If you ever interested in SEO, you may hear a term like ‘link building’. But what is it and how to do it in the best way? Let’s start from the beginning, and move step by step.
What is link building
Suppose, that the whole Internet is like a big city. It has a lot of districts, communities, and parts – pages and websites. But what is the connector? – The streets. Therefore, links are like streets in the city, and the more streets you build that directs to you district the more people can get to it. The same situation is on the Internet: the more links you can build, the more web traffic you can get. Sounds simple, isn’t it? But there are a lot of pitfalls.
Today the link building is like art because their importance has never been higher. You need to create a process of high-quality links acquiring from other websites to your own in the order you want to compete and thrive online.
Each link consists of 4 main parts:
- Anchor tag: it starts the link and tells search engine ‘Hi, I am a link’
- Hyperlink referral (href): means link referral location (e.g. website, image, file address)
- Link visible text: text that users see on the page
- Anchor tag closure: signals that the link is finished.
Link parts
Why links are important
Links are used for several purposes:
- For ranking: search engines’ algorithms tracks and analyze them to rank your site
- To determine the popularity: the more important a site, the more links from this site value
- Trust management: to differentiate spam pages
- To discover new fresh pages.
Total referring domains vs Google position
If you want to discover more about how search works, we advise you to see this short video from Google.
By the way, applying links as a rank factor was one of the reasons why Google starts to dominate the search engine markets (PageRank).
Nowadays, there are a lot of different techniques for building links, which vary from simple to hard. It is worth to say, that SEO specialists spend a lot of time trying to do it in the best way. So, do not expect that you learn everything just in one night. But be sure, that the first step you will make.
1. Avoid nofollow
Look at this link:
<a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>Firstly, it looks like the common link, but then you notice this ‘nofollow’ attribute. What does it mean? It tells the search engine not to trust this link and do not include to the PageRank. Sometimes, the site cannot be sure in the link quality. It can suit for:
- Different types of comments
- Forum posts
- Guest posts signatures and so on.
2. Use influencers
Google ranks all pages by its importance, therefore not every link has the same weight. Also, it takes into account the ‘Local reputation’, meaning that links from the topic specialized sites are more important than links from the general-purpose sites. Moreover, socially shared links are also important for your rank and Google can differentiate them as other types of links.
So, you can use it by running any influencer program and make partnerships with a lot of famous bloggers. Furthermore, it is also good for your corporate image and trust level.
3. Create shareable content
In fact, infographics receive 62% more backlinks than other content types. But, make sure that you use different types of material that also attract links:
- Videos
- Guides
- Tutorials
- Articles
- White papers and so on.
Once you appeal and offer useful information for users, they start to share it, and you will get a new portion of backlinks.
4. Do not forget about guest posts
We can say exactly that you are a professional in the industry you work, so why do not share your experience with the audience? Utilizing this method, you can not only tell users about your company but also provide them with some links.
5. Be social
One of the useful tactics to promote your business, educate people, and leave some links is to monitor specialized forums and discussion topics like Quora.
- Find the question in which you can help
- Write a helpful answer
- Provide with some links on your website where people can know.
As you successfully develop your link building strategy, you can get more traffic to the website, increase brand awareness, raise a page rank and get other benefits.
Really informative, thanks for sharing this!