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Link Building For SEO
Link Building For SEO

Link Building For SEO

Link building is an essential part of winning the SEO game and increasing both your site’s authority and traffic. When quality websites link back to your site, it helps you drive referral traffic, significantly affecting your site’s rank and visibility. Links are a signal that your site is a proper resource worthy of citation, hence deserves higher rankings! With updates like Google Penguin, link quality and not just quantity can determine your website’s overall quality. Link building strategies include content marketing techniques, public relations and many others

Here’s your complete guide to what is link building, how does it benefit your SEO and how to implement it the right way!

Internal link building

In addition to building external links and gaining backlinks, it’s necessary to focus your efforts on optimising internal links with rich anchor texts to boost your rankings. To internally link your pages, follow these simple steps. Start with a comprehensive keyword research to identify keywords that are relevant to you. Then group your keywords and assign them to an informative piece of content that includes them. Then link to the right pages that have more detailed and relevant content on this topic, or even a product page that provides a solution to a popular search query.

   

What is link building for search engine optimization?

Link building means building one-way hyperlinks, which are also known as backlinks, to improve your site’s visibility for search engines. To maintain the long-term viability of your website, it’s crucial to employ natural and organic link building strategies, rather than buying links or getting them through manipulative ways. Unlike humans, links are not created equal! A link from an authoritative website has more value to your rankings than a link from a new website. There are also internal links; these are links that connect pages of the same domain. Internal linking to a specific page of your site means that this page is essential and should receive more attention from Google.

What makes a high-quality link?

With search engines dedicating a great deal of attention to link building, some SEOs managed to come up with somewhat manipulative ways to get links. But soon Google began to roll out regular updates to bust their attempts at manipulating search results. Overuse of link building, also referred to as over-optimisation, is now penalised by Google, along with many other spammy link building techniques. So what makes a good-quality link? Here are some main factors that determine link quality:

  • Page authority

The authority of the page linking to you is one of the most influential factors that indicate link quality. It can have a significant impact on your rankings if top-quality authoritative pages are linking back to you, therefore passing authority to you as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Site relevancy

Besides authority, the relevancy of the site is nonetheless important. So if you’re website is about SEO, but you get a link from an authoritative beauty blog, it won’t be really that valuable. Getting links from authority sites that are also related to your site’s niche is the best practice when it comes to link building.

  • Link placement and positioning

A useful link should be editorially placed, meaning the person that linked to you believes that your website rocks. An editorial link, vouched by the site’s owner on a page, is considered a high-quality link. Otherwise, creating a random profile to leave your link on a website, leading to an unnatural link situation, can put you at the risk of violating Google guidelines.

Another factor to consider is the link’s position, is it placed in the middle of the content, or is it buried in the footer of the page? This also matters. Links found in sidebars and footers are not as worthy as those that are contextually positioned in the main body content of a webpage.

  • Guest blog posts

Guest blogging can be spammy, and a link from a guest post might not be very valuable. The quality of guest posts depends on whether someone was paid to publish it, if it contains exact match anchor text, if this site’s only function is publishing guest posts and if it’s irrelevant to your site. Otherwise, if you publish a good quality guest post on a relevant and authoritative website, the link in this post can help boost your ranking.

  • Anchor text and link co-occurrences

Anchor text is the clickable text that redirects to a page on your site, which is also a ranking signal. The text doesn’t have to be an exact-match keyword in a way that makes it spammy; however, getting a natural link with your keyword in the anchor text is still a prominent signal. Numerous backlinks with the same anchor text could seem like an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings.

As for co-occurrences, these are the words that usually appear around your link. “Baby anchor text” or the text around your link can indicate what your page is about. Which is also a factor that can help search engines determine the authenticity and relevance of the link.

E-A-T and link building

E-A-T is an acronym that stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness. These values are of utmost importance to Google and its quality rating process. If a website does not embrace these characteristics, it is deemed a low-quality website by search engines, and vice versa. What makes the concept of E-A-T important is the fact that search engines are all about user intent, which is the reason behind the user’s search query. By stressing the significance of expertise, authority and trust, search engines are encouraging high-quality content that meets the user’s needs.

So to win at SEO, always keep E-A-T in mind. And what’s a better way to prove authority and expertise than having other websites link to your content as a trustworthy resource. What’s even better is that these sites linking to you are also living by the E-A-T concept and providing credible and reliable content.

Understanding “follow” vs “nofollow” links

As the names imply, a rel=” nofollow” tag in a link means this link is not a supportive one, while a standard “follow” tag means this link is an endorsement of that website to the website they’re linking to. This means you can link a resource without giving it your vote to rank higher in SERPs. You can use “nofollow” links if you’re linking to a source that is not credible to point out a bad example or a wrong practice. By doing so, you’re linking to that page without giving Google a signal that you trust this page. Here’s an example of a “nofollow” link markup:

outdated SEO practices

A site can have both “nofollow” and “follow” backlinks; a “nofollow” link can send traffic to your sites and perhaps lead to follow links!

 

How search engines use links

Search engines use links to discover new web pages and determine how well a page ranks in SERPs. When crawling a page, search engines index these pages to determine its quality and ranking for related keywords. The content of the page, the number of links pointing to it and the quality of those external websites are three main factors that the website’s quality relies on. This metric is effective since links are viewed as votes from other websites, meaning your website is a relevant and trustworthy resource, which is something Google has always considered.

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3 Common link building mistakes that you should avoid

There are many unnatural and low-quality ways to do link building. These link building techniques can be tempting to try since they’re easy and convenient. However, a spammy link profile can lead to site penalisation by Google. Here are 3 link building mistakes that you should avoid:

 

  • Buying links: Search engines can use a few clues to determine if a link is purchased or earned through looking at certain patterns and viewing the link itself. So buying links, or exchanging links for services and goods risks your ranking and leads to penalisation.
  • Reciprocal linking: Google’s quality guidelines strictly advise against the excessive exchange of links. Partner programs at a mass scale with unaffiliated sites that are explicitly designed for link building purposes might trigger spam alerts.
  • Low-quality directory link: Paid placements in web directories are a popular source of manipulation. These sites have extensive lists of websites linking back to a site that paid for this link. Low-quality directories can be identified by search engines, which can lead to penalisation as well.

Generate links by simply building your brand!

A lot of the practices that you want to do to generate organic and valuable links are things that will help you build and enhance your brand and website in general! You want backlinks for the same reason you want to spread awareness about your brand and drive traffic by proving authority in a specific field or topic. Once your target audience is aware of your products and services, they will share your content if they find it valuable. So by sharing your content on different platforms and amplifying your brand awareness, you’re earning both trust and natural links!

Search engines are always stressing the importance of trustworthiness, which is measured by the quality and quantity of links your site earns. By offering great services and connecting with your audience, you’re establishing trust and integrity with them. So, in addition to following the above steps to enhance your link-building strategy, keep on doing great things in the real world to earn your audience’s trust.

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