Whether you're new to SEO or a business owner looking to rank your website, one of the common questions that pops up when researching ways to dominate Google ranking is – What is link building?
It is all about acquiring backlinks from high-authority and relevant websites. Link building is often called the secret sauce to success in the world of SEO. It is because backlinks are the votes of confidence your websites gain from other websites and help search engines determine your trustworthiness and authority.
Links are one of the most crucial ranking factors search engines use to rank websites and discover new content. Moreover, link authority is how search engines judge content's quality.
Over time, Google and other search engines have improved their ability to determine relevant and useful links for users. In other words, link-building strategies and techniques like spamming, forum postings, and other unnatural link-building methods practiced earlier are not recommended and aren't as effective today.
Before we go about discussing link building and its importance, let us briefly cover the basics –
What is a Link?
A hyperlink or link helps people travel from one location to another online. In other words, a link connects two different pages on the internet and refers or directs people to an online post, image, video, page, etc.
Other than guiding users, links also serve search engines. Search engine bots or Google Crawlers use links to discover pages and new content on the internet.
For search engine bots or crawlers to discover your page, your website must have at least one link from another website that's already crawled. This is why having a link from a relevant, authoritative website is important for newly launched websites.
Types of Links
With respect to SEO, there are two main types of links – Internal Links and External Links.
Internal Links
Internal links are links on your website that connect various pages of your website.
External Links
External links are links other website owners place on their website to refer their audience to page/product/service/image/video/etc. on your page(s) and vice versa. In the SEO world, external links are often called backlinks.
It's important to note that while internal linking is a vital aspect of an effective SEO, it's different from link building. In this blog, we will mainly focus on the importance of backlinks and how to acquire them.
Anchor Text
No definition of link building is complete without the mention of 'Anchor Text.'
Anchor Text serves several purposes apart from linking a page. It potentially describes or should describe what the linked page is about and must be appealing enough to invite people to click on it.
A well-worded Anchor Text offers a few benefits, including
- Ensures more people click on the link.
- Helps drive more traffic.
- Helps search engines understand what the linked page is about, potentially driving even more organic traffic directly from search engines.
While it's impossible to control the anchor text used by other websites when linking to pages on your website, it's important to use well-crafted anchor text for internal linking.
What Is Meant By Link Building?
Link building is the process of acquiring links on other websites to pages on your website to boost search engine rankings and visibility.
One of the primary purposes of search engine optimization link building is to boost the authority of web pages, which helps them rank higher in search engine rankings, translating into higher traffic, sales, and online visibility.
What Is Link Building In SEO?
Link building has been one of the most important aspects of an effective SEO strategy because it helps search engines understand the hierarchy and structure of the web. With the help of search engine bots or crawlers, search engines determine the websites that are valuable for the users and those that aren't important or are irrelevant.
Website link building helps search engines decipher a website's content and quality. When more websites link back to your website, search engines translate it as your website having worthy and valuable content. It helps the search engines pull up some websites with higher backlinks and relevant backlink profiles on top of search results.
However, it's important to note that days of focusing on quantity when link building is over. Search engines reward websites focusing on organic, relevant, and quality link building. It's important to have backlinks to your website from relevant and topically related websites.
The websites that link back to you must be high-authority and reputable because, other than link juice, credibility and trust are also passed on through the backlinks.
Is Link Building Useful?
Link building is not only useful but critical for achieving SEO success. It's an important Google Ranking factor that cannot be ignored when trying to succeed in digital marketing.
Whether you're looking to boost your site's authority, increase your site's traffic, enhance web presence, improve search engine visibility, achieve higher search engine rankings, or want to be a name to reckon with in your industry, link building can substantially contribute.
Link building can be done in many ways, but following the industry's best practices to build high-quality, relevant, and credible links from authority sources to reap maximum benefits is important.
Why Is Link Building Important?
Having covered what is link building briefly, let us move on in this link building guide to understand why it is important.
To understand the importance of link building, let us start from the start or Pre-Google days.
Before Google existed, search engines like Alta Vista or Yahoo focused 100% on websites' content to rank websites.
As soon as Google entered the search engine market, things changed and how!
Google uses the famous PageRank algorithm that doesn't only analyze content but also the website's link profile. In other words, Google checks how many websites are linking to your website to determine the search engine ranking of a website.
Even after two decades, links remain the best way to ascertain the webpages' quality. And backlinks remain one of the most important ranking factors for Google.
Over the years and after several Google updates, especially Penguin Update, Google doesn't only focus on the quantity of backlinks to your website but also the 'Quality' of links.
The quantity of backlinks to your website only counts if the links are high quality. If the links directing to your website are spammy, irrelevant, and poor-quality, it can do more harm than good.
Let us go through some of the benefits of link building to define link building and its importance elaborately
Benefits of Link Building
This SEO link building guide won't be complete till we delve deeper into the importance and benefits of link-building.
Rank Your Website
If your website has no incoming links from other websites, it's almost impossible for Google to rank it. No matter how good the quality of content on your website, link building is crucial for ranking on Google.
The more relevant and high-quality backlinks you achieve from authority online sources, the better your chances of achieving higher rankings.
Without backlinks, Google's Crawlers won't be able to find your website or even know about its existence. This makes link-building one of the most effective organic search engine ranking methods.
If your website has more backlinks from authority websites than your competition, it will support your SEO strategy and help you rank higher than them.
Boost Website Metrics
Link building helps boost the website's metrics, such as –
- Domain Authority
- Page Rank
- Domain Rating
Enhancing Domain Rating and Domain Authority is crucial to achieving SEO success and improving your website's authority in your niche. A recent study by Ahrefs revealed that Domain Authority is invaluable to achieving higher SERPs.
Getting a do-follow backlink from websites with high Domain Rating (DR) can help boost the site's authority and ranking in due course.
Boost Sales & Revenue Opportunities
An effective link-building strategy helps enhance a website's metrics, drives organic traffic, and helps a website rank higher in search engines for its focus keywords. This translates into higher sales and opens new doors to generating revenues.
Ranking higher in search engine rankings for your targeted keywords helps your website reach a larger audience. It leads to brand awareness and ensures higher sales than if you're buried deep in Google's search results.
This is because the website in the first position on Google receives around 28 percent of the traffic, and the second position receives nearly half of it at around 15 percent.
So, the higher you rank, the more money you make, and link-building plays a pivotal role in placing you on top.
Become a Brand to Reckon With
Link Building meaning revolves around increasing a website's ranking in search engine results. When your website ranks higher, it helps you turn around your business positively.
Typically, ranking higher in search engines is perceived by the audience as a brand better than others below.
It is why ranking higher doesn't only lead to more sales, increased brand awareness, and enhanced search engine visibility – it also helps you become a known, reputable, and authoritative brand in your domain.
Increase Referral Traffic
Another benefit of link building is that it helps you get referral traffic from websites you've acquired backlink(s) from.
If the backlink is placed on a popular website with high traffic and authority, some of the traffic it receives is passed on to your website. As the audience trusts the top website, they would also trust you because the link to your website appears on the website they trust.
Apart from referral traffic, link building from top websites helps you achieve higher credibility and trustworthiness among your target audience in due course.
Reduce Bounce Rates
Quantity doesn't always translate into quality, but quality always translates into quantity. If backlinks you acquire on top-tier websites and other online sources direct users to quality and valuable content on your website, there's no reason for them to follow your desired call-to-action.
For example, if an educational blog directs its audience to a restaurant's website, the chances of conversion are low. Customers won't engage as soon as the restaurant's website opens up, leading to higher bounce rates. And it's not good news for the website's metrics.
Your link-building campaign should be devised on the principle of delivering value rather than tricking people into coming to your website.
Getting into Wikipedia link building techniques can be helpful as well. How? Because Wikipedia is among the most visited and trusted online sources for information, having an incoming link from it can drastically boost your website's ranking, traffic, credibility, and rankings on search engines.
Consistent Conversion Rates
Being consistent with your link-building strategies shows in the conversion rate as well. With most standard link-building campaigns, the brands usually go through feast and famine phases, where traffic fluctuates drastically depending on how much time and money is invested in building credible links.
However, when you're consistent with your link-building strategy, it helps you predict your revenue and upward trend in sales with time.
Even if Google Updates shakes your website's positioning and revenue for a bit, it becomes easier to revive your position and stabilize revenue. This is because links from top sources continue to empower your performance and online presence.
More Social Media Followers
As of today, total number of people on social media is just short of 5 billion. Whether you're an aspiring or established brand, it's important to have a strong presence on social media and focus on getting a miniscule of that humongous figure to follow you.
Just like referral traffic, link building can help you get more social media followers through links and mentions on high-authority websites. These high-authority websites will continually push organic referral traffic to your website, and you can convert visitors to followers through appealing social media buttons.
What Makes a Good Link?
Truth be told, no one knows exactly how Google analyzes the value of a link. However, the SEO community has a general consensus on how to evaluate links. The value of a link is based on several factors, such as -
Page's Authority
If the page linking to you has high PageRank, it will substantially boost your rankings and traffic. The higher the page's authority linking back to you, the higher the chances of your website ranking higher for your targeted keywords on Google.
Website's Authority
Just like PageRank, the quality of a link is also influenced by a domain's site-wide authority.
For example, a link from a website like the Washington Post will have way more impact than a backlink from a no-name blogger.
Of course, these high-quality links are hard to get, but they're worth the effort you put into getting them.
Website's Relevancy
The site's relevance is almost as important as the site's authority. The links you get from other sites should be topically relevant.
For example, if you run a fitness website, a backlink from a roofing website would be worthless.
In many cases, Google may even penalize such spammy link-building efforts.
Focus on getting quality links from authority websites relevant to your website's niche. Focus on quality over quantity because one high-quality link is far better than a hundred spammy links.
Link's Position
Just getting a link from a web page with high PageRank or a website with high authority isn't enough.
You also must ensure the link is positioned strategically to reach maximum eyeballs. It is because links placed in footers or sidebars don't pass as much link juice as the links found on the top or in the middle of the web page.
You should always try to get your link positioned within the web page's main body.
Editorial Placement
You can't answer what is link building without understanding these minute nuances of link building. Yes, just the link placement isn't enough because editorial placement is important.
An editorial link is placed when the blog owner or admin links to your website or any of your web pages because they found it awesome.
If you created a random profile on a random website and placed a link in the comments, the link might be linking back to your website but doesn't pass as much link juice as editorial links, if at all.
Google counts editorial links of value, and other unnatural links directly violate Google's guidelines.
Link Label or Anchor Text
What is a link builder who doesn't know about or use anchor text in link building? As discussed earlier, Anchor text is the clickable text link that Google uses as a linking signal.
Topical relevancy between the text in the anchor text and the site it links to is very important. For example, Google sees an anchor text – Cheese Cake. Now, Google has reasons to believe that the site it directs to must be a food, confectionary, or cake-related website. If yes, Google rewards it handsomely by ranking higher.
However, this technique of using keyword-rich anchor text has been overused and abused in the SEO realm. It is abused to the point that using too many exact-match anchor text links is often categorized as spammy these days.
With that said, building links with keyword-rich anchor text should be moderated, topically relevant, and not overdone.
Nofollow vs. Follow
Simply put, the 'nofollow' link attribute tells Google not to follow the outbound link. It is meant to tell the search engines that the linking done is not meant for endorsement.
Google has clearly stated that while nofollow links don't pass link authority, they bring referral traffic and boost brand awareness.
Follow or Dofollow links, as known in the SEO circles, are links that pass link authority. Dofollow links imply endorsement and are the most sought-after in the SEO world.
There are two other link attributes: sponsored and user-generated content. Link attributes help search engines interpret links and their purpose.
Link Building Strategies
Link building is crucial to achieving SEO success, but as passive as it may seem, it doesn't offer passive long-term results.
This is because backlinks may disappear or become less relevant or irrelevant with time. It means you must actively look for new link-building opportunities to achieve higher rankings and maintain those higher SERPs.
Let us briefly discuss some of the highly effective link-building strategies to generate high-quality backlinks
Pursuing Competitors' Links
Performing competitors' link research and analysis remains one of the most popular yet fundamental steps in link-building. In this activity, you reverse engineer the link-building strategy of your competitor and find out the tactics used to achieve higher SERP.
By replicating a similar strategy and adding to it, you can outrank your competitor. Advanced SEO tools can help you analyze the backlink profile of top-performing websites for any keyword(s).
Once the competitors' link analysis is done, you can get a link from the same pages/websites the competitors have got links from. Also, invest time in understanding how the competitors acquired links and try to outperform them by using the same tactic to get even more links.
Creating Linkable Assets
Creating linkable assets implies creating content that is meant to attract links. These linkable assets, or as many refer to as link baits, can be in many different forms, including
- Online Tools
- Infographics, GIFs, Map-o-Graphics
- Awards & Rankings
- Surveys
- Listicles
- How-To Guides
- Tutorials
- Coined Terms
- Images/Videos
- Definitions
The best way to get inspiration for creating linkable assets is by running through high-performing link baits on competitors' websites and creating better ones than them.
Content Promotion
People can't link to your website no matter how linkable your website or web pages maybe if they're hard to discover. This is why promoting linkable assets is essential.
There are several ways to promote content –
- Influencers & Communities
- Advertising
- Growing Audience
Let us go through this breakdown briefly –
Influencers & Communities
Reach out to the influencers and communities in your space that might help put your content in front of a huge audience. To make this happen organically, you must ensure that the 'merit' of content is worthy of promotion.
Today, millions of online spaces and influencers do paid promotion as well.
But then, every organic method of link building has a paid alternative one way or the other.
Advertising
Talking about paid marketing, advertising on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, etc., can help bring many visitors to your website.
As mentioned earlier, you can even pay influencers or communities with a large audience to promote your content.
Find where your target audience hangs out and pay for the best spot to drive targeted traffic back to your website.
Grow an Audience
Whenever you publish and promote your content online, there will always be some people who like your content or have enjoyed it thoroughly. It would be such a waste of your effort and their time if this connection isn't harnessed into building a relationship.
And this is where the importance of growing an audience comes into the picture. It can be done in many different ways like
- Ask readers/visitors to subscribe to your email list.
- Encourage your audience to follow you on social media platforms.
- Invite your audience to your private community on various platforms like Facebook/Slack/Discord
- Retarget your audience with ads on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Google.
The focus should be an incremental increase in your audience with every piece of content you promote and publish. With time, as more and more people follow your work, your job of promoting content manually gets easier.
Guest Posting
It continues to be one of SEO professionals' most used link-building methods.
Guest blogging can offer great value and incredibly valuable links when done properly. The most crucial factor determining a guest blog's success is that the post should offer value to the audience. If the post is published only for the sake of a link, forget achieving any positive results.
This is even more crucial because Google has recently cracked down on guest blogging as a link-building measure. While guest blogging can be really helpful in getting high-quality links from topically relevant and high-authority websites, it's important that the post you publish stands out.
To be on the safer side, engage in guest blogging with the intent of reaching out to a larger audience and creating brand awareness rather than just building links.
Great-quality content creates high-quality backlinks as byproducts.
Become a Source
One of the newest link-building methods that has been making rounds in the SEO circles is becoming a source for reporters, bloggers, and journalists.
One of the popular services in this domain is – Help a Reporter Out.
It helps connect those who need sources to people looking for exposure (links). Many big media outlets, including The Wall Street, The New York Times, Mashable, Business Insider, and more, use such services.
Once you sign up for HARO, you'll get emails daily with a list of businesses and writers looking for expert sources.
It takes some work to get quality backlinks through this method, but it's one of the best ways to create a network of high-quality backlinks at scale.
Broken Link Building
Another great way to build quality backlinks is by finding broken backlinks on blogs and websites related to your niche. If you find broken links on websites relevant to your niche, contact the website's owner and recommend linking to your content.
It works well because no website owner wants to have broken links on their web pages. The first step to broken link building is doing competitors' website analysis and finding broken web pages.
You can use many SEO tools to analyze competitors' websites or perform site audits. When done properly, there's a good chance of finding many backlink opportunities you can scale upon.
Final Conclusion
What is Link Building is a question that circles in the minds of many marketers and business owners when they embark on a digital marketing journey.
Having discussed the importance of link-building and strategies to create high-quality backlinks in-depth, it can be concluded without an iota of doubt that SEO success can only be achieved with an effective link-building strategy.
Link building can help drive organic traffic, boost brand awareness, increase search engine rankings, enhance sales and revenue, improve the brand's credibility, and expand online presence.
The key word in the link-building strategy is 'Quality.' You mustn't compromise on the quality of links to gain links in quantity. Sure, it is a time-consuming process, but the results a successful link-building strategy can generate are incomparable to any other SEO technique.
Focus on consistently creating good quality content and linkable assets while following the link-building strategies mentioned above, and soon, you'll be one of the thought leaders in your industry!
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