Getting Started with Link Building
5 min read
Despite SEO and link building always going hand-in-hand, high-quality links have never been more important to rankings. In order to compete for online visibility and links to your site, it’s essential to understand the importance of link building as part of a high-quality SEO campaign.
If you’re new to link building or have been building backlinks for some time, this blog will help you understand link building, its importance, types of links, and how link building benefits your business.
What is Link Building?
Link building involves creating hyperlinks between your website and other websites. When determining what counts as a good link, search engines crawl the links between individual pages on your website as well as those between entire websites.
Links pointing to your website tell Google your website is an authoritative source on the subject, and deserves to be cited. A site with more backlinks has a higher chance of ranking highly on Google. “Link juice” is often referred to by SEOs.
While link building techniques vary in difficulty and complexity, it is one of the most time-consuming parts of an SEO’s job to build links. Links are not all created equal. A link from the Guardian, for example, will be much more valuable to you than one from an unknown travel blogger.
Why is Link Building Important for SEO?
Building links is an important part of SEO company since it enables search engines to discover new web pages and determines which pages should rank higher.
The following is Google’s description of link building:
By creating high-quality sites that users want to use and share, webmasters can generally improve their sites’ rankings.”
Using link building strategies, you should focus on earning links because you’ve created great content that your users will share – not just creating links for search engines.
For Google, link building is one of the most important ranking factors, along with:
- On-page SEO and content optimisation
- Trust and authority of the website
- Site loading speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- User experience elements
Black hat SEO vs. White hat SEO
When it comes to link building, there are right ways and wrong ways. In order to ensure your website’s long-term viability and performance, you should follow Google’s webmaster guidelines when building links.
To improve your online visibility in search results, white hat SEO uses organic link building tactics. Google approves of these techniques, but they usually take longer than black hat ones. Techniques for building white SEO links include:
- Guest posting
- Promoting your content
- Creating infographics
- Building online relationships
- Commenting on authority blogs and blog posts
- Using website directories and business listings
You can rank your website higher in the search engines by using black hat SEO methods. A manual penalty could be applied to your site if Google finds that your techniques violate their quality guidelines. In addition to costing you your hard-earned rankings, these practices can take a lot of time and effort to remove and get your SEO performance back on track. Among the black hat SEO techniques are:
- Hidden links
- Link schemes
- Doorway pages
- Keyword stuffing
- Automatically generated content
- Abusing structured data or anchor text
- & basically anything malicious or spammy
Follow v Nofollow links
Link attributes can be added to links to inform Google to “count” the link. Links that follow or do follow are called “follow” links. Google values follow links as a vote of confidence.
It is also possible to apply the “no follow” attribute which sometimes appears in search engines. The following is an addition of rel=”nofollow”:
Do you remember the black hat SEO tactics we discussed earlier? Prior to the nofollow attribute, SEOs used spammy SEO techniques to artificially boost their websites. Since the nofollow makes it nearly impossible for spammers to post irrelevant links, they won’t bother posting them.
There are still spam blog comments and websites, but it has dampened the practice and reduced its impact on more authoritative sites.
There might be some confusion about where these “no to follow” links belong. There are several ways to use nofollow links:
- Blog Comments
- Forums
- Yahoo! Answers
- Wiki pages, such as Wikipedia
- Guest Book Comments
- Guest Post Signatures
Posting and adding links are allowed in these types of places. As it’s not practical to moderate every single spammy link, you can mark all links posted by others as “no follow,” although this is up to the website’s discretion. You might reward a user who regularly participates in your discussion, for example.
What are the benefits of Link Building services for my business?
Links are important to search engine rankings, as we’ve discussed. Over the years, link building has evolved in the way we interact with it and use it, but it remains a cornerstone of SEO.
The benefits of link building go beyond improving your SEO performance. They can also help you build your business or brand in a variety of other ways.
BRAND BUILDING
Your brand can be built up and your industry authority can be established when link building is done correctly. If you want your brand to be at the forefront of your industry, you should use content marketing techniques that involve high-quality content creation and guest posting. Being able to display the expertise of your company can go a long way in brand building, and you’ll be rewarded with authoritative inbound links when you become an authoritative voice.
REFERRAL TRAFFIC
In addition to earning you “link juice”, a link from a highly-trafficked website can also increase your traffic. You’re more likely to get relevant traffic if you link to websites that are relevant to yours. Often, a small, very passionate audience from a relevant blog is better than reaching a large, more general audience – and this doesn’t just apply to high traffic sites.
RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
An effective link building strategy involves outreaching to relevant websites or blogs in relation to a piece you’ve created, an informative infographic, or a promotion. Besides gaining links, outreach can help your business build long-term relationships with key people in your industry. As a result of these relationships, you can build your brand, your network, and your authority. It is invaluable to connect with others and become trustworthy in your industry, whether you are a site owner or key influencer.
GREATER SALES OPPORTUNITIES
More customers are attracted by referral traffic from relevant sites, resulting in more sales. In addition to the boost in rankings that link building will give you, you will also gain highly qualified referral traffic from different types of links. This lets you generate revenue from a new source, and sell more goods or services.
For years, link building has been a crucial part of SEO, and it seems to be here to stay. There will always be a desire on the part of Google to serve its users with the most authoritative, well-loved content possible.
