Table Of Contents
- What is Link Building
- Why is link-building so important?
- Types of Backlinks
- Parameters of a good Backlink
- Best strategies for link-building
Introduction
Link Building is an integral part of SEO as it builds the authority of a website and makes it easier to get a good rank on search engine results pages. Link building is the most effective off-page SEO strategy to prioritize as it enables search engine crawlers to evaluate the references to your website, thereby comprehending the quality and value of your content.
When you strategies your link-building plan with on-page and Technical SEO, it will be a killer step to make the way for high ranking and organic traffic.
Now, let's move to the link Building Guide for beginners. But we need to know a few technical terms before diving into it.
What is Link Building?
Links are hyperlink text which makes the path to another website or webpage from its source. The process to create and earn these links on different websites, social media, and other platforms is link building.
Search engine crawlers use these links to index your website. It judges the quality of links. If you have a backlink from a high authority website, which is not easy, though, your website authority will automatically increase.
So, you need to maintain the quality of your backlinks with the number of backlinks. This means your focus should be on earning and creating high-authority backlinks by providing excellent content.
Why is Link Building so important?
As I said earlier, link building is the most important parameter that search engines follow religiously during the indexing of a website. But how does it work?
When someone searches for a keyword in the search bar, the user gets the required information within a second. How do search engines do this so fast?
The Behind the Scene is like that:
When a website or business owner publishes a new website, search engine crawlers crawl it, extract the content, and store it for future queries
During crawling, crawlers scan the entire content of the web pages to index it.
For indexing, it considers quality content and the number of quality backlinks of the web pages.
Here, quality backlink means a link from a high authority domain. Google's co-founder Larry Page invented PageRank, a tool to check the quality of webpages based on the links they have. So, people started to create random poor links to manipulate the software.
Because building low-quality links like website directories and doing spam comments is easy. It wasn't easy to identify which one was of high quality as too many links were built. Then Google's penguin updates came.
From now on search engines were able to differentiate between low and high-quality links. The search engine does not allow websites with low-quality links to rank better.
Links help crawlers to find new web pages and sail around different web pages of a website.
Link building can help a business grow in other ways, too.
It can help you to build a relationship with your industry influencers. When you launch a new product, you need to reach out to influencers for its promotion. Right?
They can link your product when you pitch them. You have to make an outstanding product that everyone will be talking about. Then, you can get a link to top websites. In this way, mutual respect can grow, which may help you in the long term because it is a sign of how trustworthy you are.
Links can help to get more traffic from another website. If you leave a link on a high-traffic website of a relevant niche, you can get a few of them. You also promote your product on related industry websites. Few of them may become your customers. If they do not buy it, at least they can refer you to their friends. Link building is not only about referral traffic and improving SERP rank, but it brings you to sell.
A proper link-building strategy can build your brand. When you link your content or product, you get a chance to show your work to the world. Building links in social media platforms can grow your audience there. You can prove your ability through link building. If the audience loves the content, they will come and make your brand.
Types of Backlinks
There are certain types of links you should know for a successful link-building plan.
You can understand the value of different kinds of links and their importance.
Editorial links
An editorial is a piece of great content published in a news portal or blog. Links from this kind of editorial are worthy. Writers put links in these kinds of pieces for reference. You get a link from the editorial when you create outstanding useful, link-worthy content without asking for it. People who love them link it. Getting an editorial link can be the goal of SEO. It takes time. It would be best if you focused on the quality of content so that it can get attention.
There are editorial links that you can ask for. You can promote your content to journalists so that they may get interested and write about it. Here, it would be best if you worked on promotion with the maintenance of quality content.
User-generated links
Users create these kinds of links and are of low quality so search engines do not count them as a ranking factor. It carries less value than any other kind of link. They are
- Blog comments
- Over-optimized guest post
- Article directories
- Forum Signature
- Embedded widgets
You should use these techniques carefully, as overdoing any strategies may not work well.
No follow links
No follow attribute does not pass link juice to the linked website, while do-follow links pass the link juice through websites. Google does not count these types of links as ranking factors. It does not help the linked site to get a better rank where the following attribute allows the page rank to move to the linked page.
- No follow links are
- Guest book comment
- Forum Posting
- Blog comments
- Quora
As users can build spam these types of links without any bindings, website owners can change the attribute of all links posted by others into no follow.
Parameters of a good Backlink
Google did not provide any guidelines to tell how a good backlink should be. We can get an idea from backlinks of high-domain websites. There are a few things to follow.
Authority
Google sees links as the power of the webpage. The more links you possess, the more power you have. This power comes from a powerful website to which your page is linked. So check the webpage authority before approaching link building. Naturally, linking to the webpage of Cosmopolitan magazine gives you better link juices than linking to someone's blog.
You can find high domain rating(DR) websites by using SEO tools available on Google. Then, target those sites.
Relevance
Linking to relevant niches and keywords is necessary to rank well. Google algorithm counts relevance and context while indexing pages. You have a blog on trending fashion, and you go for Moz website. Will it work? Not. Both niches are disparate. The audience on Moz will not take an interest in trending fashion. It would be best if you approached a top-rated lifestyle and fashion blogger for the link.
Anchor text
When a search engine crawls through the content, it finds links to other web pages in the form of anchor text. These are little colored text with links to webpages placed inside the content. Search engines can get an idea about the context of the linked webpage.
If I wrote a blog on Tips for plant care in summer and placed a link to a webpage with the details of the best plant to grow in summer with the word 'plant', it would be an anchor text.
Creating anchor text for related keywords is the main point. Search engines will understand that the linked page has something about plants. And it indexes it accordingly.
However, putting so much anchor text for each keyword may negatively affect it as Google can take it as manipulative.
Nofollow, user-generated, sponsored
A no-follow link is a link attribute that does not allow a linked page to transfer link juice.
No follow link is not counted during crawling. Webmasters use the rel= ''no-follow'' tag when they don't want to pass the link juice to the linking website.
A user-generated link is created by a user in comments and forum posts. The attribute of this is rel=''ugc''. Search engines understand these tags and consider them according to guidelines.
A link can be sponsored. For identifying sponsored posts, we use the rel=''sponsored'' tag. Sponsored links can be advertising, agreements, etc.
Placement and destination
Google's surfer patent has given a brief idea about the significance of link placement and the authority it conveys. So, it is important to place a link in the correct position to get it clicked. The chances of clicking on a link increase with its visibility. If I put a link in the footer of a page, who will see it?
Placing a link at the beginning of the content is more worthwhile than placing it in the middle or at the end.
We can't say that the user will scroll up to the end. Always try to place a link in the main body of the content. The number of clicks will pass the authority to you.
We should not neglect internal linking. Websites have few commercial pages, getting links for which is quite a difficult task. Other websites do not receive as much traffic as this one, making it appear uninteresting to users. Users want information and guides, but who wants to know which services a digital marketing company is providing? Here, we can use internal linking. You can link your home page, any linkable asset, and any product pages or landing pages to your content.
Consider a few things while doing internal linking.
Identify your page, which is already attracting links, and place a link to the page that you want to rank well.
Optimize your commercial pages well. Place an internal link with the other related pages. Use the navigation menu and link all the pages in that.
Create a content hub or resource pages where you can link all your commercial pages. Promote those boring pages through various forms of marketing.
This way, you can build links to your most important yet bland pages. This helps search engines to understand the relation between different pages and rank them.
Best strategies for link-building
Link building is more of a practical technique rather than a theoretical one. Among so many link-building strategies, one should choose wisely according to their resources and industry. As a fully grown industry has more competitors, it has less exposure for freshers. But new industries have a lot more scope if planned well.
Now, let's look into the strategies.
1. Competitors backlink analysis
This is the first baby step you take to plan your link-building strategy. If you don't know your competitor well, you may lose the race. This method is about analyzing your competitors' backlinks and going with their strategy. If you thoroughly analyze the top website's link-building plan, you may have a chance to outrank that page.
For that, you need to know a few things.
How many backlinks do they have, and from how many referring domains?
The websites from which your competitors have backlinks, why have they linked them?
Examine your competitor's content strategy very well. There are plenty of free tools available online. One of them is Ahref's keyword Explorer. Another is Semrush's backlink analytic tool.
We used Semrush's backlink analysis tool here, and you can see the actual number of referring domains and total backlinks they had built. Remember, you should focus on referring domains but not on total backlinks.
You can use these tools, and they will show you a list of websites to which articles of your competitors are linked. From this, you can get an idea of where you need to build links and how the content should be. One important thing to note is that Google counts referring domains, not backlinks. That means getting several links from one unique domain counts as one.
For example, I have a digital marketing agency. I need links from top-rated websites of the same niche. One or more links from MOZ count as one link. Again, links from Aherf count two, and this goes on. To get into the first or second position, analyze competitors' backlink websites and build high-quality links there.
2. Create linkable content
A linkable asset tends to earn links naturally without asking anyone. These assets are created to earn quality links naturally. People who have an interest in certain kinds of content link it to their website. But for this, the product or content must be mind-blowing. These assets are useful for targeted users. It can be:
- Online tool
- Infographic
- Whitepaper
- Videos
- Study
- Awards
- Industry surveys
- Image Gallery
All these can be very useful for those who need them. They will link it in their content naturally. You can check your competitor's backlink profile to see if they are creating any of these.
3. Content promotion
The next step is promoting your content. You make a great piece of art. How will the audience get to know about it? You have to tell them. When the audience knows about the asset they will automatically mention it someplace.
Who will tell them?
Your influencer. Yes, you can promote your product through influential people from the same industry. Influencers have huge audiences. Your product should be up to the mark that it attracts them. They will mention you and your product in front of a huge audience.
You may share it with the communities of the same space as yours.
Here comes advertising. You can run ads for your product or asset on different social media platforms. Advertising is one of the best solutions to promote your content.
Design a banner for the product and post it to social media. With this, you need to grow your audience base. Make sure that each time you launch a new product or content, it must reach them. You can make an email list or ask them to subscribe to your website or a YouTube channel or follow Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
As your audience grows, people will know you and trust you, and this can help you to build high-quality links.
4. Guest posting
Guest posting is another most used link-building strategy. It is the way of approaching other blog owners to write for their pages. But why do they allow you? Due to the value of the excellent content you put on their website. Your content should rank well in SERPs so that they can get traffic to their website, and You have to provide amazing content and get an opportunity to build a link on their website.
Search for your targeted keyword and guest post, and you will get a list of websites that accept guest postings. Go to the website and read their guidelines for guest posting. Write some amazing content on relevant niches, and don't forget to use long tail keywords. Drop an email with your content and wait for a reply.
Setting goals for high domain rating websites in the first instance may bring rejection. You can not create content of that level. Target medium domain rating websites. Content standards of medium or low-domain rating websites may accept your work. After a few posts with these websites, then jump to the big shots. On the journey, you can gather some knowledge and experience to show them.
As guest posting is the most fruitful way of link-building with high-quality content, it should not be overused. Posting numbers of poor-quality content won't work for long-term goals. It would be best if you took the time to create linkable and great content for your valuable audience.
5. Broken link building
A broken link is a link to a content or webpage that does not exist on the internet anymore. When a user clicks on a broken link, it shows an error message. It can happen for various reasons like wrong URL, change in the URL structure, deleted or removed content, deleted webpages, change in the URL without redirection, etc.
Every website has a few broken links. Though it does not affect your ranking, it may impact the user experience and quality of your site. By clicking on a broken link, the user gets an error message instead of the required information. Now, naturally, the user will move to another site. Now, the bounce rate of your website will be increasing.
So, researching broken links and fixing them helps to maintain the overall quality of your site. Use broken links to build your backlinks.
The first step is to research broken links of your targeted websites for guest posting.
Now, create the best content to put it in the place of broken links.
Then, reach out to the web admins. Pitch them.
Let's say you have a bakery business. You target a food-related website and find some broken links to cake recipes. Reach out to them and tell them that the recipes do not exist. So, you want to help and share some trending recipes. In This way, they get trendy rank-able content on their webpage, and you get a backlink.
6. Non-linking brand mentions
Sometimes, you can find your name without a link to different blogs. People may use your brand name or your product to make their blog worthy and practical. As in this blog
I used " Ahref " and ''Semrush'' without links for the sake of quality content.
You can find through Google search, Ahrefs Content Explorer, and Backlink Checker where your name is mentioned without a link. The outreach and ask to change the mention into a link.
Use Google alerts and Ahrefs alerts to keep an eye on who mentions your name on their site.
7. Non-linking images
Someone may use your images on their website without any mention or credit. You can find these sites easily and inform them that they have used your image. But instead of asking to remove it or giving a copyright strike, you should ask to place a link to your site with the image.
You can take the help of Google reverse image search for this purpose. You get a link in exchange for an image. Great move.
8. Reclaim lost backlinks
Don't get confused with the broken links. Broken links are links to other web pages which provide zero value. But lost links are backlinks to your website. Somehow, they are lost. The reasons may vary. The linking website may cease to work or get redirected.
You can use online tools to find lost links. Then, go to each URL and find out the reason. If the website does not exist anymore, then bad luck. But if they remove your link and link to another website then reach out imminently to ask for a new link. Check out the new content that they have linked with. Improve your strategy accordingly.
Keep checking quarterly if you lost any backlinks. Reclaim it to maintain your website quality.
Implementing an effective and well-crafted link-building strategy is crucial for the growth of your business or website. Link building not only improves your SERP ranking but also enhances your site's authority and credibility.
We have discussed essential components and tactics that will help you chalk out a perfect link-building plan.
Conclusion
To sum up, a perfect link-building strategy comprises creating high-quality linkable content, knowing your competitor, building links through guest posting, fixing broken links, and reclamation of lost links.
By adding more, you need to know the differences and values of various types of links. You should chalk out every aspect of link building, i.e. where, which kind of link can grow your audience, who are your target websites and how their content is. Consistently creating linkable assets can be hectic. Without it, how can you get backlinks from top-rated websites? It would be best if you fixed broken links, too.
You can rank better and get referral traffic by using these steps.
Now, move on to practical work. For that, the first step is to audit your site and check for your backlinks.
