Link building is the process of strategically increasing the number of hyperlinks (or backlinks) pointing to a website. It is an essential aspect of SEO meant to improve a website’s search engine visibility.
Here are some of the most popular link building strategies:
- Content marketing
- Email outreach
- Broken link building
- Unlinked brand mentions
- PR
(Among others.)
Let’s get into the details. Here’s your beginner’s guide to link building in SEO.
Why Is Link Building Important?
The more high-quality backlinks a page has, the higher it can rank. Backlinks are one of Google’s most important ranking factors.
Google and other major search engines consider backlinks as “votes of confidence” for the website getting the links.
Each vote suggests your content is valuable, credible, and useful.
So, if you want your pages to rank high in the Google search results, you will almost certainly need to do some backlink building.
How To Build Links
Most link building tactics and strategies fall into one of the three following buckets.
1. Ask for Links
Asking for links is when you actively contact a website and ask them to link to yours.
You can ask them to link to:
- Blog posts
- In-depth guides
- Ebooks
- Visual assets (like infographics)
- Case studies
- Original research and data
And so forth.
We’ll get into how to do that later in the “Best Backlink Building Strategies” section.
2. Add Links
Adding links refers to going to another website and manually adding your link there.
For example, you can manually add links to:
- Social media profiles
- Business directories
- Forums, communities, and Q&A sites (like Quora)
- Blog comments
- User profile pages
And so on.
Note: Manually adding SEO links is one of the easiest and possibly least effective ways to build links.
These types of links often come from low-quality sources. The kind that Google doesn’t want to give too much weight to.
Why?
Because you create them. And you’re practically endorsing yourself.
Which isn’t what Google is looking for when figuring out which websites deserve to rank best.
And since these links aren’t editorially given (links you don’t ask for), they carry less weight than other types of links.
While these links won’t actively help you, they also won’t hurt you.
Your best bet is to earn your links.
3. Earn Links
When you earn links, other websites link to yours without you asking them to.
And the best way to earn links is by creating high-quality content people want to link to.
Links happen naturally when someone wants to link to something as a resource or helpful further reading.
Here are a few different types of content people tend to link to:
- Visual assets (infographics, charts, diagrams, etc.)
- Original research and data (industry studies, surveys, proprietary research, etc.)
- Online tools and calculators
- In-depth guides and tutorials
And others.
To find more content ideas, look at your competitors’ backlink profiles.
(Again, we’ll get into the step-by-step of how to do all of this in the “Best Backlink Building Strategies” section.)
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