Ultimate Guide To Link Building

Link building is crucial for improving your online visibility and driving steady traffic to your website. However, it is essential you learn to build links the right way, as black-hat tactics can lead to deindexing or an unwanted penalty from the search engines.

In the digital era, if your website is not seen and found online, you are missing out on a global audience. With an incredible 3.5 billion searches completed on Google every day, to ignore search engine optimisation is to ignore the possibility of reaching hundreds upon thousands of new consumers. You need to be visible online, but having an online presence is no longer enough. Now, you need to be visible on the top three pages of Google’s results to make any kind of mark in the industry, regardless of your clients, demographic, product, or service.

Whether you are new to the world of link building or a seasoned SEO expert, the following link building guide offers informative advice and tips that can help you to climb the search engines.

What is Link Building?

Link building is a method of internet marketing, which differs from brick marketing (the process of marketing for ‘bricks-and-mortar’ shops). Essentially, link building is the practice of acquiring links from other websites to your own. Internet users navigate from site to site using hyperlinks, and by featuring your links on relevant websites, you can attract and draw new consumers to your pages.

Link building is a creative practice, one which requires extremely high quality content, written with the audience in mind, along with communication skills needed to reach out to fellow bloggers and sites (otherwise known as blogger outreach).

According to Moz research, in 2017 link building accounted for 17.31% which is an increase of 2.48% since 2015. If you need a little clarification about what you should or shouldn’t be doing online and want to only embark on the link building tactics that matter, you have arrived on the perfect article.

A talented link builder will be able to construct a relevant backlink profile, create winning copy, and send convincing proposition to the right websites. “Thin” content must be avoided at all costs, otherwise the search engines will mark you down in the search engine rankings.

The Specific Ranking Factors of Link Building

SEO campaigns need to taking the ranking factors into account when devising a strategy, but what are the specific elements of link building tactics?

• Quality: What makes a quality link may be subjective to an audience, but there’s no denying that a link from one of the big players in your industry is going to boost your links quality. It is this factor which is the most important to ensure you adhere to. With higher quality the link, search engines will reward your website with increased visibility.
• Trust & Authority: Much like quality, domain authority is determined by the audience and by Google. If the site is widely recognised and lauded as a force to be reckoned with, it has high authority. It makes the site much more trustworthy. How Google determines the authority, however, is a mystery to SEO experts, but it’s a factor you cannot ignore.
• Relevance: Google takes into account how relevant your specific link is on the site it appears. A link to a football kit on an interior design blog is not appropriate. However, a link to a football kit on a sports blog is. Relevant links are incredibly important, and show that you are not spamming.
• Number of Links: Don’t spam blogs with your links. Focus on a select number of high quality sites to build links.
• Engagement: How many visitors does the website have? How long do visitors stay on the desired page? Bounce rate is a considerable factor for SEO in general, but also for link building as it can also refer to how relevant a page is to a specific term or visitor. For pages which see high engagement and visitors staying for a long time, it informs Google’s bots that this is something worth reading.
• Social Signals: An off-set of engagement. Is the content being shared on social sites? Is it gaining a high number of ‘likes’ and comments on social media? If so, Google will rank this content as highly relevant, high quality, and authoritative. Social signals also show the link popularity to Google’s bots.
• Link Position: Where your link is positioned on a page is actually quite important! You want to place your link in the content directly, rather than the sidebar or footers, to get the best ranking.

What Makes a Powerful Backlink?

As a website acquires many powerful backlinks, its authority will start to grow. A site will then pass on this authority when linking out to other websites, which can help this site’s authority to grow. A website linked to from The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times will, therefore, be more powerful in comparison to a new website with limited inbound links.

There are two metrics you should definitely review when measuring a website’s authority:

– Domain Authority (DA)

The domain rating is the total strength (authority) of a website, which will be measured from 0 to 100. If a website is a 0, this means it has no authority and it is more than likely a new site with zero inbound links. On the other end of the scale is 100, which means it is an established, reputable website that has acquired multiple powerful backlinks throughout the years.

– URL Rating (UR)

The URL rating is the strength of one webpage, which will again be measured from 0 to 100. A backlink from a high authority page will pass more authority to a website.

Why Relevancy Matters

While a site’s authority is a big ranking factor, its relevancy does still matter to your backlink profile. A former Google engineer stated:

"… getting a link from a high PageRank page used to always be valuable. Today, it’s more the relevancy of a site’s theme in regards to yours. Relevance is the new PageRank."

For this reason, you must not only look at high-authority websites, but you must secure backlinks on websites closely related to your industry.

Steer Clear of Private Blog Networks and Link Schemes

Unless you really want Google to penalise or deindex your website, you would be smart to steer clear of link schemes, private blog networks, or private link networks. Private blog networks are websites that have commonly been deleted or auctioned in the past.

Google has become much stricter on private blog networks over the last few years, as they view them as a primary source for link spam. Rather than focusing on private blog networks, your goal must be to secure high-quality articles on high-authority, trusted websites.

The Importance of Link Position

A backlink’s position will also determine its power. If it is hidden away in a footer or sidebar, it will not be worth as much as a link that has been embedded in the middle of a webpage’s body content.

Also, according to Google’s Reasonable Surfer patent, the search engine will determine how likely a backlink is likely to be clicked on by a reader before deciding how much link juice to pass onto a site. If you want to increase your online visibility effectively, aim to secure a backlink within the main webpage body.

The Benefits of an Editorial Backlink

Google wants to provide its users with interesting, relevant and valuable content for every query. For this reason, they value editorial backlinks, which is when a site links to you because they love your brand or content. If you create a profile on an irrelevant website with a backlink, this will not be classed as an editorial backlink, so it will not be as powerful.

The Perfect Anchor Text

Anchor text is a Google ranking signal and provides a semantic connection to your website. For example, if Google reads an anchor text that says “digital marketing agency,” it will indicate that you are exactly that.

Google is also looking for signs your website is a credible resource that is worthy of ranking on page one for a keyword, and your anchor text will provide them with an insight into your link building tactics.

For example, if your backlink profile is filled with many exact match anchor texts, it will look unnatural and spammy, and it could lead to a penalty in the search engines. Instead, you should aim for a diverse mix of anchor texts, such as brand, LSI, generic, naked, and partial match.

Creating an anchor text is as simple as choosing the keyword or tags you want, and hyperlinking them with the relevant webpage. You do have to be careful, however, as anchor texts are a key part of any linking strategy, which means that if you do not adhere to Google’s guidelines, they could be used to penalise your website. To ensure that your website is in the clear, and that any linking strategy is effective, always remember to:

• Ensure the anchor text is relevant to your landing page.
• Is naturally placed in the article, as Google will pick up on strange or out-of-place keywords that sound too promotional.

Deciding on the anchor text you use can be difficult, however, it should be decided on what key phrase resonates with your business, what it is you are linking to, and what fits naturally.

While agencies may have their own definitions, many are the same and are derived from the following list.

• Exact-match: If you’re linking to a page on email marketing and you selected keyword is ‘email marketing’, then ‘email marketing’ would exactly match what the link is about.
• Partial-match: When the anchor text is a variation of the keyword given. For instance, for email marketing, it could be expanded to include ‘email marketing tactics’.
• Branded: Your business’s brand name.
• Generic: A generic phrase, such as ‘click here’.
• Naked: The naked URL link, for example, www.clickintelligence.co.uk.

Dofollow vs. Nofollow

There is a big difference between a ‘Dofollow’ and a ‘Nofollow’ link. For example, ref=”nofollow” is a simple tag that informs the search engines to not view this link as an endorsement. That is why you must aim to secure many dofollow links, as the link will inform Google that you are a trusted, valuable resource.

In theory, a nofollow link will not contribute to a site’s rankings; however, there are conflicting opinions about whether this is true. Remember, Google is looking for a natural backlink profile, so it makes sense that you might organically acquire nofollow backlinks. If your site doesn’t, it could be a red flag that you are attempting to manipulate the search engines. Wikipedia is a prime example, as it features the nofollow tag, but many SEO professionals believe the link is still beneficial to their rankings due to its high authority.

Conclusion

Link building is about finding the right balance between powerful backlinks on high authority websites, which must be relevant to your industry, but appearing both natural and helpful. It is not just the backlink that matters, as its position, anchor text diversity, and relevance to your industry are also important factors to consider.

Now you know the basics of link building, all you need to do now is learn how to build natural backlink placements without catching the attention of Google, such as asking for a backlink on unlinked brand mentions, securing a guest post on a relevant third-party website, or writing exceptional content that websites will want to link back to naturally.

If you bear in mind all the information above when attempting to build a strong backlink profile, there is no reason why you cannot reach the top positions for your most desired keywords in time.