Link Building: How To Do It Right

Qualified website traffic is the most critical factor for the success of your business on the internet. SEO, a cost-effective digital marketing strategy, can help you achieve this goal without the need to spend exorbitant amounts on online advertising. Once your website has reached a high ranking on search engines, it’s almost free traffic from then on. The maintenance cost for keeping the website at the top rank is far lower than other marketing methods. This is your guide to link building, a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal.

Modern SEO involves a harmonious collaboration of on-page and off-page SEO. In this article, we’ll talk about off-page SEO, specifically link building. Along with “content,” it is one of the most important factors influencing a website’s ranking on Google. While most people focus on the many on-page factors, you must not underestimate the importance of off-page SEO and link building.

The State of Link Building Today

To create successful campaigns, you must understand the A to Z of link building today: why link building is still so important and the strategies to build high-quality backlinks for your website. Remember, it’s not just about the quantity of backlinks, but the quality that truly matters.

What do we mean by link building? Link Building is the process of making other websites link (via links) to your website, to improve its search engine positioning. These external links pointing to your website are known as backlinks. Search engines use these links as a vote for your website to judge its quality and determine its ranking in their organic search results. However, not all backlinks pointing to your site are going to improve its ranking; some links (considered poor quality by Search engines) can even hurt the positioning of your website.

Why is Link Building Still Important? Link building remains a crucial factor in determining how Google and Bing rank websites. As Google has stated, the two most important factors are content and links.

Here’s how backlinks help your website: When deciding on the ranking of your website and your competitors, one of the ranking factors Google will consider is the number of quality links. The more good-quality backlinks you have, the better your website ranks. To produce the best results, one must create strategies involving dozens of link building factors.

How to Choose Websites for Quality Link Building

When choosing a website to place a link on, you must consider three essential factors:

• The trust and authority of the link pages.
• SEO and content optimization of the respective sites.
• The anchor text of the incoming links.

The most important thing to understand is that, as Google states, your content is more likely to receive a higher rating for the targeted keywords if it can have external websites linked to its pages.

Different Types of Links and the Value They Offer

We can classify links based on their destination, whether they direct users to another page on the same site or to a different website.

• Internal links: Links between the pages of your website that help search engines assign link equity and help visitors navigate.
• Incoming links (Backlinks): Links that point to your website from another website. These are of the utmost value for SEO, as they serve as votes of confidence, demonstrating trustworthiness and authority. They must be natural and come from high-quality, relevant sites.
• Outgoing links: Links on your website that guide visitors to external websites, often used to cite sources or provide additional information. Linking to high-quality sites within your niche demonstrates a strong association with visitors and search engines.
• Dofollow or follow links: Backlinks that are anointed with a “do follow” tag. This tag tells Search engines that the website is intended to pass link value to the linked webpage.
• Nofollow links: No-follow links have a rel= “nofollow” HTML tag attached to them. This tells search engines not to count the link as an endorsement. Since 2019, Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a strict directive, meaning the link may still be crawled. You should also be aware of the modern rel=” sponsored” and rel= “ugc” (User Generated content) attributes. A healthy backlink profile includes a mix of these attributes to look natural.

The Importance of Backlinks for SEO

Content and backlinks are the two most important pillars of SEO. Understanding their role and how they work together is crucial for achieving higher rankings on Search Engines. This knowledge will empower you to make informed decisions in your SEO strategy.

• Improve website search ranking: Any backlink pointing to your website is like a “vote” which tells search engines that your content is valuable. The quality of backlinks is far more critical than quantity.
• Improve user experience: Backlinks help internet users find your website for the information or product they’re looking for.

Quality is the Most Important Factor

Google’s Penguin update in 2012 made it clear that the era of backlink spam had come to an end, marking the beginning of a new era of quality content. Since then, the importance of high-quality backlinks has surpassed that of quantity.

• Monitor backlinks regularly: We recommend periodically monitoring your website’s backlinks, as losing links can negatively impact your search engine ranking. Tools like Ahrefs are comprehensive for this task.
• Prioritize obtaining backlinks from unique domains: It’s better to have links from a diverse mix of websites relevant to your business niche. One hundred links from 100 domains are more effective than 1,000 links from a single domain.
• Don’t underestimate the importance of relevance: Relevance is the most significant factor in determining the value of backlinks. You must look for websites from the relevant industry. For example, as an online shop for Jewelry, it makes no sense to put a backlink on a blog for sports.

Link Acquisition Best Practices

• Always look for natural links: Backlinks must be natural. Search engines are wary of exaggerated or forced content or link building methods.
• Strive for a balanced use of anchor text: The optimization of anchor text has never been more critical. Avoid generic phrases like “click here” and use keywords or their variations for value and naturalness. Anchor text diversity is also essential.
• Prioritize the placement of backlinks in the content area: Search engines usually give more value to the backlinks on the main content area than on the sidebar, comment section, or footer.
• Remove toxic and low-quality backlinks: Monitor your backlink profile using tools like Google Search Console and utilize the Google Disavow tool to instruct Google not to consider those backlinks for ranking purposes.
• Maintain a slow and steady flow of backlinks: If you get too many links in a short period, it looks unnatural. Consider link building as a long-term activity.
• Get backlinks for country-specific TLDs for Geotargeting: TLDs (like .fr or .ca) are crucial if you want to rank high in a particular country or region.

Content-Centric Link Building Strategies

Content is the king, whether for on-page optimization or link building. Here are the best content-centric link building strategies to boost your link profile:

• Create Visual and Interactive Media Assets: Visuals (infographics, charts, presentations) are highly shareable and often generate backlinks rapidly when published on other sites.
• Create Listings: Articles in the form of lists (tips, methods, how-to) are popular and highly linkable content formats.
• Publish Original Research and Studies: Conducting new research, industry studies, or surveys establishes authority and generates high-value links when quoted by educational or authoritative websites.
• Create In-depth Guides: Informational resources establish you as an expert and generate backlinks from social networks and other reputable websites.
• Encourage Customer Reviews: Reviews on your site or external review websites (Yelp, Trustpilot) improve brand value and authority.
• Mentions by Influencers and Bloggers: Mentions by popular industry figures generate buzz and authority backlinks.
• Network with Friends and Associates: Links from partners, clients, and suppliers operating in the same niche have higher value due to relevancy.

Link building remains one of the most critical components of SEO. While the methodologies have evolved, the foundation—high-quality content and good user experience—remains essentially the same.