SEO: Link Building and how to boost your website ranking

Link Building

Link Building – Photo by Darrel Und on Pexels.com

Link building is a process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own website. It plays an important role in driving organic traffic via search engines, especially in competitive industries. When combined with strong technical SEO foundations, great on-page SEO, excellent content, and a good user experience, link building can be super effective at driving more organic traffic. The need for quality, relevance, and authenticity has never been more important. While low-quality, spammy link building techniques can work, they shouldn’t play a part in a strategy for an organization who is building for long-term organic search success. Arguably, link building these days is more akin to great marketing, and the organizations who understand this are usually the ones who win long-term. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a technical aspect to building links or that all techniques need to revolve around your product. There’s still far more to it than this, and far more to understand than ever before.

Also links are divided into two main categories, External and Internal. External is normally coming from other domains. Internal links are links you made to other relevant pages on your blog or website.

Importance of Link Building

Link building is an essential aspect of SEO. It helps search engines to find and rank your pages. You can write the perfect post, but if search engines can’t follow at least one link to it, it will most likely wait forever in vain for visitors to admire its outstanding content. 

Link building leads to higher site metrics and SEO scores.

If you’re SEO savvy you’ll understand terms like Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), Page Rank (PR), Alexa Rank, and so on. By building backlinks you’ll increase these metrics and your website will benefit, health-wise.

Again, When combined with strong technical SEO foundations, great on-page SEO, excellent content, and a good user experience, link building can be super effective at driving more organic traffic. The need for quality, relevance, and authenticity has never been more important. 

How Link Building Works for Your Page?

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the Internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web.

Normally you start by contacting and exchanging the links with as many as possible related pages, by putting a link in your page to them and they link back to you as well. There are many factors that determine if it is good to link to this page or not , view the next section about Steps to quality link building.

How Good is This Link to Me?

The factors that determine how good a specific link is to you include:

1. Global popularity: Popular sites receive more external links. Wikipedia ends up at the top of search pages for many subjects because so many websites link to it.
2. Local popularity: Local popularity refers to inbound links that come from similar sites. For instance, if you have a shoe store, and a popular shoe blog links to it, search engines will pay more attention than if the link came from an unrelated website.
3. Anchor text: When someone links to your shoe store using “shoe store” as the anchor text, this sends a signal to search engines that your website is a good resource for shoes. But if the anchor text that brings visitors to a page uses the same keywords too frequently, search engines may start to suspect spammy tactics.
4. Link context: Links are more valuable when the context is directly related to the topic your website. The transition from the current page to the one being linked should be relatively seamless.
5. Where the link comes from: Links from authoritative websites carry more weight than links from less-reputable sites. For instance, a link that comes from Google’s official blog will be more authoritative than one that comes from a personal blog on WordPress. Search engines have methods to sort through spam and irrelevant content, and Google has a ranking system that grades individual Web pages based on their reputability.

The Benefits of Link Building

Link building is an essential part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It involves acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own website. Here are some benefits of link building:

1. Build Authority and Credibility: The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the more authoritative and credible it is considered to be. This can lead to higher domain authority and domain rating, which are both site metrics used by SEO analysis tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz ¹.
2. Improve SERP Rankings: Generally, the higher the domain authority, the more likely it is that the website will rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) ¹.
3. Generate More Website Traffic: Backlinks can drive referral traffic to the website, thereby increasing the authority of your site ².
4. Support Your Internal Linking: Link building can help support your internal linking strategy, which is important for SEO ¹.
5. Better ROI: Link building can provide a better return on investment (ROI) than other marketing strategies ¹.
6. Cultivate Brand Awareness: Link building can help increase brand awareness by exposing your website to a wider audience ³.
7. Increased Sales and Conversions: Link building can help increase sales and conversions by driving more traffic to your website ⁴.
8. Boost Referrals: Link building can help increase referrals to your website, which can lead to more business opportunities ¹.
9. Reduce Your Reliance on Paid Ads: Link building can help reduce your reliance on paid ads by driving more organic traffic to your website ¹.

In summary, link building is a crucial aspect of SEO that can help improve your website’s authority, credibility, and visibility. It can also help increase traffic, sales, and referrals while reducing your reliance on paid ads.

Some of the advantages of making link building plan are:

• Recurring Income.
• Boosts Domain Authority (Moz) or Domain Rating (Ahrefs)
• Builds Credibility.
• Boosts Online Visibility.

You can also find more about that in the More Resources section below.

Link Building Tools & Services

Tools can be divided into four categories:

• Link research.
• Prospecting and outreach.
• Reporting.
• AI-powered tools.

Emerging technologies powered by AI can make the link-building process easier.

But in general we can list most common used  8 ones as follows:

1. Ahrefs
2. Google
3. Hunter.io
4. NeverBounce
5. Buzzstream
6. HARO
7. URL Profiler
8. SEO Toolbar

These tools sure need another post to expand and detail its advantages, I will make this happen soon.

Steps to Quality Link Building Results

Here are some steps to achieve quality link building results:

1. Analyze your website with SEO tools: Use SEO tools like Ahrefs.com and Moz.com to audit your website and analyze your existing backlink profile ¹.
2. Know your niche: Identify the websites that are relevant to your niche and target audience ¹.
3. Create a list of websites: Create a list of websites that you want to target for link building ¹.
4. Write engaging content: Create engaging content that is relevant to your niche and target audience ¹².
5. Get to blogging: Start a blog and publish high-quality content regularly ¹.
6. Circulate or pitch your content: Share your content on social media platforms and reach out to other websites to pitch your content ¹.

For more information on evaluating site quality for link building, check out this article by Search Engine Journal ³. You can also refer to Moz’s beginner’s guide to link building ² and Ahref’s guide to link building strategies ¹ for more tips and tricks. Checkout our more resources section below.

Some of The Best Link Building Techniques 

1. Prioritize Backlinks Placed within the Text

One important link-building strategy is to note where the link is placed on the webpage. The main fundamental in link building is to maintain a natural distribution of links. For this reason, backlinks with text integrated into the content had added more value by hitting more views than those that were placed on the sidebar or the footer.

2. Quality over Quantity

In search engine optimization and link building, it is important to know that quality is more important than quantity. Adding many links to your site brings no results if the links are not of any value. A link from a single domain with higher authority is far better than adding several backlinks from the same domain.

3. Page Authority and Domain Authority

It is important to understand how page authority and domain authority work for successful link building. When the authority of the page and site that hosts your backlinks is greater, better the link building as the part of the authority is transmitted to the linked page. 

4. Build Backlinks Slowly

Search engines will determine that they were not obtained in an organic way if you add multiple backlinks in a short span of time. When the backlinks are not added in a short time, it creates a strategy to let them achieve it little by little and not overnight.

5. Broken Link Building 

Broken Link Building is the process of finding backlinks that lead to 404 pages on other websites. Contacting those websites and suggesting them to replace the 404 links with another link leading to a similar page on your website. This strategy is a great way to get backlinks while adding value to the site offering you the backlink. There are two primary ways to find broken backlinks, 

• From your Competitors site– To find broken backlinks you can perform the analysis using a backlink analysis tool. Using the tool, you will be able to filter the results to find do-follow backlinks that are throwing 404 errors with high authority.  
• Analyze the Website you want the Backlinks from– If there is any specific website you want to source backlinks from, you can analyze the website to see if it has any backlinks relevant to your stream.

6. Guest Posts 

Another strategy you can implement in link building is guest posts. Guest posts boost the credibility of your website and make your brand visible to a new set of audiences. Another great SEO strategy is to add links to the content on your website. The content on the guest post should be well-written and informative.

7. Use Images to Build Links

Images grab the attention of the user and take up more space in general. And it is one good reason why creating and adding images such as infographics, graphics, product photos, comics, etc. It helps in promoting them to attract more backlinks to your website. Make sure that the links point to the page the image was originally sourced from and not the image directory ending in .gif, .png, .jpg, etc are dead ends. All the traffic that ends up in the image directory goes wasted. 

8. Look for Domains related to your Niche

Backlinks sourced from websites that are of the same theme or from the same page that discuss issues related to the content of your blog are considered as more valid strategies in link building.

9. Balance between No-follow and Do-follow

There are 2 types of links, namely no-follow links and do-follow links.

• No-follow Links– No-follow links are those who do not have the intention to pass authority to the page that is linked.   
• Do-follow Links– Do-follow links are those who have the intention of passing on the authority of the page linked. 

Many assume that link-building strategy must be of do-follow links only. But the best practice is to balance between the no-follow links and do-follow links.

10. Regain Missing Backlinks

Link building is not just about adding new backlinks to your website. It is equally important to take time to figure out which of the previous backlinks are broken or have gone missing.

Link Building Job & its Description

We (website owners) are always searching for an SEO Link Builder to help us increase brand awareness by building high-quality backlinks. The right link builder will contribute to increasing our site’s ranking by getting us high-quality backlinks from authority websites by outreaching and promoting our brand.

Here are the most common prerequisites that companies require for a link builder:

• Knowledgeable about SEO – SEO is the bread-and-butter of link building, and it’s the top requirement for a link builder. You must know the different types of SEO and how each of them works.
• Must be a bachelor’s degree holder – it’s required to have at least a bachelor’s degree to be a link building specialist. A degree in communication or IT is preferred but not required.
• Sense of urgency – link building is a time-sensitive job because clients set deadlines for their requirements. Thus, a sense of urgency is needed to complete the tasks in the set time frame.
• Communication skills – you’ll encounter different types of persons when building links. A good communicator is necessary to earn links.
• Knowledgeable about link building tools – to build links, you have to operate a number of link building software. These tools will make the job easier.
• Eager in finding new link building opportunities – you must know how to use advanced search settings on Google to find new link building opportunities for your client.

More on the job duties:

1. Research websites for outreach opportunities.
2. Drawing a strategy to build links for your client’s website.
3. Use web-based tools for link building (e.g. Ahrefs, Pitchbox).
4. Monitoring the backlinks and improvements in the performance of the client’s website.
5. Write content and monitor quality of the content with the client’s backlink.

Conclusion

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

After all, you may think of Link Building as a hand pulling you one step up in the long stairway. After you get used to all the concepts and good strategies, convince yourself with the right toolset and best technique, you can now go ahead and start your first link exchange in your prepared list. There will be many more ways to get attention but this old style, like word of mouth, works like a charm on the web. If you continue reading on this topic with the next section links, I’m sure you will be far more into the subject. Estimates of how much people make working in the field of Link Building will be around 69K-83K US$ per year, according to glassdoor data.

More Resources

• Link Building: The Free SEO Beginner’s Guide – Moz 
• What Is Link Building & it’s Importance in SEO | Infidigit
• What Is Link Building In SEO: Guide For Beginners – BetterLinks
• What is Link Building in SEO? – Web Hosting Tutorial, WordPress Video Guide – Bluehost India
• 20 Benefits of Link Building | LinkDoctor™
• Ultimate Guide to Link Building Strategies in 2024
• How To Evaluate Site Quality For Link Building
• The Ultimate Link Building Checklist For 2024
• 10 Link Building Benefits for SEO (and $$$) in 2024
• 14 Benefits of Link Building: How To Achieve These Benefits?
• 16 Benefits of Link Building – Grow Your Traffic And Rankings
• 10 key factors for a successful Link Building strategy