Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide

Magazines, newspapers, fans, and news websites publish and constantly discuss celebrities’ every new action or whenever there is no action at all. The buzz increases the celebrity’s popularity. A popular website has a similar life story. Many other websites and people talk about its pages, media, or articles. These conversations boost the site’s popularity and ultimately help rank higher in search engines.

A celebrity or popular website gets the attention of hundreds, thousands, and even more sources. This adds to the reliability of the website. Link building for websites means creating more conversations and mentions online to increase visibility and trustworthiness.

Backlinking is only one of the ways search engines spot a popular, reliable, and relevant website. Google and other major search engines lay a lot of emphasis on high-quality backlinks. So, working on increasing your backlinks for SEO link building is one of the more prominent methods to improve rank in the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP).

Why Must You Plan for Backlink Building?

Link building brings several benefits apart from just popularity. When reputable websites link to your article or website, you stand to gain more traffic and attract the relevant audience from these referring websites. A popular website can shine till it shares more valuable and original content, highlighting the direct relation between refreshing content and link building.

Link building is a promotional engine that increases your site’s credibility and high trust among search engines. Backlinks enable you to stay competitive and make your competitors work harder to get past you. A more obvious reason to plan link-building is to become an authoritative source your audience looks up to. Now that we know link building’s importance let’s take a closer look at how to build links and increase your articles and website’s popularity with a strategic approach.

Features of a good backlink

Not all backlinks are useful for your website. You want websites with high domain authority to point the resources to your website to increase the readership and subscribe to your newsletter or updates. Some features that make an excellent backlink are:

Should refer to your website in an unforced way: Search engines are wary of backlinks that look unnatural or forcefully placed in high volumes. A backlink should promote good content and cite a helpful webpage like yours.

Combination of backlink types: You want only to have some of your backlinks coming from a single source like a website or blog but have a mix of links from news websites, forums, and blogs. This variety makes it more intentional and signals to search engines about your web page’s trustability, making it likely to be recommended.

Must have do-follow links too: By default, all links have a do-follow, meaning search engines can follow the source of the backlink. Too many no-follows can hurt your SEO and cause it to be unfavorable. A healthy backlink passes link equity or link juice to the source.

Low spam websites: Backlinks from high spam score websites hurt your website’s credibility. With constant monitoring, you can spot backlinks from spammy domains and add them to your website’s URL list to ignore them.

Latest backlinks: To keep your web pages, website, or articles fresh for SEO, you must receive links regularly. You’d want your content to remain relevant, evergreen, and valuable. A good practice is to update older articles to make them relevant and link-worthy.

What are the types of backlinks?

Link building is a useful SEO strategy to improve your website’s visibility. Among the many ways, backlinks may take time and effort to boost your web page’s trust. There are also a few to avoid that can damage your site or your client’s.

Editorial backlinks:

High-quality content on reputable websites places some of the best-quality backlinks. The referral comes from your webpage or article, earning a thought-leader status or a high source of useful information. It helps to give a natural feel to the backlink and brings along a decent volume of interested reader traffic.

Guest blogging:

Some companies outsource the guest blogging tasks while some dedicate themselves to building them. You can find websites with authoritative domain ranking that allow users to add guest posts on a topic of interest. These sites provide a backlink to their readers, making it a win-win for both websites to add a credible source.

User-Generated Backlinks:

These links come from users commenting on public forums or other websites, mentioning your website or article to add context to an existing or similar topic. They offer a low SEO value but can increase your brand visibility. You must be careful with these as there is a possibility of having malicious intent to affect spam scores.

Media backlinks:

Image or video content makes a great way to earn backlinks by embedding your media in their content. A credit given to your media comes with the source URL, bringing search engines and interested readers to your website. Media backlinks like infographics, graphs, images, maps, or product photos work well if they are original, engaging, and relatable.

Press Release Backlinks:

News and other publications create buzz for celebrities and other niche product lines or services, usually with many subscribers and a high readership. These websites publish press releases that bring you relevant traffic. It could be subscription-based or ad-hoc paid service.

Social media backlinks:

Popular social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. create healthy backlinks and valuable brand mentions and introduce your brand to a newer audience.

Backlinks from outreach:

Based on your reputation and networking, you could ask blogging websites or individual bloggers to mention your best articles or latest content that may benefit both audiences. These backlinks must come naturally to avoid looking spammy or paid. Consider local link building to satisfy local SEO queries.

Fixing broken links:

Broken link building involves spotting opportunities to place your website links instead of non-functional or inactive links. In this process, you report a broken link on a reputable website to the website admin or owner and request to place your link as a reward for spotting the gap. Reclaiming broken links requires dedicated efforts and some tact when dealing with web admins.

Type of Backlinks to Avoid or Use Sparingly

These are best used with caution as search engines are known to penalize unethical use of backlinks.

Paid backlinks:

A tempting proposition is purchasing high-quality backlinks to boost your webpage or site’s visibility among search engines. This practice is rewarding if limitedly used and fetches good SEO value. On the contrary, if you purchase backlinks from websites already penalized previously, you risk damaging your reputation, SEO score, and credibility.

Private Blog Network Backlinks:

Known to boost SEO scores, backlinking has given birth to several specialized websites known as Private Blog Networks that link to other websites purely to create lots of backlinks artificially. Often, these result in penalties from search engines when discovered.

Ways to start with backlinking

Creating suitable information sources can attract people and search engines to link to your pages and rank higher in the SERPs. The backlink guide below helps you with some ways to build backlinks to your website.

Create linkable or shareable assets

By developing deep-researched studies on your customer’s pain points or an industry problem, you’re naturally creating backlinks worth sharing with an audience with similar interests. These must be rich with media like images, videos, or infographics.

Webinars embedding

There is a lot of demand for in-depth clarity on complex topics that webinars can help throw light on. Host live or on-demand rich and valuable webinars to dispel myths or provide a pathway through a complex problem to bring the attention of the most interested audience. You could go viral if people and companies cite your webinar as a useful resource, boosting your traffic and search engine rankings.

Relationship Building

You could promote each other’s website assets with targeted outreach and collaboration with the proper organization for mutual benefit. Influencer collaboration works well when you have someone from your industry or with a common interest.

Feature on listings

You could be part of the listicles of a curated collection of suggestions based on your expertise. For example, if your website provides digital marketing services, you could get featured in digital magazines that compile the best marketing services. The backlinks from reputed sites give an excellent platform to earn SEO weightage.

Internal Link Optimization:

The best source to promote your web pages and articles is your website by interlinking pages among other articles and landing pages or social media promotions.

Monitor Brand Mentions:

By digging deep, you could turn your brand mentioned on various websites into backlinks with some work. Like broken link optimization, this strategy requires using tools like Google Alerts for branded or unbranded mentions. When you come across mentions without backlinks, ask the web admin or owner to insert your webpage links.

Takeaway

Backlinks are important for a constantly high SEO ranking. When picking among the several ways to create backlinks, you must remember to promote and distribute your website content organically. This increases your chances of reaching relevant audiences naturally and gaining more backlinks.

FAQs: