Some SEOs will urge you to develop amazing content and wait for links to flow naturally, some will say deliberate link prospecting and focused email marketing is best, while others will smile cryptically and say PBNs.
Who should you follow?
Contents
The ideal link development strategy relies on your sector, website, resources, and goals, as with other SEO methods. We’ll outline some helpful basics in this article.
1. Linking fundamentals
Link building involves attracting external links to your website. Link building raises your pages’ “authority” in Google’s eyes, thus increasing search traffic.
White hat link building usually involves two steps:
- Make something memorable (and therefore worthy of a link)
- Show content to website owners (and have them link to it)
Why Link building?
Google and other search engines use links from other sites as “votes” to choose which page on a given topic should rank first out of thousands of comparable ones. Backlinks generally boost search rankings. However, not all links are equal. There is usually a mix of factors that may depend on the search query you wish to rank for.
2. Building links
Most link building methods fall into one of four categories:
- Add Links Manually
- “Adding” a link means manually adding it to a third-party website. These techniques are most common with business listings, profile creation, commenting, forum, community, and Q&A posting, job listings, etc.
- Request links from website owners
- This is when you contact the website owner and offer a convincing argument to connect to you. This connection building group needs that “compelling purpose.” Unless you’re famous, no one will help you since they don’t care about you or your website. You need to demonstrate the value to them.
- Earn – Organic links from site visitors.
- You “earn” links when others link to your website pages without your request. This only happens if you have something truly amazing that other website owners wish to highlight. People can’t link to unknown entities. You must promote your page regardless of its quality. More people seeing your page means more people connecting to it.
3. What makes a link good?
Nobody knows how Google evaluates links. However, SEOs agree on several link evaluation principles:
- Authority
- Relevance
- “Anchor”
- Nofollow/follow
- Placement
- Destination
4. Best link-building methods
We provided several link building techniques in chapter two. Which ones work best?
- Competitor links
- Link-building begins with competitor link research. The top-ranking page for your search query has all the proper links, which convinced Google of its excellence. Study its links to find out how to gain comparable connections and outrank that page.
- Linking assets
- With enough drive and determination, any page can create connections, but it’s simpler when others want to link to it. Even the most dull businesses may produce link-worthy material. So check your rivals’ websites for linkable items you may copy like calculators, infographics, how-tos, guides, etc.
- Publicity
- Your pages are “linkable” only if others find them. Thus, even the most linkable assets need promotion to gain links.More people will connect to your material if you publicize it.
- Guest posting
- Every blogger wants to write valuable material, right? That’s hard to maintain. Thus, many blog owners allow guest posts. To stay in Google’s good graces, choose legitimate blogs and provide them stuff you’d post on your own website. Unfortunately, legitimate blogs don’t require your guest posts. That makes them “legit.”
Finishing up
We merely touched on the topic of link building, but we hope you found this beginner guide helpful to learn some of the basics.