In a few words, Link Building is the process of getting other websites to link to your own website. The purpose of link building is to boost the “authority” of your pages in the eyes of search engines and increase the “relevancy” of the domain to a certain search neighbourhood so that these pages rank higher and bring more search traffic from relevant search queries.
Generally, most “white hat” link-building strategies are twofold:
- Creating something noteworthy of a mention from other sources
- Reaching out to website owners to bring inbound referrals in the form of backlinks
The Importance of Link Building
Together with content and “Rankbrain”, backlinks are among these three of the most important ranking factors for ranking in Google search. So if you’re after higher rankings in Organic Google Search, you’ll almost certainly be required to accumulate backlinks. To put it briefly, backlinks are seen by search engines as referrals to help them identify which pages on a given topic deserve the most attention in organic search results.
As a general rule, websites with more backlinks tend to have their pages rank higher in organic search results. According to Ahrefs’ study of one billion pages, there is a positive correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and how much search traffic it gets from Google. Furthermore, according to Backlinko’s Brian Dean, the importance of backlinks can be considered two-layered.
Backlinks that power the authority of the domain are of prime importance, which is followed by the importance of backlinks coming to the ranking page itself. In other words, for a page to rank higher in Google, it is its’ domain that must first have a strong backlink profile and only after that comes the importance of the backlinks leading to the individual ranking pages.
Apart from the fact that not all backlinks are created equal, search engines factor in over 200 other variables when ranking pages. Arguably, the relative importance of the mix of these variables will depend on the type of search queries you want to rank for. So, do not expect that building loads of backlinks to your page will save it from ranking poorly. You must always consider the full picture, including other ranking factors that might prevent you from ranking well.
Building Backlinks
Although there might be hundreds of proven link-building strategies and tactics, a good approach to getting a grasp of link-building is categorising them into four main categories;
1. Manually adding links to websites
This implies going to a website that doesn’t belong to you and manually placing your link there. For the exact reason that building these links is relatively easy, they tend to have the lowest value in the eyes of search engines. Also, it may also be important to note that these backlinks barely give you any competitive advantage.
The first reason for that is if you can go to a website and manually place your link there, your competitors can do the same. Secondly, in efforts to combat SPAM and help search engines estimate the true value of backlinks linking between websites, these backlinks are often automatically marked as “nofollow”. This gives search engines know that these backlinks shouldn’t be followed by search bots. Some search engines follow these regardless but still use this directive to assign no backlink value to the referred page.
However, these links or referrals shouldn’t be ignored altogether. Each of them can actually be quite beneficial for your online business for reasons other than acquiring links. Let me elaborate with a few examples:
It might be a good idea to claim your brand name on all major social media sites as soon as possible, regardless of whether these bring backlinks or not. Investing time and effort into social media is a good way to accumulate a loyal following and promote your business to them. However the actual backlinks from social profile pages have little to no direct SEO value, so it would be foolish to expect a sudden boost in rankings after signing up for social media sites.
It is widely recommended to avoid adding your website to every single business directory there is just to get yourself another link. Instead, it is important to focus on those that are well-known, have traffic and thus might bring actual visitors to your website.
Starting a thread or leaving a meaningful comment in response to someone else’s query or article is a great way to make a name for yourself in the community and kickstart a relationship with industry players. However, posting comments with the sole purpose of building a link to your website will only make the community turn against you.
2. Outreach: Asking for Links
Outreach relates to asking the owner of a website for a backlink by giving them a compelling reason to do so. A “compelling reason” is absolutely essential for getting a website owner to link to you and can be employed in a wide variety of link-building strategies and tactics:
Although it has been many years since it was announced by some of the major search engines that guest blogging is no longer a relevant way of building links, it continues to be a strategy employed by SEO managers. It is just that low-quality guest posts in the form of spun articles published to highly generic blogging platforms are truly a great example of a link-building tactic that should no longer be pursued. Guest blogging on highly relevant niche platforms on the other hand is not only alive and well but also remains highly effective.
This is when you find highly popular content with loads of backlinks, improve it to the best of your ability, and then ask everyone who links to the content you improved to link to you instead. Some of the opportunities to improve your content over the existing resource are to correct inaccurate or misleading claims; go deeper and explain things in detail and explain it in a manner that uses graphics, videos, or whatever is needed to help the reader understand things easier.
This tactic involves showing prospects a resource with more information on something they’ve briefly mentioned. This is a tactic that can be often employed in collaboration with a broken link-building tactic, just to provide website owners with an additional reason to refer to your page and is similar to the skyscraper technique where a more comprehensive resource is proposed to the site owners.
While many other link-building tactics aim to create content that appeals to as wide an audience as possible, ego bait takes a highly targeted and personal approach. The success of ego bait content revolves around attracting the interest of whichever influencer or website owner you want a link from. So what you must do is simply create content that catches the attention of industry players in your niche and entices them to engage with your content.
This relates to the process of getting your positive experience with a product or service featured on the provider’s website. In other words, the exchange of value between parties happens at the expense of you providing the owner with a positive customer testimonial in exchange for a mention or link from their site.
Just as the name suggests, link exchanges stand for, well, exchanges of backlinks, where the referrer is linked back to by the referred. Although link exchanges are against Google’s guidelines, it remains unclear how search engines, and Google in particular, handle these cases as a certain overlap may be impossible to avoid and is, in fact, considered completely natural. Previous studies done by Ahrefs have proven that having a certain percentage of reciprocal links is perfectly natural and won’t necessarily lead to Google penalizing your website.
Resource page link building is when you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to other useful industry resources, relevant to their industries. The idea behind this link-building tactic is that a resource page’s value is determined by the quality and quantity of the third-party resources to which it links. So when you reach out suggesting something of value to the creators of such pages, what you’re doing is helping them to improve the page.
This strategy stands for finding a broken link, recreating the missing content, and then reaching out to anyone linking to the dead resource to instead link to your re-created content. The idea behind it is that nobody wants broken links on their website, as they contribute to a poor user experience. So when you reach out to people telling them about broken links on their site, they’ll normally happily replace them with working ones.
Unlike quotes, images are embeddable. When people embed them in their content, they tend to link back to the source. Some of the few common image types that tend to attract links are Infographics; Graphs; Photos; and Mind Maps.
These are online mentions or citations of your brand that do not link back to your site. A common link-building strategy is asking to replace these citations with clickable backlinks.
This opportunity is all about getting granular in certain situations by asking for a backlink to bottom-funnel pages. When done correctly, this practice can help take your web pages to the next level.
This is a free service that provides journalists with a robust database of sources for upcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources to secure valuable media coverage.
To succeed at PR, identify some of your site’s or your business’s unique attributes. Find several companies that share these attributes and then find a number of publications that share these attributes and reach out to them.
It must be noted, however, that for these link-building tactics to work you will need to create truly exceptional pages that people would naturally want to link to. Not to mention you would need to have a lot of authority and credibility in your space, which on some occasions might help to compensate for your page’s lack of notoriety. Given how hard it is to persuade other website owners to link to you, many SEO managers start looking for ways to get their way across by offering:
- To share their content on Twitter & Facebook.
- To promote their content in an email newsletter.
- Free access to a premium product or service.
- A link in exchange
On the other hand, offering these kinds of benefits gets us into the grey area of what is considered a “link scheme” according to Google’s guidelines. So in other words, the legitimate ways of asking for links have a rather low success rate and as soon as you try to get it your way, you’re entering Google’s minefield.
So just to set the right expectations ahead of your outreach campaign, using tactics and strategies listed in this group can only go so far. It takes a lot of effort to get links with these tactics while not breaking Google’s guidelines.
3. Buying Links
Just to set the right expectations straight off the bat, buying links isn’t a recommended practice. At best, you’ll end up wasting loads of money on links that do not bring a valuable contribution to your website and at worst you’ll get your website penalized. However, it shouldn’t go without saying that many people in the SEO industry buy links in all sorts of ways and manage to get away with it.
4. Earning and Preserving Links
The art of earning backlinks stands for the process of, well, earning them when other people link to your web pages without you having to ask them to do so. The only way it can happen is when you have something truly outstanding that other website owners would genuinely want to mention on their websites.
However, it should be noted that no matter how great your content is, it’s very rare for it to be discovered without any kind of promotion. The more you promote your pages the more likely they will end up on someone else’s radar and the more likely for you to receive those earned backlinks.
Constructing content that attracts backlinks is also known as link bait and it can fall under several categories including:
Although using first-hand data is always preferable, it may be possible for you to find publicly available data to put it in a digestible format and attempt to build backlinks off the back of it.
Just like in the case of data studies, infographics deal with the digestible nature of showing data. Unlike in the case of full-scale data studies infographics tend to have data on very niched-down topics which makes this technique so valuable to niche websites.
Just like in the case of infographics and data studies, Maps relate to building backlinks off the back of visualizing data. One argument for infographic maps over regular infographics is that, according to a large number of SEO managers, the infographic market is quite saturated and this asks for increasingly more sophisticated data visualization initiatives, like maps.
Surveys are all about first-hand data. They can come in handy in outreach to journalists who are looking into very specific issues. Survey data is really hard to come by these days, so if you have a chance to get first-hand information through them, you might find yourself building meaningful relations with journalists as a result.
Many companies are in the business and putting entire awards ceremonies for certain industries and niches. A quite powerful link bait tactic as award nominees and winners are likely to link back to the award owners mentioning their nomination.
Running your own podcasts can help you build backlinks off the back of its guests, who would be in a very good position to link back to you since you’ve interviewed them directly and they might also be interested in mentioning their ties with the podcast.
Not an uncommon strategy for some blogs are running interviews in various forms with industry professionals. This, like the other tactics, can end up resulting in a link back to the website owners as this is a meaningful means of forming relationships with industry professionals.
Anyone would much rather prefer to invest time and money into creating valuable pages generating word of mouth and picking up links naturally, rather than working on a sequence of daunting link prospecting and email outreach workflows, hoping to build links to a mediocre page.
Although preserving hard-earned links does not really fall under the definition of link building, it still might deserve a brief mention here. There are just two ways of preserving links: link reclamation and fixing 404 pages that have links.
Understanding Backlinks
It is kept as more or less a secret how exactly Google measures the value of each link. However, there are some general concepts of evaluating links that the SEO community believes to be true. Most of these insights are gathered from link-tracking tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, and SEMRush, which can help discover backlinks leading to your website.
1. Authority
Most link tracking tools identify 2 types of authority, website authority covering the entire website and page authority covering individual pages. According to Backlinko, website authority is more important for ranking a page than page authority is, however, it may be noteworthy that both carry a certain degree of importance, especially for highly competitive search queries.
Different Link Tracking tools track authority through different metrics, the most prominent, mainly because it was among the first to appear around the web, is Moz’s Domain Authority, which just like in the case of Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, is based on the strength of a given website’s backlink profile. Although major search engines, and Google in particular have consistently denied that some sort of sitewide website authority metric even exists, to many SEO professionals, it seems rather intuitive that a link from a reputable source brings more value than a link from one less reputable.
Many SEO managers would argue though, that the most important aspect of a link is not so much authority as it is relevance and a link from a highly relevant resource might be more valuable than one from an irrelevant but authoritative one. Some major link-tracking providers like Ahrefs go as far as saying that their metric for tracking website authority should serve as an estimate of “the relative amount of effort that it makes sense to invest in acquiring a link from a given website“.
The basic idea behind Page Authority is that the page with more links pointing at it casts a stronger vote. This is the reason why so many SEO managers strive to acquire links from old pages with a strong backlink profile. A link from such a page is deemed to bring more value than a link from a newly published page that doesn’t yet have any backlinks of its own.
On the other hand, the value of backlinks coming from a new page might actually change over time, as the page acquires new backlinks and grows in popularity. So, a generally good practice is trying to build backlinks from pages that get backlinks of their own and are likely to grow in popularity over time and not necessarily old pages with backlinks.
2. Relevance
As previously stated backlink relevance is just as important, if not in some situations, more important than a backlink’s authority. Many SEO professionals believe that relevance also applies at both, the website and the page level. In the SEO community, as well as based on comments from prominent search engines like Google, it is widely believed that if other prominent websites on the subject link to a page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality. This implies that that you should aim to get links from websites that are in some manner relevant to yours, instead of pursuing every single link opportunity that presents itself.
3. Anchor text
The anchor text is the clickable snippet of text that contains a link to another page and directly talks about the relevancy of a link. In other words, in most cases, the anchor text describes what the linked page is about. Anchor text is a ranking factor, and search engines like Google use it to determine what a page is about. Although many believe that the more you try to control and shoehorn all the right keywords into the anchor texts of your backlinks, the higher the chance that Google will penalize you for that, anchor text optimisation as an SEO strategy has certainly deserved a place under the sun.
There are several types of anchor text that describe the backlinks they carry. Among these are branded anchor text which hosts the brand of the referred website, keyword-related anchor text which hosts a number of relevant keywords and naked anchor text, also called naked links which simply feature the webpage URL. The text near the anchor text is also considered of some importance, for which it was given the name “baby anchor text”.
4. Nofollow vs Follow
Not all links are born equal. Just as previously explained most self-published links are nofollow and thus do not pass value, links that are earned are called followed, which do pass “link-juice” to the the referred page and thus help that page rank higher. In a more detailed setting, “Nofollow” stands for an attribute that tells Google that the linking page would rather not give its vote to the page that it is referencing. This, however, isn’t the full story as fairly recently Google has announced that they do take these links into consideration, in particular, when discovering new pages.
Search engines like Google have also introduced 2 new types of links to better clarify the relationship of the link to the referred page. As a general rule, SEO
- rel=“UGC” which should be applied to “user-generated” links such as blog comments and forum posts.
- rel=“sponsored” which should be applied when the link is part of an advertisement, sponsorship, or some other compensation agreement.
As a general rule SEO managers should strive to build followed backlinks or in other words backlinks that do not contain “nofollow; UGC or sponsored” attributes as these are the ones that cast the strongest votes toward the referred content. However, if you find an opportunity to get a no-followed link from a highly relevant page that is likely to result in leads, you should absolutely go for it.
5. Backlinks Placement
One of Google’s patents talks about how the likeliness of a link being clicked may affect how much authority it transfers and the placement of a link on a page is one of the few things that can affect its click through rate. As an example from a list of links in the content, sidebar and footer content links tend to be most prominent because they’re most likely to be clicked.
Not even all content links are created equal. The higher in the content a link is the likelier it is to be clicked and thus the more value it is expected to pass to the referred page. Also, a noteworthy factor is the total number of backlinks on the page, as the more backlinks there are the more they’re competing for click-throughs.
It may also be important to mention that when you’re finding yourself writing a guest article for someone else’s blog, you should try to entice readers to click on your links as links are important not just for boosting the SEO value of referred pages, but because it will also send some referral traffic to your website.
6. Backlink Destination
Link destination is an equally important consideration. There are generally 3 destinations you can point the links to: the homepage, linkable assets normally developed for link-building purposes and the actual pages that you need to rank high in search engines also known under the name of money pages.
As it happens, the pages that you need links to are the hardest to build backlinks to. The reason for this is that webmasters tend to link to pages where their users can get valuable information for free as opposed to pages where they’re expected to part with their cash. While there’s no single right way of addressing this, most webmasters would agree that you should leverage the power of internal linking to help your money pages rank better. In other words, this entails building internal links to internal assets to leverage the passing of link juice to important pages.