Links are one of the most important ranking factors used by Google and other search engines. Knowing how to build high-quality links is essential for your SEO strategy. Our definitive guide to link building for SEO provides you with the need-to-know information and sets out best practice strategies that you can implement immediately.
What is Link Building for SEO?
Link building is a term for how an SEO marketer can acquire links to their content. It is the process of attaining the hyperlinks from other websites that, when clicked, lead to your website. The links should be related to the content, and have strong anchor text. This is useful for search engines to understand the context of the links.
Link building is very important for SEO because links are one of the major ranking factors of search engines. When Google crawls a webpage it will look at the quantity of high-quality inbound and outbound links.
What makes a good link?
A high-quality link is like a vote. It informs Google that your content is worthwhile and should rank higher on the SERP. But what makes a good link?
- High domain authority is the most important factor determining whether a link is high-quality or not. You can easily check any website’s domain authority using online tools such as Ahrefs.
- The website’s relevancy. Google will deem a link more valuable if it features content that is similar to the content you are publishing.
- The link’s position on the page. A link buried in the footer of a webpage is less valuable than a link embedded within a piece of content.
- Link anchor text. This is the clickable text section of a link and is especially valuable if it is keyword rich.
Low-quality, spammy backlinks will be detrimental to a website’s SEO and ranking. Google deems these as toxic backlinks that violate their quality guidelines. You will receive penalties from search engines if the algorithm crawls your website and discovers black hat link building tactics have been used.
How to Find High-Quality Links
Visual assets
Using visual assets to present your information is more engaging and will therefore see more people share your visual content across the internet. These visuals can be in the form of images, diagrams, infographics, and charts. Every time the visual is shared, a backlink to the source should hopefully be included as well.
Guest blogging
Many marketing experts believe guest blogging to be an outdated link-building practice, and this is true in regards to guest blogs being published on low authority websites that have no relevance to your business.
If executed strategically, guest blogging can be effective in building high-quality links. If you come across a good opportunity, first reach out directly to the website owner to pitch your idea. Do not send the same guest posts to multiple websites – Google is smart enough to recognise this and will penalize you for it.
Social media promotion
An easy way to start building backlinks is by posting your content on the numerous social media platforms available. You can re-purpose your website content or post graphics and other linkable assets that you have produced. Just make sure that you remain active on social media outside of sharing new posts, as this is invaluable brand awareness.
Outreach
This is a time-consuming method that demands a lot of effort for little reward. If you are interested in getting a backlink from a particular website that you know will benefit your SEO strategy and rankings, you will need to contact the website owner directly to ask.
When approaching this, remember to only request from websites that are relative to your business niche. You can then send a professional email asking for the backlink.
Broken link building
Broken link building involves three easy steps:
- Find a relevant broken link on a website
- Create something similar to the broken resource
- Ask those linking to the dead resource to link to your resource instead
This is another form of the outreach strategy, and you can again contact the website owner directly to acquire the broken link. This method is time-consuming and may not achieve the desired results.
SEO marketing agency topclick has an excellent team and more than 20 years of experience in delivering an expertly tailored SEO service for your specific business niche. As part of our service, we will give you regular updates, access to granular SEO reporting metrics; as well as a dedicated account manager to help you achieve the results you need. Contact us today for more information.