Link Building

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We are the perfect White-Labelable SEO & link building company, because of our 13+ years’ experience delivering unmatched SEO performance across industries and countries, through high-quality & fully-manual SEO & link building; we sometimes like to call it “link earning” purely because of the hard work we put into it! A link building service is a digital marketing service performed by an experienced SEO consultant or an SEO agency that helps a company acquire backlinks through link building activities. Link building activities include manual outreach, guest blogging and broken link building, among other tactics. Link building is a very broad term describing anything done to point inbound hyperlinks back to a website (also known as building back links). Link building helps improve your website’s domain authority and has been found to help rank pages higher in the search engine results pages (SERP). By building relevant and authoritative links to your pages, search engines like Google and Bing are able to identify that you are an authoritative result for certain search queries.

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website.[1] Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks (usually called links) to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.[2]

Link types

Editorial link

Editorial links are the links not acquired from paying money, asking, trading or exchanging. These links are attracted because of the good content and marketing strategies of a website. These are the links that the website owner does not need to ask for as they are naturally given by other website owners.[3]

Resource link

Resource links are a category of links, which can be either one-way or two-way, usually referenced as 'Resources' or 'Information' in navbars, but sometimes, especially in the early, less compartmentalized years of the Web, simply called 'links'. Basically, they are hyperlinks to a website or a specific web page containing content believed to be beneficial, useful and relevant to visitors of the site establishing the link.

In recent years, resource links have grown in importance because most major search engines have made it plain that—in Google's words—'quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating'.[4]

Search engines measure a website’s value and relevance by analyzing the links to the site from other websites. The resulting “link popularity” is a measure of the number and quality of links to a website. It is an integral part of a website’s ranking in search engines. Search engines examine each of the links to a particular website to determine its value. Although every link to a website is a vote in its favor, not all votes are counted equally. A website with similar subject matter to the website receiving the inbound link carries more weight than an unrelated site, and a well-regarded website (such as a university) has higher link quality than an unknown or disreputable website.[5][self-published source?]

The text of links helps search engines categorize a website. The engines' insistence on resource links being relevant and beneficial developed because many artificial link building methods were employed solely to spam search engines, i.e. to 'fool' the engines' algorithms into awarding the sites employing these unethical devices undeservedly high page ranks and/or return positions.

Google has cautioned site developers to avoid 'free-for-all' links, link-popularity schemes, and the submission of a site to thousands of search engines, given that these tactics are typically useless exercises that do not affect the ranking of a site in the results of the major search engines.[6] For many years now, the major[which?] search engines have deployed technology designed to 'red flag' and potentially penalize sites employing such practices.[7]

Acquired link

These are the links acquired by the website owner through payment or distribution. They are also known as organically obtained links. Such links include link advertisements, paid linking, article distribution, directory links and comments on forums, blogs, articles and other interactive forms of social media.[8]

Reciprocal link

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites, to ensure mutual traffic. For example, Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob's website links to Alice's website and Alice's website links to Bob's website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is no longer an important part of the search engine optimization process. In 2005, with their Jagger 2 update, Google stopped giving credit to reciprocal links as it does not indicate genuine link popularity.[9]

Link Building

Blog and forum comments

User-generated content such as blog and forum comments with links can drive valuable referral traffic if it's well-thought-out and pertains to the discussion of the post on the blog.[10] However, these links almost always contain the nofollow or the newer ugc attribute which signal that Google shouldn't take these into its ranking considerations.[11]

Directory link

Website directories are lists of links to websites which are sorted into categories. Website owners can submit their site to many of these directories. Some directories accept payment for listing in their directory while others are free.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way of saving and categorizing web pages in a public location on the web. Because bookmarks have anchor text and are shared and stored publicly, they are scanned by search engine crawlers and have search engine optimization value.

Image linking

Image linking is a way of submitting images, such as infographics, to image directories and linking them back to a specific URL.

Guest blogging

Also known as guest posting, is a popular SEO technique that consists of writing a piece of content for another website with the goal of getting more visibility and possibly link back to the author's website. According to Google, such links are considered unnatural and should be generally containing the nofollow attribute.[12]

Black hat link building

In early incarnations, when Google's algorithm relied on incoming links as an indicator of website success, Black Hat SEOs manipulated website rankings by creating link-building schemes, such as building subsidiary websites to send links to a primary website. With an abundance of incoming links, the prime website outranked many reputable sites. However, the conflicts of being devalued by major search engines while building links could be caused by web owners using other black hat strategies. Black hat link building refers explicitly to the process of acquiring as many links as possible with minimal effort.

The Penguin algorithm was created to eliminate this type of abuse. At the time, Google clarified its definition of a 'bad' link: “Any links intended to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme.”

With Penguin, it wasn't the quantity of links that improved your site but the quality. Since then, Google's web spam team has attempted to prevent the manipulation of their search results through link building. Major brands including J.C. Penney, BMW, Forbes, Overstock.com, and many others have received severe penalties to their search rankings for employing spammy and non-user friendly link building tactics.[13]

In October 5, 2014 Google launched a new algorithm update Penguin 3.0 to penalize those sites who use black hat link building tactics to build unnatural links to manipulate search engines. The update affected 0.3% English Language queries all over the world.[14]

Black hat SEO could also be referred to as Spamdexing, which utilizes other black SEO strategies and link building tactics.[15] Some black hat link building strategies include getting unqualified links from and participating in Link farm, link schemes and Doorway page.[6] Black Hat SEO could also refer to 'negative SEO,' the practice of deliberately harming another website's performance.

White hat link building

White hat link building strategies are those strategies that add value to end users, abide by Google's term of service and produce good results that could be sustained for a long time. White hat link building strategies focus on producing high-quality as well as relevant links to the website. Although more difficult to acquire, white hat link building tactics are widely implemented by website owners because such kind of strategies are not only beneficial to their websites' long-term developments but also good to the overall online environment.

See also

  • Deep linking: linking directly to a page within another website.
  • Inline linking: linking directly to content within another website.
  • Internal link: linking directly to content within your own website.
  • Page Rank: an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results.

References

  1. ^'Link Building Strategies You Need to Know | SEJ'. searchenginejournal. Retrieved 10 February 2017.
  2. ^Bailey, Matt (2011). Internet marketing : an hour a day (1st ed.). Indianapolis, Ind.: Wiley Technology Publishing. pp. 83–84. ISBN978-0470633748. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  3. ^Rognerud, Jon (2011). Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization Drive Traffic, Boost Conversion Rates, and Make Lots of Money (2nd ed.). New York: Entrepreneur Press. p. 213. ISBN978-1613080207. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  4. ^'Link schemes' Google webmaster central
  5. ^Oxer, Jonathan (2007). How to build a website and stay sane (2nd ed.). Lulu.com. p. 134. ISBN978-1847997340. Retrieved 2 December 2014.[self-published source]
  6. ^ ab'Search Engine Optimization (SEO)' Google webmaster central
  7. ^'Is That Directory Link Unnatural? | Search Engine Watch'. searchenginewatch.com. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  8. ^Jerkovic, John I. (2010). SEO Warrior. Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 17. ISBN978-1449383077. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  9. ^Webster, Ken. 'Google's Jagger Update – Dust Begins to Settle?'. WebProNews. iEntry Network. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 24 February 2014.
  10. ^Hines, Kristi. 'How to Use Blog Commenting to Get Valuable Backlinks'. Search Engine Watch. Retrieved 20 July 2016.
  11. ^'Evolving 'nofollow' – new ways to identify the nature of links'. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  12. ^Southern, Matt (10 April 2020). 'Google Answers: Is It OK to Link to My Own Guest Post?'. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  13. ^'10 Big Brands That Were Penalized By Google, From Rap Genius To The BBC'. Marketing Land. Retrieved 21 April 2014.
  14. ^Matt McGee. 'Google Penguin Update 3 Released, Impacts 0.3% Of English-Language Queries', Retrieved on 17 February 2016.
  15. ^Frick, Tim (2013). Return on Engagement: Content, Strategy and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. Taylor & Francis. pp. 30–31. ISBN978-1136030260. Retrieved 3 December 2014.

External links

Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Link_building&oldid=997134243'

If link building isn’t already in your SEO arsenal, it’s time to change that. Earning authoritative, relevant backlinks is one of the best ways to boost your keyword rankings and drive organic traffic.

If you’ve heard of link building before but don’t know much about it, you’re not alone. Link building has changed significantly over the years, and there are a variety of methods companies can use to acquire backlinks. In this post, we’ll cover what you need to know about link building and highlight the most commonly used tactics in the industry.

What is link building and why does it matter?

Simply put, link building is the process of acquiring backlinks from third-party websites to your own for the purpose of increasing your domain’s presence in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search engines use complex algorithms that are constantly being updated to give their users the best search results. While Google’s ranking system is determined by many different factors, backlinks have always been one of the most impactful. In Google’s eyes, links act like a “vote of confidence” from Site A to Site B. The more backlinks you have, the more likely it is that Google will see your site as a trustworthy source of information.

As an industry, SEO is constantly evolving and adapting to algorithm updates, but recent case studies continue to show a strong correlation between links and search rankings. A 2020 data study published by Backlinko and Ahrefs found that pages with more backlinks tended to rank higher than pages with fewer backlinks. In addition, the study found that the number of unique referring domains had a substantial impact on rankings. This indicates that the variety of sites linking back to you is perhaps more valuable than the sheer number of backlinks, as there is diminishing value for earning multiple links from the same domain.

The SEO community at large agrees that links continue to be just as important as ever. A report from SparkToro surveying 1,500+ professionals in the SEO field found that “quality of linking sites and pages” was one of the most important factors for Google’s ranking system, second only to the relevancy of the page’s content.

Improving SERP rankings is the primary goal of link building, but engaging in this process can also help grow your digital performance in other ways. One of the most notable benefits is increased traffic. Ultimately, improved rankings will help generate more organic traffic to your site. In addition, building links on highly visited websites can bring in considerable referral traffic from visitors who otherwise would not have found your page. Link building outreach can also be useful for building relationships with industry websites and increasing brand recognition.

Go for quality over quantity

In the past, link building was associated with spammy, “black-hat” tactics that took advantage of loopholes in search engine algorithms. But as Google’s algorithm has evolved, it is has become better at identifying link-building schemes and penalizing websites that violate its guidelines. Link building tactics have similarly shifted over the years. Instead of trying to earn as many links as possible, best practices now reflect earning backlinks on relevant pages and focusing on the quality of the websites that are linking to you.

Learning to how to gauge the quality of a website is a crucial skill for anyone trying to build links. Here are some factors our team takes into consideration when qualifying potential linking opportunities for our clients:

  • Relevancy. Relevancy is key for successful link building. Ask yourself if a link back to your website would make sense on the web page you have found. Is it a logical fit? If you can’t explain why a webmaster should link back to you, you are unlikely to earn the link.
  • Domain Authority and Page Authority. Moz’s Domain Authority and Page Authority rankings use a 1-100 logarithmic scale to predict how well a website will rank in search engine result pages. This is a good way to get an idea of the general authority of a website—just keep in mind in that these scores are simply an estimate and are not associated with Google in any way. These metrics can be checked with Moz’s Link Explorer tool.
  • Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Trust Flow is a metric developed by Majestic that predicts how trustworthy a website is based on the quality of backlinks pointing toward the site. Similarly, Citation Flow predicts how influential a page is based on how many sites are linking to it. These scores range from 1-100.
  • Traffic. Quality websites should have consistent traffic across most web pages without any major drops over the past year. Be wary of websites that have fewer than 100 monthly visitors.
  • Look and feel of the website. While some of this comes with experience, follow your gut instinct when evaluating a website. Does the website design and layout look outdated? If so, there’s a good chance the page isn’t being updated. Is there an excessive amount of external links on the page, including a few that don’t seem relevant to the page’s topic? This could indicate that the website is engaging in spammy tactics, and you should do some further investigation before asking them for a link.

We’ve covered why backlinks are important and how to determine the quality of a potential linking partner. Now, where do you start in terms of actually earning these links? How do you find websites willing to link back to you in the first place? And what pages on your website have the best shot of earning links?

A good place to start is using a tool like Ahrefs or Majestic to see what’s working for you already. You may have earned some links organically through brand mentions or content published on your site.

Additionally, look at your competition to see which strategies or keywords are working for them. It helps to review not only your physical competitors, but companies who are most likely to share your target keywords.

Looking at your existing links along with your competitors’ links can give you some ideas about the type of strategies that may work well for your industry. Below, we’ve included explanations of the most popular link building techniques, along with a few tips that are sure to get your campaign off to a good start.

1. Unlinked brand mentions

Oftentimes, publications will mention a business within an article without linking out to that company’s website. This presents a quick win for link building. In instances where your brand is mentioned but there is no link present, you can send a request to the site’s editor to ask if they are able to update the article with a link back to your site. Finding unlinked mentions is one of the most popular and most successful link building tactics, especially for large brands.

You can search for mentions of your brand with a simple advanced search command:

“your brand name” -site:yoursite.com

The Google search page will populate with a list of websites that mention that your company name somewhere within the page’s text. You can further narrow your search by limiting it to pages published within a certain time frame or navigating to the “News” section of the search pages if you are specifically looking for news articles.

Once you’ve found a page that mentions your company, you can double check whether or not they’re already linking back to you by right-clicking anywhere on the page, selecting “View page source,” and entering your site’s URL.

You can also set up Google alerts to get notified whenever your brand name is mentioned in the news.

2. Local link building

Local link building is the practice of getting other websites in your area to link back to your site. While this is a great way for smaller organizations to gain organic visibility, this method of link building can also be one of the most challenging, since local opportunities may be limited. Often, local link building involves reaching to smaller, less authoritative organizations that are based in your company’s region. Keep in mind that is perfectly fine to go after sites that have relevantly low Domain Authority scores, as long as these sites are relevant and authentic. If you already have partnerships with a few other businesses in your area, see if you can leverage any of these existing relationships for link building opportunities.

Other tactics for local link building include creating newsworthy content that you can pitch to local news websites and getting your company listed in local directories. Track down websites specific to your city—such as local libraries, government websites, or school websites—to see if they have any web pages highlighting local businesses in your industry. Certain business directories (such as those found on Chamber of Commerce sites) will require a membership fee to be listed, but you will gain valuable brand exposure in exchange for this fee.

Note: When submitting your website to directories, take extra care to make sure the directory is legitimate. Focus on niche directories that are specific either to your industry or your location. Check out some of the other companies listed and dive into the directory’s analytics to make sure there are no signs of spam.

3. Guest blogging

If you have the time and resources to create written content for industry websites, you may want to incorporate guest blogging into your link building strategy.

Guest blogging typically entails reaching out to third-party publications and offering to create content for them. In return for providing them with a high-quality article for their site, the website will often permit you to link back to your own site within the article.
Because this tactic requires creating a new piece of content for every linking opportunity, it can take considerably more time and effort than some of the other link building techniques we’ve mentioned. That said, it remains one of the most popular methods of link building, especially for companies that are trying to build links to pages that are less likely to earn links organically.

If you are going down this route, ensure that you are only reaching out to high-quality website that are ranking for relevant industry keywords and receiving a decent amount of monthly traffic. Be especially cautious of any site that requires payment before publishing a guest post. Google is known to penalize websites that feature unnatural, paid links in their guest posts.

When done properly, guest posting is a useful tool not only for earning backlinks but for establishing your brand as a thought leader in your industry as well.

4. Content-based link building

Unlinked mentions and directory links may be easy wins, but there is a finite amount of opportunities out there. For this reason, our team has found that leveraging linkable content is the most effective and efficient way to ensure the long-term success of a link building campaign. In fact, it’s the primary tactic we use for most of clients.

Unlike guest blogging, which involves writing content for external websites, content-based link building refers to creating a piece of content to live on your own website and leveraging that to earn links.

You may already be publishing content on your website, and that’s great, but content-based link building isn’t as simple as taking any existing blog post and mass-promoting across the web. Some types of content are simply better at attracting links than others. For example, content that is presented in unique formats—such as infographics or interactive content—is more likely to catch the attention of webmasters and earn backlinks.

Content that is created with link acquisition in mind is referred to as a “linkable asset.”

While linkable assets can take many different forms, they usually share the following characteristics:

  • Non-promotional
  • In-depth
  • Useful
  • Top-of-funnel
  • Evergreen

By producing useful content on a variety of topics, your company can earn links on websites that it wouldn’t be able to target otherwise.
With content-based link building, one of your main focuses will be earning links on “resource center”-style pages that feature a roundup of external links on a single topic. These types of pages are more common that you might think, especially on educational and nonprofit websites.

Because webmasters want to provide as much value as possible to their site’s visitors, they are often picky about the types of resources they are willing to include on their page. To see success with this method of link building, you will need to create content that is genuinely helpful and informative. Webmasters aren’t going to link to a short and simple blog post that repeatedly advertises your company’s services. They’re going to want to link out to resources that act as a comprehensive guide on a given topic.
4 final tips as you begin your link building campaign

1. You need a strategy

You may have some ideas churning for how to start earning links for your website, but before jumping into your own link building endeavor, it’s important to put together a strategy. Without a strategy in place, it will be easy to get lost and hard to know when you’ve hit (or missed) your goals.

Consider how much time you’re able to put toward link building efforts each month, as this might affect which techniques you focus on. Your strategy will also depend upon what your current content situation looks like. In many cases, it is wise to focus on content creationbefore starting a link building campaign.

2. Make sure you have the right tools

In addition, make sure that you have the necessary tools before getting started. Some of the most useful tools for competitor analysis and qualifying potential opportunities are Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, and SEMrush. We also highly recommend using an outreach tool such as BuzzStream to organize your emails and save templates.

3. Monitor your success rate

Measure your success by keeping track of the number of sites you have reached out to, the number of replies you have received, and any important metrics (such as Domain Authority or Trust Flow) from sites where you have earned a link. By monitoring your success rate, you will have a better idea of what tactics are and aren’t working for you.

4. Be patient

Most importantly, be patient. Link building can be a tedious process, and it may take a while to start earning high-quality backlinks, especially when you are first starting out. Even if you have an amazing piece of content and the best tools at your disposal, there will be days when you don’t receive a single reply from any of your outreach emails. Don’t be discouraged. Keep pressing forward, and don’t be afraid to pivot your tactics if needed. By sticking with your efforts, it will be even more rewarding when those links start coming in.

With a solid understanding of what makes a quality linking opportunity and a variety of techniques under your belt, you can experiment to find what works best for your business and start taking advantage of the numerous benefits associated with link development.

Our team has years of experience building links for clients in a variety of industries. If you want to learn more about our link building process here at Investis Digital and how it could improve your SEO performance, get in touch!

Make sure to also download our recent report, “How to Build Quality Backlinks That Impact Organic Search Visibility.”