Link building is an important part of SEO strategy. The number of links to your site decides your site’s quality.
Good links are always an asset to your site. It is a crucial ranking factor to search engines too.
Every website owner works for getting genuine links to their site. The main reason behind it is that genuine links will enhance your site reputation and its organic traffic too.
If you are unaware of links and its importance, here I am providing you a detailed guide related to it. This will help newbies in this field to get an idea of the following points.
- Definition of link building
- Importance of link building
- Link building strategies
- How to check link authenticity
Definition of Link Building:
Link building is the process of generating relevant links to your site from other external sites. This is a very important SEO strategy and it is one of the significant factors that decide your site genuinity, authority, and ranking.
The next question will be, how can you generate links?
There are two types of links, they are
- Created links
- Earned links.
When you have a guest blog you will get links to your content that is called created links. You can earn links from external sources by creating good quality contents.
Google only counts organic links while considering your site for ranking.
According to Google, your site got these links because of your content quality. There are good as well as bad links.
While getting links, make sure you check for its genuineness. It is recommended to remove bad links if not, you will have to face penalties from Google.
Link Building Terms You Should Know:
Before going into more details, you should know some important terms related to link building
On-site SEO:
Every site will promote their site by applying some SEO strategies such as including keywords, Meta title, etc. This is to attract Google’s attention. These strategies that happen on your site are called On-site SEO.
Off-site SEO:
In order to position your site on the top of the search result list, there are some strategies like link building. This type of SEO strategy is called off-site SEO.
Backlinks:
When a website links to your site, it is called backlink (Inbound link)
Domain Authority:
MOZ tool will assign a score for each domain according to their ranking. It is always advisable to get links from the site with high domain authority.
Anchor text:
Anchor text is the clickable text that you can see in the hyperlink. It should be relevant to your topic and Google will consider anchor text while ranking.
Advantages of link building:
Link building is important and it can bring many benefits to your site.
- Links building can increase your site’s Domain authority
- Drives more traffic towards your site
- Improves your brand visibility
- Helps your site to get good ranking
- Builds a trust towards your site
- Receive more traffic from inbound links
- Link building is one of the important SEO aspects you can use to get good SERP.
These are some benefits of link building. It is not easy to get more links on your site. You need to work hard for it.
Here are some link building strategies you can follow if you are new to this field.
Link Building Strategies:
You can get organic links automatically if your content is of good quality. Otherwise, you need to request for links by sending invites or by guest posting. Here are some strategies you can follow to get more links
1. Create high-quality content:
Your content should be of high quality to get links organically. For that, you need to research well and produce content with accurate information and entertaining language.
If you can create up-to-date content many users will follow you. As your site traffic increases, many websites will start to link with your site automatically. No need to request others to link with your site if your site is of a good ranking.
2. Check your competitor sites:
Every link building campaign starts with a competitor site analysis. This will help you to get an idea of their strategies to build links.
You can also try to get those links to your website. You need to work out some new ideas to get some good links. Some links are very easy to get.
For example, user-generated links, guest post links or links from resource pages. If you can upgrade your content quality than your competitor, you can get them easily. Or else conduct a link building campaign to get more links.
To get these links you may have to work a lot. But if you succeed then no need to worry about your site ranking.
3. Include guest posting:
Guest posting is a good option to increase the number of links to your site. You can find out good writers in your niche and request them to post contents on your site.
It will help to improve your site reachability and thereby you can improve your site traffic.
As your site gets popular, many sites will link with your content or you can add backlinks to relevant sites with this. But before going for guest posting, you need to make sure that the content is relevant to your topic.
Also, you need to check the quality of content, not include any self- promoting an article, etc. Just follow these basic rules and go for some new experiments so that you can see the actual result.
4. Link building using broken links:
There will be some links in your site that don’t exist. They are called broken links.
The reasons could be many like they don’t update the site, running out of business, etc. But, webmasters can use this as a favorable technique to earn more links.
You can create content relevant to their topics and share with them. If they have got interested in updating that site they will accept your proposal and both will get benefit from it. This technology is known as broken link building.
5. Add our site to directories:
Have you noticed various directories before?
These are like a guide to search for various business around an area. There will be different niche and you can add your site link to the corresponding niche.
These help to popularize your business to a wide audience. When somebody searches for a business in your niche, your name will also be there in the result.
Here you can describe your company’s products/ services. When somebody searches your site, they need to get more idea about your site and business.
You can generate backlinks using this technique and also your site traffic. But make sure to post on most popular directories first. There are many and you need to shortlist directories according to its popularity.
6. Reach out:
This is a very good strategy for newbies in this field. When you produced quality contents and you want some important site to link to your site, ask for it.
You can send invites to that website owner by requesting to link to your site.
You can write personalized emails or make phone calls to make a request. Most of them will be willing to do this if they found that your content is of good quality.
There is no shame in reaching out to get more links. Everyone cannot get organic links always.
7. Participate in other blog discussions:
Google loves active participants in various discussions. You can participate in various discussions of other bloggers related to your topic. You can add Dofollow blog comments there.
Make sure not to put irrelevant comments in order to get noticed. That will cause a negative impression on you.
Always make relevant comments and this will help you to create a good friendship with other bloggers. This will increase your connections and number of links on your site also.
If you are active on every site, many users will follow you and thereby your site traffic will also improve.
Avoid these backlinks on your site:
As link building is very crucial in determining your site quality there are some important thing to be noted. There will be good links as well as bad links.
Good quality backlinks are always advisable because low- quality links may destroy your site reputation. Also, if your site contains a lot of spammy links, you may get penalties from Google.
Also, avoid buying and selling links in order to improve site ranking. Google only give importance to organic link building.
Also, avoid link exchanges and low- quality backlinks. Don’t follow any unethical method to gain more links. These practices will bring a bad image to your site.
How to check backlinks authenticity:
You need to check the authenticity of links on your site. If your site contains bad backlinks then you need to disavow it.
Otherwise, it can reduce your page quality. Here are some factors you need to check for all links on your pages.
Page authority:
You need to check the authority of all links on your site. This is the most important factor to consider while verifying link authority.
You can use tools like Ahrefs to know the domain authority of a link. There will be a score for the domain. Check the score of the URL and know whether it is with good quality or not.
Relevancy of links:
Make sure that all links in your site are relevant to your topic.
Irrelevant links are considered as spams. So, make sure all links on your site are linked to your content topic
Link position:
Link position is also an important ranking factor. If links are placed in footers or sidebars, they are not worthy.
If Google needs to consider your links then it should be placed within the main body of the page.
Editorial links:
Editorial links are links you get from the external site because of your content quality. Google gives much value to such links.
Link anchor text:
Anchor text is the clickable text section you can see in a link. Google will not encourage anchor text with the overstuffed keyword.
You need to make sure that the links on your page have anchor text with relevant keywords. Otherwise, it is taken as spammy links. It will also give a negative impact on your site.
Links from the guest post:
Guest posts are one of the most popular link building strategies. But when your site has got those links, make sure to check the following points
- Paid guest post
- Links with copied anchor text
- Irrelevant guest posts
- Site get links only through guest posting
These are some important points Why Google discourages guest posting.
DoFollow Vs NoFollow links:
There will be some tags on the link which says the search engine whether to follow or not the link. SEO encourages Dofollow links other than nofollow links.
These are some factors you need to consider to check the authenticity of all links on your site. Don’t hesitate to disavow backlinks that are not worth to your site SEO.
Google always give value to high-quality organic links. For that, you need to work well to create impressive contents.
Final words:
Links building is an important SEO strategy. Every webmaster wants to get more links to their site. But make sure that the quality of these link matters than quantity.
If your site contains many backlinks with high quality then you are lucky because Google gives importance to trustworthy good quality links.
You can conduct an SEO audit more often and check the honesty of all links. If there are links in your site with the low quality you need to disavow it immediately.
The only secret of link building is your content quality. Always make sure to post contents with good quality. Accept only relevant links to the topic and make sure they are genuine.
If you are new to this field, then you can request to other sites to links with yours. If they find your content good then you will get links from those sites.
Google discourages paid links while considering your site for ranking. If you can get as many organic links as possible on your site you don’t need to look back. The ranking of your site will also improve as a result of it.