The online world considers links as valuable assets. Webpages with a substantial number of links are considered “authoritative” and receive favorable rankings on Google. Conversely, pages lacking links merely gain visibility. How to build links for SEO?
This comprehensive guide aims to educate you on how to build links for SEO while avoiding potential penalties from Google. Designed with beginners in mind, it provides practical advice that you can immediately apply into your website. That will equip you with practical strategies to enhance your link-building efforts.
What is Link Building?
Link building is an essential search engine optimization (SEO) technique that involves securing hyperlinks from other websites to your own site. These hyperlinks act as endorsements or recommendations from external sites. Engaging a link building service can significantly boost a website’s authority and its position in search engine results.
Search engines like Google consider backlinks as a signal of trust and relevance. When a reputable website links to your site, it indicates that your content is trustworthy. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your website rank in search engine results. However, not all backlinks are equal. Search engines evaluate the quality of the links through various factors such as the relevance, the anchor text, the link’s context, and the website’s overall link profile. It is important to focus on high-quality, relevant backlinks from authoritative websites in the industry.
Why is Link Building Important?
As stated by Andrey Lipattsev from Google, links are among the top three factors determining rankings on Google. Therefore, if you aspire to achieve high rankings in search engine results, obtaining links is certainly necessary.
Link building is important for many reasons, including:
- Improved search engine ranking: Quality backlinks are a major ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Obtaining relevant and authoritative backlinks helps increase your website’s visibility and rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Increased organic traffic: When your website ranks higher in search results, it attracts more organic traffic. Quality backlinks from reputable sources can drive targeted traffic to your site, increasing visibility, clicks, and conversions.
- Enhanced brand authority: Backlinks from authoritative websites act as endorsements and establish your website’s credibility and authority. When reputable sites link to your content, it signals to search engines and users that your website is trusted.
- Higher conversion rates: As organic traffic increases through effective link building, the potential for conversions also grows. When your website attracts relevant visitors interested in your products or services, the chances of converting them into customers are higher.
- Improved website metrics: Link building can positively impact various website metrics, such as domain authority, page authority, and trust flow. These metrics are considered by search engines when evaluating the quality of your website, which can influence your overall search engine rankings.
How to Build Links for SEO Effectively?
Ask for Links
Asking for links involves actively reaching out to websites and requesting them to link to your website. This can be done through different types of content, such as blog posts, ebooks, visual assets like infographics, case studies, original research, and more.
Add Links
Adding links refers to manually placing your link on another website. What you can do is adding your link to social media profiles, business directories, forums, communities, or blog comments.
In fact, manually adding SEO links is one of the easiest but least effective methods of building links. These types of links often come from low-quality sources that do not get much weight from Google.
Earn Links
When you acquire links through earning, other websites voluntarily link to your website without any solicitation from you.
The most effective approach to earning links is by creating high-quality content that appeals to people and encourages them to link to it. These links occur when individuals perceive your content as a valuable resource for further reading.
What Makes a Good Backlink?
Understanding the characteristics of a good or bad link enables you to prioritize building links that have a positive impact on your Google rankings. Let’s explore the approach for identifying links that are valuable and worth pursuing.
1. Authority
“Authority” is an important SEO concept that refers to the overall quality and credibility of a website. Websites or pages with higher authority scores have more influential backlinks. Consequently, obtaining a link from those highly authoritative websites carries greater value in boosting the ranking of your own page.
For example, a link from a well-known publication like The Wall Street Journal is evaluated higher than the one from an unknown blogger.
2. Relevance
The relevance of a website is a crucial factor to consider when it comes to how to build links for SEO. This is because of Google’s “how search works” page, which states that their systems analyze content relevance in various ways, including assessing if prominent websites link or refer to the content. Therefore, you should prioritize obtaining links from websites that are relevant to your own rather than pursuing every available link opportunity.
3. Placement
A high-quality backlink is typically found within the main body of the page. This is a matter due to a specific Google patent that addresses link placement.
The patent examines various probabilities of a reader clicking on a link based on its location. Generally, links positioned higher up on the page with the higher probability of clicks carry more authority.
4. Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text displayed within a hyperlink. It holds significance as both search engines and readers utilize it to understand the content of the linked page. Consequently, the relevance and descriptive nature of the anchor text greatly impact its effectiveness. In addition to the content, good backlinks also feature anchor text that is descriptive and relevant.
5. No-follow vs. Follow
The “nofollow” attribute is used in building links for SEO to instruct search engines not to follow the outbound link. It is employed when website owners want to include a link to another website without implying endorsement.
In the page’s source code, the “nofollow” tag appears as: rel=”nofollow”. Here’s an example of a link with the “nofollow” attribute:
<a href="<https://example.com>" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a>It is important to note that according to Google, nofollow links do not pass authority. However, they can still contribute to brand recognition and referral traffic.
On the other hand, “follow” links are regular links without any attributes. These links can imply endorsement and pass ranking credit. Here’s an example of a follow link with no attribute:
<a href="<https://example.com>">Anchor Text</a>Apart from nofollow, there are two additional attributes that site owners can utilize. It is important to understand that all link attributes are considered as hints for Google to interpret the links.
- rel=”sponsored” is used to identify links as part of advertisements, sponsorships, or other agreements.
- rel=”ugc” is used to identify links within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
Tips for Backlink Building
Here are some tips on how to build links for SEO:
- Create high-quality content: Focus on producing valuable and engaging content that will naturally attract backlinks. Quality content is more likely to be shared and linked to by other websites.
- Guest blogging: Contribute guest posts to reputable websites in your industry. Include a relevant and informative author bio with a link back to your website. This can help you reach a new audience and build quality backlinks.
- Build relationships: Connect with other website owners, bloggers, and influencers in your industry. Engage with them through social media, commenting on their posts, or attending industry events. Building relationships can lead to link opportunities and collaborations.
- Broken link building: Identify broken links on other websites that are relevant to your content. Reach out to the website owner and suggest your content as a replacement for the broken link. This technique provides value to the website owner while gaining a backlink for yourself.
- Social media promotion: Share your content on social media platforms to increase its visibility. If your content is valuable and interesting, it can attract attention from other website owners who might link to it.
- Directory submissions: Submit your website to reputable online directories and industry-specific directories. This can help generate backlinks and improve your website’s visibility.
- Internal linking: Optimize your website’s internal linking structure by linking relevant pages within your own site. This helps search engines discover and understand the content on your website while also passing authority between pages.
Remember, building backlinks should be a gradual and organic process. Focus on quality over quantity, and always prioritize relevant and authoritative websites for link-building opportunities.
Wrapping Up
You can establish authority and improve your website’s visibility by obtaining high-quality links. This SEO link-building guide has provided actionable advice to help you navigate link-building safely and effectively. Now, it is time to put this knowledge into action!
For further guidance and support on how to build links for SEO and digital marketing, contact us today. Tech-One offers valuable SEO link building service, and expertise to optimize your online presence. Take action to take your next step towards SEO success!
