It’s no secret, of course, that sneaky spam-driven link building practices can give businesses the right kind of fuel to kick-start short-term gains. However, they have no place in the strategic blueprint of organizations committed to creating lasting, sustainable success in organic search.
Link building is, at the most fundamental level, inexorably turning into an art in itself—that part of some sort of highbrow marketing activity. So, the organizations that are attuned to this paradigm shift are therefore the ones who come out successful in the long-term prospect. But this doesn’t mean that link building isn’t a technical process or that strategies have to revolve around some ‘product-centric‘ perspective.
On the contrary: it’s nuanced and plural, hence one needs to garner comprehension à-hitherto unseen.
Welcome to our quick-start guide, designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible. The task ahead might seem daunting right now, but don’t worry! We’ve carefully divided the information up into bite-sized chapters and thrown tons of examples in your way to guide your way.
So go ahead and jump into the Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: PADDY MOOGAN
Paddy is the co-founder of Aira, a dynamic digital marketing agency nestled in the heart of the UK. We do everything with the best strategies: leading SEO, paid media campaigns, content marketing solutions, and digital PR initiatives. And it stretches far and wide, far across other businesses not just in the UK but reaches into the dynamic landscapes of North America and Europe. With Paddy at the wheel, Aira is the one agency you need to collaborate with to achieve unbeatable, epic success.
What is link building?
The process of getting other websites to link to a page on your site. These hypertext links, usually just called links, are the virtual apparatus that enables users to navigate easily in the ocean that is the wide and deep sea of the internet. Search engines, the information gatekeepers on the internet, physically rely on these links to index websites and the massive content of the World Wide Web. They indeed give a lot of focus to these links—again, not just on the individual web page but on entire online domains.
Not every link is born of the effort at getting SEOs and marketers for a link. This is automatically done, be it a journalist making reference to a source within a piece of news or an avid blogger sharing a favorite purchase from an online retailer.
The ultimate pursuit, then, is gaining organic links—a pursuit to be made over long time spans. This means making your website worthy enough to be linked to; it could be for having great products or services or just amazing content that many websites find really valuable.
This can also be combined with various link-building strategies applied to your entire site, which can increase one’s level of authority and the possibility of ranking well organically—thus driving more organic traffic.
AOIFE O’CONNOR, AIRA:
“A huge part of our link-building strategy is in content creation. The approach itself spans a huge array of different formats, from very large interactive campaigns to indexes, calculators, and tools down to more standard-static campaigns: a repository of report-style presentations to be rich in terms of strong graphics and on-page copy. We also utilize quick-turnaround pieces and brain-teasing content to land great links easily back to our home or category pages with just a well-crafted pitch email.”
Hyperlink Anatomy:
We need to understand a little about the minutiae of a link, how search engines view such links, and what inferences that notion leads the search engines to make before we can understand just how important link building is.
Link tag start:
Meet the anchor tag, commonly referred to as “a”. This is the opening link tag and like a trumpet call to browsers and search engines that the time for the opening of a new connection to some other resource is nigh. Get Ready as time has come to boost your website’s interconnectivity with this tag.
Link Reference Location:
Here, “href” stands for “hypertext reference,” and the quoted text is where you put the destination URL of the link. This URL does not need to point at a web page expressly; it points at any resource including an image or a file to download. Sometimes you might notice a link that does not start with a URL but with a #: These links will take you to specific parts of the URL.
Anchor text of link: The text that you see on a webpage that makes you want to click for further information is usually optimized so that it stands out from the color and style of the text that surrounds it. It may be in blue and/or underlined. This tells your visitor that this is actual text, and they can do something with this text – click on it and find out more. End of link tag: This is where the link tag’s relationship with search engines ceases.
How links are perceived by search engines:
Search engines use links mainly for two purposes:
Crawling:
They use links in order to find new web pages then include them in the search file.
Ranking Survey:
Links could likewise be evaluated about the appropriateness and significance of a particular page thus affecting the rank of the link in search. Search engines, after examining a website, get off with the content in it and include it in the database. This is the process which enables them to determine whether a page is good or bad, and also it may even rank within search results under relevant keywords.
During this evaluation of page quality, the engines not only looked at the page content but also at the amount and quality of inbound links from external resources. In general, the more other, quality sites link to a page, the more search engines will believe that page to be a quality resource worth surfacing.
Links as signals of importance:
The reason Google started to dominate the late 1990s was largely thanks to a concept called “PageRank.”
This formula evaluated a page based, in part, on the number of other pages that linked to that page. This metric was part of Google’s ranking algorithm, one powerful signal since it works for the quality of pages. Inclusion of this metric into the Google algorithm made it possible to deliver to the users search results much more relevant and useful than that of competitors at that time.
The effectiveness of this approach lies in the concept that a link serves as an endorsement for a webpage. In essence, if a page garners links, it’s deemed deserving. The underlying theory suggests that when one website links to another, it’s essentially vouching for its quality. Just as you wouldn’t recommend a subpar restaurant to a friend, websites wouldn’t link to inferior resources.
What SEO experts did, however, was pretty soon to game that system to actually make web pages rank higher in search results with targeted keyword usages. At that stage, despite the superior core technology Google had over its competitors, it was still vulnerable to manipulation – its biggest downfall was being unable to discern between the quality or lack of quality of the links.
Google has taken a step further in trying to be proactive about sites manipulating the search results by listing their websites with poor quality links. On their part, they have commenced regular updates aimed at filtering through the sites that do not merit being listed, again due to poor quality and backlinks.
It was this change in approach that made Google devalue a large number of link-building practices that it had previously been actively cooperative with. For example, by submitting websites in exchange for links, this looming practice was long accepted by Google and, therefore, approved. Over time, this approach became largely abused and used to an extent that it did degrade the practice of website directories. Consequently, Google curtailed the importance of such links in acknowledgement of its obligation to provide quality search results.
Google has always had an aggressive stance against sites using over-the-top practices within their link building strategies, sometimes referred to as over-optimization. Such enforcement greatly increased in 2012 directly and immediately with the launch of the Penguin updates—what really were game changers in the structures of link building strategies. These actually targeted some link building practices that only ever changed beyond recognition. What followed was the attempt to use poor methods of link building, which only ended up failing and putting a great risk to the website’s position in the search engines. Therefore, it’s important to understand the Google Webmaster Guidelines and find ways by which you can adjust your strategies, so they fall in line to prevent incurring harmful consequences.
Though Google does not disclose the details of the search algorithm, keeping it under wraps as the “secret sauce” of the business, recent studies and the overall agreement within the SEO community have emphasized the importance of links in the algorithm.
Today, no one can deny that with high-quality links to your website, you vastly improve ranking and probably drive more traffic to your site. But then, the definition of a ‘high-quality’ link is indeed important, and we shall traverse that in a short while. Quality, most importantly, with each advance in their technologies, search engines like Google, for instance, have countless versions of new algorithms to fish out these low-quality links. This shift directly influences SEO practices. From here on out, link building strategies need to be quality-oriented and not quantity-oriented.
Boosting Business Growth:
Expanding a business involves more than just generating links to make a website popular and get organic traffic. There are many benefits that come with expanding a business.
Recall that obtaining links is frequently easier when they come from other businesses than when they are created directly.
For example, releasing an unprecedented new product or publishing best-in-class content for your industry might easily win your website many links.
These efforts—be they creative development or high-quality content creation—exist not to create links but to do whatever it is that your project is for. But creating links is a natural byproduct of these efforts, and
As such, not to approach link building in a vacuum but as one of those essential components that intersect one another, with the other parts of your company providing outcomes that can go way beyond link acquisition.
1. Building Relationships:
Links are one of the most important positions where you can increase the potential reach of people across the internet. The outreach plan is basically working to try and approach influential and relevant websites and blogs in your sector.
It is a way of promoting outreach, through people’s contacts who want to link out to your latest creations, which can be attractive infographics, compelling content, or featured articles. Though the aims of outreach are primarily to get links, it gives something more impactful than just acquiring backlinks; rather, it provides this supreme chance to build lasting relationships with major influencers in your niche.
These relationships also offer a great payback in terms of increasing the authority and credibility of your business. Having genuine advocates and brand evangelists shows power not strictly tied to links. In fact, outreach on its own sometimes pays off: you find yourself the receiver of a request for collaboration on a piece, which again inverts the traditional outreach dynamic.
2. Drives referral traffic:
Let’s talk about not only how links will affect your rankings but also how they will bring in relevant referral traffic. This can really mean a heap of relevant traffic to your site, sometimes outranking any other funnel to your site. If relevant traffic is driven, that means sales need to follow.
These links are more important than just being an SEO exercise; they bring your potential customer one step closer. You put your website link in front of an interested person, and he can take it from there. They won’t buy from you immediately, but they will get to know your brand and products, and thus the process of future engagement will be set in motion.
It’s no longer only necessary to talk about how links alter your ranking but also their relevance to referral traffic. One good link from a relevant website could really push a lot of traffic to your website; on the other hand, if a relevant site refers to the link, you’re going to bring you traffic more expected to indirectly boost up your leads or sales.
More than just improving the SEO, the importance of such links is to convert those leads into customers. You present your website links to interested categories, and thereby the doors are opened for them to move. They do not make immediate purchases, but they do know about the business and the offerings, and they look forward to engagement in the later days.
3. Brand building:
Effective link building is one of the in-demand strategies to boost brand recognition and establish authority within the niche. Through content development, you will demonstrate your company’s expertise and draw attention to your brand. Creating content enriched from industry data does not only strengthen your credibility but also instills audience engagement and trust. You pro-actively reach out to provide something of knowledge in exchange for a backlink or for industry peers to refer to the brand.
When traditional approaches have all fallen short in trying to quantify brand expertise or thought leadership, Brand Authority™, by Techssm, is introduced to provide a realistic metric within which brands can measure their influence. Brand Authority™ measures how a brand is taking dwell time into account in an actionable way to improve brand equity both in search results and throughout the web. By including this score, you can determine strengths, weaknesses, and focus points to strategically improve Domain Authority and Brand Authority; it is a whole, thorough process of brand building and recognition through link building.
Imagine what an aggregate view of these KPIs might reveal to you and your competitors, if you were within an industry.
NICK KATSEANES, PAGE ONE POWER:
“Getting a link from top brands and websites says you have made it – you are trustworthy.”.
Running a business is challenging in all senses, and also in its very nature, organic traffic does not flow constantly at times. Key stakeholders may have been justified with the numerous times we have had our ups and downs. Our strategy was to continuously highlight the running factors as opposed to looking for easy wins.
Over the last 5 years, our consistent efforts and clear vision have taken organic traffic growth to a staggering 104% by the end of each year. These are accomplishments that could not have come overnight, but our continued synergy continues to push us to higher heights.”
A quick note on link building vs. link “earning:
Before we get into the world of link building, there’s one thing you should know fundamentally: linking efforts and well-designed websites should be viewed as means of obtaining links to content that is deserving of being ranked. The homepage is usual to approach, but the heart of this is usually more specialized content: a tool, a blog post, some research, good graphics. This could exist on your site already, or it could be created with this specific goal in mind.
This moves us into core concepts: link earning and the idea of having a page that’s “worthy” of a ranking. Any successful link-building campaign starts with the concept that content should be created that is worthy of Web user attention or interaction. It’s tough to build links to mediocre pages, and the process ultimately makes a lot more sense if and when you’re starting with great content that people will naturally want to share. It’s also increased the chances of organic link acquisitions over time in your overall profile. It will provide an extra layer of authenticity in your link building.
