Qualified website traffic is the most important factor for the success of your business on the internet, and SEO is the best digital marketing strategy to achieve this goal without spending thousands of dollars every month on online advertising. Once the website has reached a high ranking on Search engines, it all almost free traffic from then on. The maintenance cost for keeping the website on top rank is far lower as compared to other marketing methods. At Social SEO Team we strive to create high quality guides for you to succeed online. Here’s our link building guide for 2022.
2022 has brought many new things to SEO and getting your website ranking high on search engines 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 ranking of website on Google.
With it comes to SEO for producing the best results, most people focus on the many on-page factors that influence the ranking of the website. However, you must not underestimate the importance of off-page SEO and link building.
State of Link building in 2022
To create successful campaigns you must understand A to Z of link building in 2022. why link building is still so important and the strategies to build high-quality backlinks for your website in 2022.
What do we mean by link building in 2022?
Link Building in 2022, as we’ve explained in our last link building guide, is the process of making other websites link (via links) to your website, to improve the search engine positioning of your website.
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 to decide the ranking for it in their organic search results.
However, there are many types of links and certain factors you need to take into consideration before starting a link building project, as not all backlinks pointing to your site are going to improve its ranking, some links (considered as poor quality by Search engines) can even hurt the positioning of your website. The same goes with strategies to build backlinks.
Why is Linkbuilding is still important in 2022?
Link building is important in 2021 because It’s still a deciding factor in how Google and Bing rank websites. Google has already stated the importance of link building many times. In 2016, Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsey confirmed the importance of link building in this statement:
“On the one hand, it is the content. And on the other hand, it’s links that point to your page.”
Here’s how backlinks help your website.
Let’s say you own a business that sells Hardware equipment. You compete with another manufacturer of similar products. When deciding on the ranking of your website and your competitors, one of the ranking factors Google will consider is the number of links. The more good quality backlinks you have, the better your website rank. However, it’s not as simple. 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 the three important 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 says, your content is more likely to have a higher rating for the keywords it targets if it can have external websites linked to its pages.
Different types of links and the value they offer for SEO
We may classify links based on link destination, whether you take users to another page of the same site or to a different website.
- Internal links: These are those links between the pages of your website. Search engines determine this by looking at the domain name; if links on the on-page link to other pages within the same domain, they are considered internal links. This helps Search engines assign PageRank from incoming links to different web pages of your website. Internal links are also important for building website visitors to important pages of your website.
- Incoming links: Also known as “backlinks”, these links are links that point to your website from another website. Incoming links are of greatest value TERMS of SEO, as they are like votes of confidence, trustworthiness, and authority for your website. However, these incoming links must be natural and come from high-quality sites relevant to your website topic.
- Outgoing links: These are links on your website that link to other websites. Outbound links are generally used to guide website visitors to external websites with more information. Linking to high-quality sites within your website niche shows visitors and search engines that your website and they have an association.
- Dofollow or follow links: Do-follow links are backlinks that are anointed a “do follow” tag on a webpage. This tag tells Search engines that the website is passing link juice to the linked webpage. Creating Do-follow backlinks should be a priority of link-building project managers.
- Nofollow links: No-follow links have a “no follow” HTML tag attached to them. It tells search engines not to pass any link juice to the linked pages. Nofollow tag has helped webmasters reduce the internet spam targeted on their websites. When creating backlinks you must have at least a few no-follow links pointing to your website as a website with 100% do follow doesn’t look natural as a large number of websites on the internet only give no-follow backlinks.
Is link building still a viable SEO strategy in 2022?
Yes, link building is thriving and evolving every ear as search engines are constantly updating their algorithms.
Since its dawn whole internet has been connected by websites linking to each other. By analyzing the links pointing to your website, Google can determine the thematic context as well as the reputation of websites. High-quality backlinks from thematically relevant websites should be the goal of any link-building campaign.
This is your guide to learn how to build high-quality backlinks effectively and above all sustainably and we also teach you how to identify low-quality backlinks. You’ll also learn the most efficient strategies to improve the ranking of your website on Google, and at the same time avoid penalties. So if you’re already building backlinks, let’s get started.
What are backlinks and how do they work?
As we’ve explained before basics of backlinks haven’t changed. They’re links from external sites pointing to your website. checkout this article for a detailed explanation.
What is the Importance of Backlinks for SEO?
Content and backlinks are the two most important pillars of SEO for achieving higher rankings on Search Engines.
- Improve website search ranking: Any backlink pointing to your website is like a “vote” which tells search engines that the content of your Page is valuable and useful. The more backlinks you have, the higher your chance of a better ranking in the search results. However, the quality of backlinks is far more important than quantity.
- Improve user experience: Backlinks help internet users find your website for the information or the product they’re looking for. Thus saving them time, and also providing them with valuable information they’re looking for.
Just like anything in life, the Quality of backlinks should be of utmost priority for the success of any link-building campaign. That’s why you must know how to acquire good-quality links. if you’re not careful it can hurt your website’s search engine ranking. The whole link building project can be divided into three steps:
Quality of backlinks is the most important factor in 2022
Link building is time-consuming work that requires constant commitment, motivation, and learning new strategies. But it’s worth it, as if done properly, it leads to impressive results in terms of the marketing of your website. The first step in this journey is to recognize the best link sources for your website.
Backlinks coming from websites with high traffic and those which are considered an authority on the topic of your website are the best sources of backlinks. You must research and see if you can get these websites to link back to your website. This you can do by creating good quality informative content and reaching out to the webmasters of the authority websites.
Google's Penguin update back in 2012 made it clear that the era for backlink spam has gone and a new era of quality content has begun. Since then the importance of quality backlinks is superseding the importance of quality.
For SEO it means that the more reputable websites with a quality content link to your website, the higher you’ll rank on Google.
On the other hand, low-quality backlinks (in the worst-case large number of them created over a short time) and only a few high-quality links pointing to your website can lead to Google downgrading your website rank or even removing it from the search index. Which can be devastating for any business.
Its important to regularly monitor the backlinks
On the internet websites constantly undergo changes and many shut down every day which can make you lose backlinks. It often goes unnoticed and can hamper your website positioning. Therefore, it is recommended to constantly monitor the backlinks of your website.
We recommend Ahrefs backlink tool for this task. Among other things, it’s the most comprehensive tool to monitor and analyze the backlinks pointing to your website.
Backlink building in 2022- Getting Started
Every year we hear so many posts about “link building is “Dead. However, it’s still thriving after 20 years and backlinks are still one of the most important factors for high ranking on Search Engines in 2021. The truth is that without high-quality link building, your website has a very low chance of appearing on top positions of Search engine organic listing in 2021.
Opt for quality instead of quantity When it comes to link building and SEO, it’s important to explain that quality is much better than quantity. Therefore, having a lot of links to your website will not bring any results if they have no value.
For example, binding within a single domain is much better than multiple backlinks within the same domain. Other aspects that you should also consider are the Page Authority and Domain Authority, which are page authority and domain authority, respectively.
The higher the authority of the page and the site hosting your backlink, the better because some of that authority will be transferred to the linked page. In this case, there are fewer high-authority site backlinks compared to many low-authority site links.
Here are important factors to consider before starting link building in 2022.
Choose websites with high domain authority:
There’s no set rule on what kind of website is best to acquire backlinks. However, it is well known in the SEO community that links coming from .edu, and .gov websites are considered an authority by Search engines. These links are worth a try even though they’re not easy to get.
Focus on quality content for link building
Google Penguin came into existence in 2012 to reward high-quality backlinks created naturally and to punish people using power quality content and low-quality links. Anchor text plays a big role in the ranking of the website. With the penguin algorithm update, Google checks if the anchor text on a backlink makes sense or not and websites with the best anchor texts are rewarded with a higher ranking. Links with anchor texts like “click here” no longer generate any value.
Anchor text diversity is also important. The same anchor text on all backlinks is considered unnatural by Search engines.
Prioritize getting backlinks from unique domains:
There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of backlinks from the same domain. However, when there are too many backlinks from the same website, especially the same webpage, they stop passing on link juice.
That’s why it’s better to have links from a healthy mix of different websites relevant to your business niche.
So remember: 100 links from 100 domains are better than 1000 links from one domain.
Don’t underestimate the importance of relevancy:
Relevancy is the biggest factor relevance of the websites. This means that you have to 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.
To get relevant backlinks you don’t have to contact your competitors. You can place backlinks on websites that are closely connected to our niche. The connection to the subject doesn’t have to be quite as close, but it should be related to the subject.
We’ve talked about why links are important, but you’d probably like to know which types of links are most valuable. Here’s how to identify the links that are worth building:
Always look for natural links
Backlinks must be natural, something you should always keep in mind. Search engines do not seem exaggerated or forced content with good eyes, and this same case happens with link-building methods.
Backlinks are important because they show search engines that your content is cited as a reference. By doing something fake, search engines will understand that all you want to do is deceive it, so it won’t benefit you, but it will hurt you.
Strive for balanced use of anchor text.
Optimization of anchor text has never been more important. With Google quality and naturalness updates for the last few months
Phrases such as “click here” make the link less relevant. The ideal approach is to place keywords or their variations to give you more value and naturalness.
Prioritize the placement of backlink in the content area
The location of a link in a webpage is very important. Search engines usually give more value to the backlinks on the main content area than on the sidebar comment section, or any other area of the website like the footer.
Remove toxic and low quality backlinks
You must constantly monitor your website’s backlink profile using tools like Google Search console, or Ahrefs, and look for low quality backlinks.
There are two ways to remove the low quality backlinks.
- Go to the website and remove them manually or ask the webmasters to remove your link from their website.
- Submit the links to the Google Disavow tool, which tells Google not to consider those backlinks for ranking of your website on the search index.
Maintain a slow and steady flow of backlinks
If you get too many links in a short period, it looks unnatural to search engines. Therefore you should consider link building a long-term activity by acquiring backlinks regularly.
Get backlinks for country specific tlds for Geotargetting
Domain TLD is very important if you want to rank high in a particular country or region. TLD is the last part of the domain, which can be .com, .org, .eu, .in, .de, etc. If you are targetting customers from a particular country, it’s recommended to get a domain with country-specific TLD. For example, .fr for France, .ca for Canada, .eu for European union region.
This is how you can more easily develop your links and improve your positioning in new regions or geographical places.
Best Link building strategies for SEO for 2022
Content is the king, whether for on-page optimization or link building. A good content strategy has to be part of any link building campaign for successful results. Here are the best content-centric link-building strategies to boost your link profile.
- Create Visual and interactive media assets: Visual assets like graphics, how-to diagrams, infographic, slides and presentations, and other types of content can build your link profile rapidly. Visuals are sharable and spread pretty fast on the internet. For example, when you publish an infographic or chart to your website and anyone shares that on their website it creates a backlink. That’s why it’s important to focus on visual content on your website along with the text.
- Create listings: Lists are one of the most popular types of content on the internet. lists consisting of tips, methods, reasons, myths, how to … or informational content, always work. Articles in the form of lists have a lot of value and at a time are picked by Google Knowledge graph. An analysis of 1 million articles by BuzzSumo found that articles in the form of a list generated more backlinks than any other content format, beating quizzes, videos, and even infographics.
- Publish Original Research and studies: Conducting new research and publishing data from industry studies, surveys show to your potential customers that you’re a trustworthy and authority entity in your sector. Statistics and research are highly linkable content. Often shared by authority educational websites. When someone quotes or mentions you as a source for research, it links to your website and it adds up quite rapidly and boosts your link profile.
- Create In-depth guides: Creating guides and informational resources can help you establish yourself as an expert and get your website shared on social networks and blogs as an authoritative source of information generating more backlinks.
- Encourage customer reviews: Customer reviews on their own website or review and testimonial websites like Yelp, Trustpilot, or BBB is a great way to improve the brand value and authority on the internet.
- Mentions by influencers and bloggers: Put your product, service, or site in front of influencers in your industry, such as popular bloggers or people with a large number of followers on social media. Mentions by them will generate lots of buzz around your product and generate more authority backlinks.
- Network with friends and associates: Share your website with people you know and work with. your friends, business partners, clients, suppliers, business customers, etc. Relevancy of backlinks is very important; Links from sites of your friends and associates that operating in the same industry or niche that your site will have more value than links from sites unrelated to your business.
Link building has been an important part of SEO for the last two decades and it still is one of the most important components. And it appears that it’ll continue to be so in near future. However, like many other things in SEO, the way building backlinks was done in the past is very different compared to the methodologies employed today, however, the foundation for the strategies to generate quality links i,e high-quality content and good user experience, remain essentially the same.
