with the advantage that link building is largely unnecessary. To date, link structures have been overlooked by Baidu in the evaluation of websites for ranking.

A link audit as the starting point for your link building strategy

A comprehensive link audit serves to review all of your international link building activities to date. As a first step, we recommend the examination and evaluation of all existing links in detail. If, based on the link profile found, we deem it possible that your website is being down-ranked by international search engines, we propose efficient measures to counter this. The goal of a link audit is to facilitate a link building strategy that is individually tailored to your website, products and to each target market.