In the past, Link building never had much attention. Most sites ranked high in the search results were not consciously designed with link building in mind, but as time passed, we began to see websites that engaged in both good and bad link-building practices.
In the digital world today, there has been so much talk about links being a ranking factor., Many SEOs done by agencies who claim to know everything about links mainly focus on content and On-Page SEO leaving the link building neglected. This is to tell you how much they know about links. Haha.
In this context, we would dissect and enlighten you with every damn thing we know about link building, and I bet you will be highly satisfied by the time you read this content to the last line. I am 100% sure of that, so just sit tight.
The SERPs Stand Point
Experience with many search engine result pages has shown that link building is one of the most critical factors influencing ranking position. Google benevolently made it known that links are the #1 ranking factor, alongside great content. With this knowledge, I can’t help but wonder why anyone would try to rank without links in the first place.
Google and other Search engine result pages care about links more than anything, and so should you. Link building should be your overall goal for your website, and there shouldn’t be any compromise once it comes to that…
It is worthy of note that before April 2012, website owners could easily buy their ranking position by adding more and more links to their site. During those times, website owners could easily manage ranking on the first search engine results page. influencing
Well, News Flash! We are in 2022. In April 2012, Google launched the Google Penguin, which aimed to recognize sites,link-building, and Ensure and reduce search engine ranking sites that violated Google webmaster guidelines. It turned out the aims were achieved, critical, and so the Google Penguin Spam Filter is to date still a part of Google’s Core Algorithm and now works in real-time.
Click here to learn more about the google penguin algorithm!
Moving Forward!
Today link building has grown into professional practice; most folks spend many resources and still don’t get the desired results. Imagine spending tons of resources on links that would still hurt you down the road. Most SEO agencies don’t know or fail to acknowledge that it is possible to simulate the impact and risk of a backlink relationship before building it.
When we talk about backlinks, we mean a reference from another web page to your web page. This is very different from the “outbound” or outgoing links from your carrier. Do not confuse the two. A backlink is also called an inbound link sometimes, and these links are essential in determining the popularity (or importance) of your website for search engines like Google.
Many people always ask if it is possible to rank a website without backlinks, and the answer is NO, but we are 100% sure that a website cannot rank without inbound links.
Why is link building important?
- Because links are SERPs #1 ranking factor
- Because links ARE the web in the Internet
- Because links point to great content (that deserves to rank well)
- Because links pass power
- Because links pass trust
- Because Google confirmed that it would be unnatural to find a website without backlinks
- Because it’s through links that Search Engine crawlers discover your website.
This list can go on to infinity!
Are all backlinks the same?
The answer is No. All backlinks aren’t the same. When working on backlinks, it is better to aim for links to high-domain authority and power sites. You should aim for fewer high-quality links than for thousands of links that bring no value to your backlink profile. These are the links you buy most of the time without checking if they are risky to your backlink profile.
Your priority when building backlinks should be to link to sites with High domain authority and sites with high traffic.
Backlinks from s, sites analysis with low domain authority might serve as critical influencing ranking positions but it won’t help increase your rankings to your desired position.
Worse is backlinks from weak or risky sites. These links can get you a Google penalty and severe (if not 100%) loss of organic traffic. So you should ultimately avoid them and refrain from them. It is better to get a backlink link from a site still growing with even a low domain authority but in a similar niche than to buy a backlink from a site that is on its own suspicious.
Links are not at all the same, so you should look out for the following criteria when building backlinks for your website:
- How many linking pages, subdomains, domains, and root domains?
- How many links per month?
- What kind of links (Follow, No Follow, Redirects, Javascript, Framessites)
- Link Power and Trust
- Linking keywords (“Business” or “Finance”)
- Link risk
Note that we can evaluate these criteria differently in different cases. A link can also be good or bad depending on the industry, the country, the language, and the keywords. Unfortunately, there is no generic rule. For example, it is NOT the same case when a domain links to 1,000 subpages or when 1,000 domains link to a subpage.
What are Google’s rules when it comes to building links?
You need to be very careful when you start a link-building campaign because not all links are equal. Make sure that the links you build are natural and that Google doesn’t conclude that you’re trying to manipulate its search algorithm.
Build your links, especially for your business, ensure and especially for your customers, make them relevant and associate them with great content. Once you do this, your users will be happy, Google will reward you with a high ranking in the search results, and your business will grow.
Once you go through Google’s Quality Guidelines regarding link schemes, you’ll get a clear picture of how to build high-quality links and how to stay away from making bad links.
Simple link-building tips
Link building is not an easy thing to do, but there are still many SEO techniques to start a healthy link building even today, without considerable effort or expenses.
1. Ask for backlinks
Think about your friends, relatives, colleagues, partners, and clients that have a blog or a site. All you have to do is ask for a backlink. Ask for links within their contents instead of links in the sidebar or footer. This will help your presence on their site feel natural or organic.
This is an excellent way to start, especially if you are a beginner in SEO. But be careful and make sure that the backlink comes from a website that is relevant to your niche. Otherwise, it will not have too much of an impact and may even be harmful to your site in the end.
2. Build relationships
If you want to build good links, you need to develop good relationships. In our world today, there are a lot of opportunities to make new contacts. You should start with niche-related online communities: forums, blogs, or social groups, etc.
Make the first step and contribute with exciting and relevant comments and posts, providing contextual value to every discussion. By actively participating in these online communities focused on your niche, you will not only gain some good backlinks, but you will also have access to the newest industry news and be able to connect with some interesting people that share your passions and dreams.
3. Give a testimonial
Many businesses offer you the chance to say a few words about your experience using their products. On the one hand, this is a perfect way for them to build customer trust.
On the other hand, it’s an excellent opportunity for you to get a backlink and potential traffic from that site, and it usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request emails. So testimonial link building is a win-win scenario because the company gets another testimonial to place on their site while you get a new backlink.
4. Start a blog
This is the only way to ensure that the world will want to link to your website again and again and again. Don’t just write a blog with one post and one backlink to your site. If you do, you not only waste your time but also create another risky link for yourself. If you want to have your blog, you need to keep it alive with great content.
Write posts regularly. Focus on your industry and your client’s needs! In time, it will most likely gain authority.
Make sure that your content is relevant, helpful, and well-structured. This is how you get great backlinks; you earn them!
5. List your site in trustworthy directories
You should consider listing your site on a trustworthy directory, a directory that not only gives you the chance to post a link to your website but also provides valuable information for your potential customers. This should be the definitive directory for your website to be listed on.
Niche directories and directories attached to informative websites for a specific industry are a good choice. Having your business listed with such directories makes it easier to get indexed in the major search engines and helps people find you online.
Many online directories provide no real value to Internet users, and Google has excluded them from its search results. You should run far away from such directories as listing your website on such pages poses a significant risk to your website.
6. Write a good guest post
Many sites and blogs will allow you to publish your article. Before you write an analysis somewhere, make sure that:
- The website or blog is relevant to your topic.
- The article is NOT about you, how great you are, or how great your company is.
- You have a focus on quality (well-written, professional, and engaging).
- You keep in mind that a poor article can bring a bad reputation.
You must build links that help your website and not links that can negatively impact your website’s ranking in search results.
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7. Discover competitors’ common backlinks
Make research of your competitors. You will notice that they have some backlinks in common you don’t have yet. Well, if they managed to get these backlinks, you should contact the backlinks too.
All you have to do is analyze these backlinks and try to get them as well. Monitor Backlink is a great online tool you can use to know the backlinks of your competitors.
8. Recover your dead backlinks
Sometimes you might find broken links to your website. This may be the case if the location of your page changes or if another webmaster misspelled your link. In both cases, these backlinks will return a 404 error.
Such issues may also commonly occur after a site was re-launched or migrated to another domain. You should then redirect these backlinks to some other page.
Screaming Frog is a common desktop application that can help you find the backlinks that your site has that are linking to a non-existent page (HTTP-code 404). You should try and recover this power and trust those links have, either by recreating the page or redirecting the link to another existing page.
9. Make use of Wikipedia’s dead links
Google finds Wikipedia to be a very trustworthy site. So you can find dead or broken links On Wikipedia and forward or replace them with dead or broken links, I mean links that need to be replaced, a missing citation, or another opening where you could offer your content up as a substantive reference.
A good, free tool for this purpose is Wikigrabber. With wikigrabber, you can search for your related keywords and get the pages that require a citation on Wikipedia or have a dead link on them. Even though most of the Wikipedia links are NoFollow links, they still pass on a lot of trust and authority so it is a great option for you to utilize.
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10. Turn your mentions into backlinks
This is probably one of the easiest ways to gain some new backlinks. Somebody already wrote something about you. They mentioned your brand or product, but they have not linked to your website.
In situations like these, you just have to contact the webmaster and ask them to add a link to your website. If someone already mentioned your brand, then why wouldn’t they want to link to you?
The question now is how do you find those mentions? Lucky you, I’ve got just the perfect solution for you. The SEMrush Brand Monitoring tool is a great tool for finding brand mentions across the web.
Another way to find and monitor mentions is by using the SERP Research Tool (SERP) with a smart combination of advanced search operators. The SERP Tool might not find as many mentions as a straight Google search. However, it will find the most relevant results, so you can avoid wasting time chasing links that may be weak or irrelevant.
Once you successfully find a mention for your brand, A simple email like this will usually do the trick:
“Hey [NAME],
I’m [YOUR NAME], [POSITION] at [WEBSITE].
I see you mentioned my [WEBSITE] on [Your Page] about [The Subject]. Thank you for doing that I appreciate it.
However, I was wondering if you would mind adding a hyperlink so that people can find out more about [The Subject].
I think it would be super useful for your visitors.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
Thanks a lot.
All the best.
[Your Name]”
11. Find other relevant link-building opportunities
There are many other opportunities for link building on the Internet. There are many forums, blogs, or sites where you could place your backlink, but usually, it is not so easy to find them. So all you need to do is sit up, open your eyes and search diligently for an opportunity, and then take advantage of it.
12. Be aware of your competitor’s new links
It is very important to be always aware of your competitor’s activities. Monitor Backlinks is a tool made to inform you about your new backlinks, and apart from that, you can also use it to monitor your competitor’s backlinks.
Not only will it help you find some new backlink opportunities, but it can also enable you to discover some new sources and techniques you could use in the future.
The best thing about Monitor Backlink is that they send you email notifications with fresh backlinks. It’s like Google Alerts, but for links. This will allow you to identify negative SEO attacks right away. In case of new, unwanted links, you can react immediately, and thus protect your site from being hit by a Google Penalty.
The building of links is not enough
If you want your website to rank well and stay penalty-free, building new links is not enough. You need to take care of your backlink profile and disavow all spammy links on your website.
So if you eventually paste your links on a spammy site, or maybe a previous SEO agency went off and ran some script to place links and a bunch of forums, and you can’t clean that up for whatever reason or you don’t have a manual action then worry much.
Since you realize your errors and are interested in ensuring that it doesn’t even get that far, the disavow file is a great way to get them taken out of the equation.
Simple Link Earning Tips
Imagine not having to go out in search of sites to link to your site or having to go through much stress to get a link from a site with high domain authority like Wikipedia… You see link building is great but with it comes to stress and stress so it would be much easier if you just sit and earn the backlinks you desire without stress and to do this all you have to do is earn the backlinks.
For you to earn this backlink all you have to do is create quality content, once you do this you’ll be surprised at how your desired sites with high domain authority would link their content to you. That is simple but it takes time and it needs you to put in quality work for a change.
Quality content will bring you a lot of natural backlinks!
But what does quality content mean?
Quality content is:
- desirable
- findable
- useful
- accessible
- credible
- valuable
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Now that you know the importance of quality content and how it can help you earn backlinks, let’s focus on how you can earn more backlinks with your content.
1. Infographics
Your business message has to be available in every form so that it can capture the attention of a wider audience. Because Different people grasp information differently, and no matter how good your writing is, some people find it easier to grasp information visually.
2. Lists
Our brains love lists. If you create a cool list, there is a big chance that people will click on it and later share it. It’s just psychological. Compare these two headlines:
- “sex is good for your health”
- “5 incredible reasons why you should have sex daily”
you see, even if you do not like sex, you will click on the second headline. Henceforth when writing your content make use of lists.
3. Newsletter subscriptions
Publishing a newsletter will increase the attention and awareness of your readers or clients. With quality and interesting content, you increase the probability of sharing it, thereby increasing traffic and the number of backlinks. Usually, companies do not understand the importance of a newsletter. If it is used properly, the benefits can be great.
Just include some effective call-to-action buttons in your newsletter, for example, offer them to register for some webinar, download some whiter paper or eBook and watch the magic…
4. Research reports and case studies
If you want to become an authority and earn a lot of backlinks, you will have to show facts and stats. Your personal opinion can be interesting and valuable, especially if you have been in a specific field for a long time.
That’s the reason why the most shareable contents are:
- Research papers
- Case studies
- Reviews
- Comparisons
In your research, include all relevant data, test results, and charts, and always link your sources. Try to be the first to write about a certain topic. Fresh content is critical in any industry especially if your niche evolves quickly.
5. Extra material
You can also try and get the most value from every piece of content you create by producing your content in different formats. By using multiple content formats, you will generate more leads and move them further. Also, you will show expertise and increase your authority.
The different formats you should implore include:
- Guides
- Infographics
- Videos
- Webinar recordings
- Transcripts
- Podcasts from research
There’s plenty of room for creativity when it comes to marketing.
6. Learn from others
Usually, people make mistakes by trying to go at something alone without having to look at their competitors or get help from friends. It doesn’t matter how good you are, going alone sometimes isn’t a nice idea. Like what use would content be if nobody cares about that topic? What about having a cool topic, but weak content?
You can read hundreds of articles and watch dozens of videos about good content, but there is always one safe road: learn from others. Once you do, you’ll be amazed at what would follow because you’ll be crushing the content perfectly.
Common Link Building Tools
Here’s a list of common tools for link building:
- Buzzstream
- Majestic SEO
- Moz Link Explorer
- Raven SEO tools
- Ahrefs
- Followerwonk
- Link Prospector
- SEO Spyglass
- SEO quake Extension
- Link Detox
- Long Tail Pro
- GroupHigh
- Monitor Backlinks
- Screaming Frog
- WikiGrabber
- SEMrush Brand Monitoring tool
- SERP Research Tool (SERP)
- Google search console
- Linkody
- Respona
We encourage you to start building links for your website with the above tools today and if you encounter any trouble or you want to save yourself the stress and troubles then send us a message and we would come to your rescue.
Concluding Link building
If you want to get to the top and stay there, then you need to protect your website for the future. Search Engine Optimization should be your topmost priority so you should monitor your backlink profile regularly.
We know this is not a piece of cake, but luckily there are automatic tools like Link Alerts or Monitor Backlinks that can help you stay on track. Using these tools, you will be notified when new backlinks appear. This allows you to react quickly in case of unwanted new backlinks, and thus avoid common SEO techniques like negative SEO attacks.
With this detailed link-building content, I know you’ve filled already so do well to leave a comment below and share it with your friends…
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