A Beginner’s Guide to Link Building
Links or hyperlinks remain one of the most essential ranking techniques on Google in 2021. Therefore, Link Building is a surefire way to take you to the top of search engine results while also improving your credibility. While using the right keywords will indeed help you optimize your content, links are what will make your website rank better.
But wait! Like most other SEO techniques, link building has also evolved over the years and requires you to have a certain degree of technical knowledge in order to implement it successfully.
This link building guide will help you gain that understanding. We will talk you through what link building is, why you need it, how to be successful at it, and anything else you need to know about this subject.
But first, the basics:
What is Link Building?
Simply put, Link Building is a process of acquiring new backlinks from other websites. In other words, it means all the efforts you put to place your hyperlinks on any third-party sites. When someone clicks on these links, they reach your site. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher will be your page rank because search engines give links from high authority sites a lot of weight in their ranking algorithm.
What is the importance of links:
So far, we’ve established that links are pretty crucial to your online business. But how exactly do backlinks benefit you? Having more high-quality backlinks will:
- Help you rank higher on search engines such as Google.
- Give you increased credibility.
- Increase the traffic to your website
- Let search engines find pages on your website more easily.
White Hat vs. Black Hat vs. Grey Hat Link Building
You’ve probably heard the words white hat, gray hat, and black hat dropped in conversations about link building. These are important terms, so you need to understand them before you proceed with this guide.
1. White hat SEO is the type of optimization technique that strictly abides by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and only makes use of JUST methods to earn a good ranking. It focuses on the human audience (not the bots) and is a long-term technique to gain visibility and trust.
2. Gray hat SEO is not as clean as a white hat. Although this kind of SEO makes use of some dubious tactics to gain traffic and views, it does not engage in outright violations of Google’s guidelines.
3. Black hat SEO violates the Google guidelines to gain better ranking. Google has special teams and algorithms in place that thwart all such bad practices and lower the rankings of websites using black hat SEO techniques.
How to find good links:
Link building is one of those techniques where “the more, the better” concept does not apply. You need backlinks that matter because only significant links will improve your ranking and reliability.
How useful a backlink will be for your website depends on several factors such as:
1. Authority of the page and site:
If a webpage with a better PageRank links to your website, it’s more impactful than a page with a lower ranking. A backlink from a high rated website gives your webpage more jurisdiction and therefore makes your page look more reliable.
Likewise, getting backlinks from popular websites will serve you better than getting them from a site no one has heard of. It’s the same as getting a recommendation from an influential person Vs. getting one from a nobody.
You can check the page and domain rating of any webpage using free online tools such as Ahrefs.
2. Link placement:
Where your link appears on a webpage makes a massive difference in how useful that link is for you.
Is your link present at the start of the blog/article? Is it in the main body? Is it in the sidebar? Or is it placed as a footnote at the end of the page? Links that are strategically placed in the middle of the main content tend to earn more follows than links that aren’t as easily visible.
3. Link anchor text:
The clickable part of the link is known as Anchor Text. It has long been used as a ranking factor by most search engines. Keyword-rich anchor texts have proven useful for drawing traffic to websites. On the other hand, having too many exact match links is considered spammy and harms ranking.
4. Relevancy of the site:
Links that come from websites in the same niche as yours are better than from webpages unrelated to your field. So, even if a high authority website links to you, it wouldn’t be a useful link if that page is irrelevant to your domain. Google might even see these links as paid and unnatural links and penalize you.
5. Editorial placement:
Editorially placed links reap you more benefit than links that are forcefully used. All links must seem natural to prevent them from being flagged as spam. The malicious links will not only make your content look bad, but will also result in penalties from Google in the form of lower ranking.
How to avoid bad links?
As already discussed, not all links will contribute to better rankings. The harmful impact of toxic or destructive links could be severe enough to undo all the work you’ve put into building a good ranking for yourself. It can take months to recover from a Google penalty. Therefore, you need to be very cautious and make sure that you only use useful links and avoid the bad ones.
Google considers any links made specifically to alter your ranking as spam and, therefore, a violation of their policy. But, how does Google classify links as toxic?
- Links from shady websites that only seem to exist for the sole purpose of linking out
- Links from irrelevant sites that do not seem related to yours
- Links from sites that aren’t indexed
- Links that look forced and out of place
- Links placed in website footers or sidebars
- Links that are scattered all over a website
- Links with exact match keywords
Dos and Don’ts of LinkBuilding
Now that you understand how to get good links and avoid the bad ones, here are some quick rules to remember:
1. Insert long keywords when link building: Longer keywords can help Google understand your content better and aid readers in finding it more easily.
2. Increase social visibility for your page: Marketing your website can help draw traffic to it, thus gives you more popularity. Sharing your webpage on social media is an ingenious way of attracting more traffic.
3. Avoid purchasing links: Google discourages paid links and considers this a bad practice. As a part of their 2021 link building strategy, they now require you to tag the sponsored links. Sponsored links do not add to your rankings.
4. Stay away from repetitions: Having identical titles all across your webpages isn’t the wisest strategy. While it doesn’t cause any direct harm, it isn’t the best SEO practice either. You can instead play around with keywords and come up with newer and more diverse titles that will make your SEO more effective.
What tools do you need for link building?
- Backlink Checkers
These tools let you check the backlinks on your competitors’ websites, giving insights into their link building strategies to one-up them. Use tools such as Ahrefs site explorer, Majestic, or Moz, etc.
- Content Research
Use Content Research tools to find the most popular content on the internet and then create similar or better content. It is helpful in creating successful and “link-worthy” content. Some popular content research tools include BuzzSumo and Ahrefs Content Explorer.
- Web Monitoring
We use these applications for constant monitoring of the web for mentions of your keywords to get your links put on them before your competitors can. Some Infamous Web Monitoring tools are Ahrefs Alerts, Mention, and Google Alerts.
- Outreach Tools
While you can use regular emailing applications for outreach purposes, tools such as BuzzStream, Ninja Outreach, Yesware, and OutreachPlus, etc. can simplify the whole process and help you keep track of correspondence.
- Freelance Sites
You can outsource many of the tasks involved in Link Building to freelancers or virtual assistants. The jobs may include creating graphics or writing your content. You can also hire freelancers to submit your business to local directories or build prospect links. Some go-to websites to find freelancers are Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr. There are many less well-heard of websites, as well.
What are the techniques for link building in 2021
1. Outreach
It means exactly what it sounds like, reaching out to people. Specifically, those people in the same niche as yours to introduce them to your content. This content does not necessarily need to be articles or blogs; it could also just be your products, services, or even personality. You can reach people by looking for pages that have mentioned your target keyword in the content, or those who have linked to content similar to yours. Content Explorer is an excellent tool for this purpose.
2. Guest Posting:
Guest blogging is the oldest and most effective method of securing reliable backlinks. It involves posting a guest blog on another website and linking to your site from that blog. It’s a straightforward technique that not only gives you more traffic but also provides you with better exposure and helps build relationships with significant players in your industry.
3. Broken Link Building:
Broken Links are wrong for any website because they can lead to poor user experience. This method involves finding links that lead to dead pages, alerting the poster, and offering them a replacement link to your content instead. Find broken links by using a site explorer application. Furthermore, you can use a Broken Link Checker app to find everyone who links to the dead resource and offer up your link to all of them.
4. Unlinked Mentions:
You may often notice people mention your business without linking to your site. The good thing about getting mentioned is that you are halfway to gaining a link. Now, you only have to reach out to them and ask them to link back to you. You can find unlinked mentions using a paid app or just use Google Alerts to receive an email every time someone cites your brand or name.
5. Link Reclamation:
Links sometimes get lost when pages cease to exist, or the content gets revamped. It is a natural process and is often easily reversible. You can identify these link reclamation opportunities with tools such as SEMrush, where you simply enter your domain name and find all the missing links. Once you’ve achieved this, you can reach out to the web page author and ask if it is an excellent opportunity to recover the links.
6. Sponsored Posts:
Another easy way to get backlinks is to reach out to websites that are willing to accept advertisements. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. all offer sponsored posts for higher exposure.
7. Skyscraper Method:
The skyscraper method is reasonably popular with a lot of marketers because of its success rate. It involves finding a weak piece of content with lots of links, building a better version of it with visuals and infographics, or perhaps more information, and then pitching it to the poster as a better link for their audience. You can use applications like BuzzSumo to see what links are getting a lot of traffic and then improve upon what they have created and contact the publisher to propose they link to it instead.
8. Content Repurposing:
In case you have an exciting piece of content and want to share it with a broader audience, you could simply repurpose it to suit several websites. For example, you can convert your video into an infographic and publish it on different websites, thus you get more backlinks.
9. Link roundups:
A link roundup is a weekly or monthly article that boasts links to other blog posts. This technique needs vigilance, but once you’ve identified the prospect, getting them to include you in upcoming posts isn’t that difficult since they’re actively looking for content to post.
10. Link pillowing:
Pillowing is the process of dressing your SEO story to make it look more natural. You can perform Pillowing of your links on three different platforms either exclusively or simultaneously for better exposure:
Video Links:
In this type of pillowing, you’ll need to create eligible video tutorials or other such content and publish it to popular video sharing platforms. In the description of the video, you should add a link to your webpage.
Directory Links:
Directories are high authority websites, which serve as online phone books. Since there are so many active directories online, you can gain multiple links in one go. The issue here is that because they’ve been getting scammed for so long, you need to work a little hard to find and build quality links. You can manually search for these directories by looking for websites in your area with “add business” in their content and then submitting your information to them.
Professional Organizations:
Find and join organizations dedicated to your field of work. It is a great way to reinstate yourself as an authority. Identify these professional organizations by searching for them online and simply follow their procedure to register yourself.
Final Words
In a nutshell, it might seem like a lot of work, and you might find yourself tempted to just buy links as a shortcut. But, as we’ve stated above, that would be an infringement of Google’s guidelines and might cause more harm than good. Looking at how expensive links are, it’s better just to build backlinks than risk buying them.
Besides, Link Building isn’t a very complicated process. The tactics listed above will work immensely well for just about anybody. You only need to experiment and find out what method or combination of techniques suits you the best.