Link building
In Chapter 6 of our SEO Beginners Guide, we'll discuss link building - one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Let's learn how you can build a profile with high quality links.
Link building is the process of getting links from other websites. From a technical point of view, backlinks are hypertext links that serve as a way to navigate between websites. Links are crawled by search engines allowing them to index web content.
Why is link building so important?
Search engines use links to discover new websites and to determine a website's overall rank in the SERP. In other words, they explore new content and determine the authority of the website based on the authority passed on from external sources.
This means that the website links profile is one of the most important ranking factors.
When Google introduced PageRank in the 1990s, the number of backlinks was used as an important measure of overall ranking. The more links you get, the better your ranking will be.
Because this can easily be abused, many Google algorithm updates have focused on punishing shady link-building techniques.
Today, link building is no longer about the number of backlinks, but mostly about quality and relevance.
Types of backlinks
In general, there are two types of backlinks:
Do-follow backlinks:
Followed backlinks pass link page validity to the linked page. This salad is often called "link juice".
No-follow backlinks: These are backlinks that do not follow
You score any points at the linked website. They don't pass authority because of the “HTML” tag in the a tag in rel="nofollow" that crawlers are told not to count.
Unfollow links have no value from an SEO point of view.
Anchor text
Anchor text is a visible, clickable portion of a hyperlink. Helps crawlers determine the topic of the linked page.
If more pages link to specific terms used in anchor texts, it may help you rank for those terms in search engines.
Well, all I need is a lot of backlinks with the keyword you are focusing on as the body text, right?
It's not that easy. An overly optimized anchor text profile may result in a computational penalty from Google. It is better to leave static texts natural rather than try to modify them artificially.
There must be a balance between the following types of anchors:
- Words and Phrases (“SEO Tools”)
- Trademarks (“motaber”)
- Branded Phrases (“Search Engine Optimization Guide by motaber”)
- Public links text (“page”)
- Bare URLs (“motaber.com)
- Call-to-action (“Click here,” “Read more”)
- Quality aspects of backlinks
Google studies multiple quality aspects of referral sites:
- Domain Authority
- Page Authority
- Other cookie quality metrics
- There are several metrics by Moz and Majestic that help us rate/rate these traits:
- The page authority is from MOZ and stands for PA for Page Authority
- Domain Authority from MOZ, symbolized by DA short for Domain Authority
- Majestic Trust Flow
Citation Flow is from majestic, CF, for Citation Flow.
The higher the value, the higher the quality of the backlink.
When we take a look at Majestic's "Trust Flow" and "Citation Flow", we'll get another link rating.
The former says that sites closely linked to a trusted site can see higher scores, while sites that may contain some questionable links will see much lower scores. Citation Flow predicts how much a URL will affect the number of sites linked to it.
convenience
Links to a website must be relevant to its content. There will be no backlink from an online clothing store for you if you write a blog about recipes.
link position
Links placed in main articles or sections are better than links in footers and sidebars. Single links tend to be more valuable than site-wide links.
Website links appear on all pages of the website. They are usually in the footer, header, sidebar or blogs. Site-wide links are great for building both internal and external links.
They can generate a lot of visitors. Don't be intimidated by them but make sure to use only natural links and remember that their SEO potential may be a little lower when compared to single links.
In addition to the aspects mentioned above, we need to consider link freshness, anchor text quality, popularity and social mentions.
Link Building Strategies
It is not easy to get a high quality backlink. Techniques that were simpler (crosslinks or directory submission) no longer work, so SEO experts spend a lot of time trying different approaches.
Let's take a look at what works best these days:
Guest Blogging or Guest Posting.
Posting an article on other blogs and websites is probably the most popular method of link building. The equation is simple: you write a post and publish it on another site. The website will get free content and you will get a free backlink. the win.
Of course, it all comes down to quality. If you want a good backlink, you need an excellent article and publish it on another blog for the blog owner to accept. The popularity of this technique means that everyone is using it and there are too many bad guest articles and bad communication emails.
Here's what you need to keep in mind when implementing a Reach Out campaign:
Do not use forms
be personal
Offer relevant and well-researched topics
Competitors' backlinks
A time consuming but still very effective strategy is to find what works for others. Check out the websites that link to your competitors, create better content and contact the relevant people behind these websites to link to your site instead.
The easiest way to find your competitor's backlinks is to use the backlink tool (most of the SEO tools we mentioned earlier provide this service, use the demo to see which sites are linking to your competitors and then try to get links from them as well).
Once you've found your competitor's backlinks, it's time to analyze the best opportunities. You should consider:
Link Relevancy - Is the link relevant to your content?
Link Strength - What is the authority/authority of a linking page?
Opportunity to repeat backlink - Will I be able to get the same backlink?
The next step is what's called email communication - contacting website owners to replace your competitor's backlink (also known as Skyscraper technology) or adding your own backlink as an additional resource.
Here are some other popular link building techniques:
Content-based link building: Create content that naturally attracts backlinks, social shares, and referral traffic
Social backlinks:
Share your content on social media, promote it on Facebook, join discussions, comment on relevant posts, and create connections
Building broken/broken links:
Find websites with non-active links and give them your own content to link to instead. PR articles written by professionals and published on news portals will give you quality backlinks but put some budget for this and make sure it's really relevant.
Buy backlinks:
Via paid blog posts
Write a testimonial testimonial: for a product with a backlink to your website.
- Backlinks from forums.
- Question and answer sites.
- and top menus.
- and comments.
- and content aggregators.
- Lists of commercial activities.
etc. (keep in mind that the vast majority of them are not following or low quality links).
Gray/black hat seo techniques.
Like building a PBN (Private Blogger Network) link, although we don't recommend it at all.
Black hat seo practice techniques and penalties.
Paid backlinks and a PBN (Private Blogger Network) are another way to create backlinks but these are black hat (or gray hat) techniques. Google may detect the pattern and penalize your website.
On the other hand, these technologies still work. You just need to be very careful and think about all the potential risks before taking the black hat course ?
Penalties and exclusion from search results.
An update to the Google Penguin algorithm starting in April 2012 began to detect and penalize bad, spammy, or low-quality links.
However, if you have unwanted or low quality backlinks that you didn't create, don't panic! Google understands that not all bad backlinks are created on purpose.
And usually the worst case scenario is that they will just ignore these backlinks. If you want to be sure, you can still disavow these backlinks in Search Console.
best practices
Create links regularly, it is not a one time effort
Get some high quality links instead of many low quality links
Distribute the natural anchor text based on the tips we mentioned in the Anchor Text section
Avoid backlinks from unwanted websites and networks
Try to get backlink placements that might bring you referral traffic as well.
User Experience & Seo
Use them as two aspects of digital marketing that go hand in hand. In this chapter, we focus on their synergy to discover how you can improve your ranking by doing a few extras on your website.