Link building for beginners

Assessing the quality of a site’s external links is one of the most important Google ranking factors. The choice of a profile building strategy depends on many conditions, starting with the age of the site, the specifics of the business topic, goals, budget and others, which we will discuss later.

Link Building Basics

Linkbuilding is the process of creating backlinks from other resources to website pages in order to receive referral traffic and improve search rankings by improving authority and trust indicators.

To put it simply, you need to put quality, useful content on your website and get links to it from other resources. Such external links (backlinks) “signal” Google that the page is useful for visitors.

How exactly do search engines use backlinks for ranking?

1. These links provide information about the existence of a web page that is quite useful because it is linked to.
2. By assessing the number of external links, the quality of donor domains and their relevance to the site’s subject matter, search engines are one of the most important factors in ranking pages in search results. That is, if there is high-quality and useful content, a page with a large number of high-quality, from the point of view of PS, backlinks will have an advantage in position.

Since the late 1990s, Google has used PageRank to determine the quality of pages. The effectiveness of the metric was due to the fact that the link was considered as a vote in favor of the reliability of the page. That is, a web page will not receive links if it does not deserve them. The idea is that if someone links to another site, they are communicating that the resource is trustworthy.

Over time, in response to attempts to manipulate search results and PageRank, Google algorithms have constantly improved their tools for filtering unreliable web resources. Sites that use “excessive” search engine optimization of the link profile receive a decrease in ranking from Google, therefore, the PageRank algorithm is built into the main ranking algorithm.

When engaging in link building, you need to understand what techniques for obtaining links it is advisable to avoid and not violate the requirements of search engines.

How to build a link?

Most link building tactics and strategies can be divided into categories:

1. adding links;
2. request for links;
3. buying links;
4. earning links;
5. saving links.

Adding links

Perhaps, if you independently place the required backlink on a “not your” site, for example:

• creating a profile on social networks, business directories;
• creation of vacancies;
• publications, comments on blogs, forums.

The value of such links for ranking in the PS is low, but adding them to thematic and visited resources can help get targeted traffic.

Request for links

Obtaining links upon request from the owner of an external resource, in other words, you need a compelling reason to link to your site that can interest the owner of the external resource where you need a backlink. Let’s look at examples of such tactics:

• Guest blogging – create content that is useful for their site;
• Reviews and practical cases – give positive feedback about a service or product;
• Skyscraper Technique – Provide a better resource than the one they link to;
• Link inserts – offer a resource with additional information about what they briefly mentioned;
• Link exchange – offer a link to them if they agree to link to you;
• Link Building with Broken Links – Help them fix the “non-existent” link on their page.

For these link building tactics to be effective, you need to create a truly useful page that people will want to link to.

Buying links

Buying links is used by many search engine optimizers, sometimes successfully. But you need to understand the risks of both receiving sanctions from search engines and spending your budget on low-quality links that will not give any positive effect in the ranking of your site. The riskiest ways to get backlinks this way:

• PBNs;
• Fiverr Services;
• Receiving links from spam donors.

If your competitors are paying for a link, you don’t have to follow suit. You don’t have to break Google’s rules to rank high and get search traffic.

Earning links

Earning links is the most effective tactic for getting links. The main feature of this tactic is to place really useful content on the pages that can get links in a natural way. Examples include data studies, infographics, surveys, podcasts, interviews, expert reviews. Investing in creating exceptional, useful pages that generate links is more effective than artificially boosting the rankings of mediocre ones.

Saving links

Maintaining existing links is not a tactic for “building” but rather “maintaining” an existing external link profile. Their use will help if:

1. The page with a link to your site has ceased to exist (deleted, deindexed or changed) – try to resolve the issue of updating the link with the resource owner.
2. A page on your site has ceased to exist, and external links indicate a 404 error – you need to restore the page or set up a 301 redirect to another relevant page on your site.

Periodic checks of “lost” and “broken” links, together with actions to preserve them, can save part of the budget on link building.

What criteria are used to evaluate a link?

How exactly Google determines the quality of links is not known for certain, but the main factors are considered to be:

1. Authority

To determine the authority of a site (or page), the search engine evaluates the number and quality of external links to this site. For example, at the site Wikipedia authority is higher than that of a new blog site, so a link from Wikipedia is more valuable.

1. Relevance

Links will carry more weight from pages that are more relevant to the topic of your content. This is how Google evaluates the quality of information on a page or site, search process.

Therefore, you should try to get links only from sites and pages that are relevant to the topic of your website.

1. Anchor text

Anchor text is interactive text with a link to an external resource, another page or block of text. Google admits, What:

“Uses anchor sharing mainly because anchor text can help ensure better quality results.”

therefore, it uses the value of anchors to determine keywords for which the resource has more authority. During the link building process, the higher the chance of receiving sanctions from Google, the harder you try to “get” the necessary anchors. Plus, most white hat link building methods don’t give you control over the anchor text.

1. Follow and Nofollow attributes

Nofollow is a link attribute that tells Google that the page being linked to does not want to transfer its weight to the page it is linking to.

After 2019, new link attributes are also taken into account in the search:

rel=”UGC” – should be applied to “user generated” links, such as blog comments and forum posts.

rel=”sponsored” – should be used when the link is published as part of an advertising, sponsorship or other agreement that provides compensation.

Although the use of Nofollow, UGC, sponsored attributes does not allow Google to take these links into account in their rankings, the presence of links and the ability for users to use them to visit the site is a positive signal for search engines.

1. Location

Patent smart user Google talks about how the likelihood of a link being clicked can affect the authority it conveys. And the location of a link on a page is one of the few characteristics that can affect its CTR.

A link at the beginning of an article will have more weight in the search engine than a link in the footer of the page. Also, the more links on a page, the higher the competition for clicks between them, and the lower the authority that will be transferred to other pages.

1. Purpose

Possible destinations of links to the site:

• home page
• a resource intended for obtaining links;
• Pages that need to rank well in Google.

More often than not, the pages that need to rank well are the ones that have the hardest time getting links. This happens because people are trying to link to informational pages where their audience can get value for free, rather than to commercial pages where their audience is more likely to part with their money.

How to rank “boring” pages?

You should use the power of internal linking to improve the rankings of your “boring pages” – build as many links as possible to your link-earning resources, and direct all that “link juice” to the pages you want to rank with internal links.

Best Link Building Tactics

Studying competitors’ links

Researching competitors’ links is one of the most important areas in link building. A page that ranks highly for your desired search query has the right links to convince Google of its advantage. By studying its links, you can figure out what tactics to use to get similar links and outrank that page.

The procedure is divided into two stages:

• try to get links to pages linking to your competitors;
• Research how these links were obtained and use what you learn to find other similar pages from which you can obtain links.

Creating resources tailored to receive links

When talking about link-building resources, people tend to think about very specific things, for example:

• online tools and calculators;
• infographics, GIF-graphs and “graphic maps”;
• awards and ratings;
• monographs and studies;
• practical lessons and guides;
• definition and fictitious terms.

There is an opinion that the list of “resources designed for receiving links” should be expanded; one idea from your article may encourage people to link to it, as well as the very existence of your company or its products.

There are probably plenty of opportunities to improve your existing pages and make them more attractive for getting links before you need to spend the time and effort on creating link bait.

Content promotion

No matter how linked your pages are, in order to link to them, people need to find them first. In other words, even the best links-focused resources must be promoted to attract links.

In general, there are only three ways to promote content:

• Advertising – You can pay money to companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to attract visitors to your page. You can also reach out to almost any website your audience prefers and sign an advertising contract with them
• Outreach is probably the best way to get your content in front of the “linkerati” – people who have websites and can link to you. Yes, these same people can most likely be reached through advertising, but a well-written personalized email will be more effective if you want to increase your chances of getting links from them.
• Communities can be a great tool for promoting your content to relevant audiences. No matter what industry you’re in, there’s likely a subreddit where like-minded people hang out, or perhaps a few Facebook groups. In some niches, you can also find individual community sites.

Guest Blogging

Every blogger wants to publish quality content that benefits their audience, but doing so consistently is very difficult. This is one of the reasons why many blog owners publish guest posts on their blogs. But the problem is that “honest” blogs with high traffic and search rankings need really useful content and unnecessary articles written by a $15 copywriter.

Publishing on the most popular blogs in your niche will likely be impossible without existing articles on less authoritative similar blogs. It will be better to start with some lesser known blogs in your field and work your way up.

One of the best ways to propose a guest post is to find a “lost semantics” – a popular topic that brings a lot of search traffic to one of their competitors but is not covered on their own blog, or offer to rewrite one of their old and ineffective articles.

I hope that this article helped you navigate and answered most of the pressing questions you have about link building. This will serve as a strong foundation for further study of link building.

Oleksandr Romanenko

Team Lead/Senior SEO specialist

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