SEO Link Building for Beginners
What is SEO?
Search. Engine. Optimization.
According to Moz, it's the process of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results. In order for brands to drive website traffic through organic search engine results, a few things are helpful:
- Understanding what people are looking for,
- How people are searching for what they are looking for, and
- What type of content they want
What is Link Building?
In order to understand link building, we need to understand how search engines use links. Search engines use links in two ways:
- to find new webpages
- to determine the webpages PageRank in the search engine results page (SERP)
In order for a website to rank highly in the SERP, Google has laid out a few guidelines on how it analyzes if a page deserves the ranking. PageRank "works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is." The reason why PageRank cares about "the number of quality links" is because the assumption is that if a website is important, it will receive links from other websites.
What are the types of links?
There are three types of links SEO is concerned with.
- Inbound links
- Outbound links (dofollow & follow)
- Internal links
Inbound links
Inbound links, also known as "backlinks", from "high-quality sites" to your website are the most lucrative in building your SEO and ranking high.
Outbound links
Outbound links, links from your website to other websites, can also help your PageRank. Research from Backlinko ranked the quality of outbound links at #31 on its list of 200 Google ranking factors. Using outbound links on your website to provide credit or reference is a great way to increase credibility of your site and provide context for search rankings. For example, outbound linking can help Google understand what your webpage about. Furthermore, there are two types out outbound links: dofollow and nofollow.
Dofollow links influence your PageRank. Below is an example of a nofollow link HTML:
<a rel="nofollow">Link text</a>
Nofollow links don't.
Nofollow links are a signal to tell the search engine that the outbound link shouldn't influence your PageRank. In the early 2000s, people started to understand Google's algorithm and started to link everywhere possible. Nofollow links were originally used to combat the use of comment spam link building in blog posts. Today these websites the "nofollow" tag on their outbound links: Quora, YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitch, and Medium.
That being said, a good tip is to make the outbound link open in a new window so your readers don't lose you. Outbound link wisely!
Internal links
Internal links are links that link to other pages within the same website. These links can help your audience find other relevant information on your website which can help Google understand how your website is configured. When writing a new blog or article, look for opportunities to link relevant content to other pages on your site.
What are important issues in the world of SEO in 2019?
- Other search engines are starting to matter. Research done by ad tech platform Kenshoo, 56% of people look on Amazon first if they are looking to buy a product.
- Mobile-First Indexing. Google rolled out Mobile-First indexing a year ago and boosts mobile ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. This means that you should spend time optimizing your webpages mobile site loading speed, mobile site UX, and make sure it's mobile-friendly. You can use Google's mobile-friendly test to analyze your mobile-friendliness
- Featured Snippets. Featured snippets are text, commonly answers to questions, that extracted from a website that Google has determined the best answer to the user's question. It shows up above the organic search results and below the ad words block.
- Voice search. With the increase of personal assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Microsoft Cortana, it's essential you optimize your website and search. It's estimated that 20% of voice search queries are local searches. Example: "Restaurants near me", "Brewery near me".
Bottom Line
Investing in SEO isn't a one-and-done thing. It's a continual process that helps increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.
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If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy next week's article about the role of an effective landing page in your marketing campaign.
Check about my personal website here to see other things I do.
Written by Judd Bobin