Link building
Link building is the process of creating backlinks for your site. Backlinks serve as hypertexts that lead to the pages of your site. These links are crawled by search engines. These links should be placed on good websites as it enhances your web authority.
Importance of link building
Link building is a great way to get your site recognized by web crawlers and search engines. The authority of a website is determined by the authority passed by other external websites.
The link profile for your website is one of the most important ranking factors.
1. Different types of backlinks
- Do follow backlinks pass the authority of the external site to the websites linked to it. Such links enhance the link juice of the websites. Link juice is nothing but the authority passed from one site to another.
- No follow backlinks pass no benefits to the site linked to it. The HTML tag for such links indicates the search engines and crawlers do not consider it.
2. Anchor Texts
Anchor text is the word or a phrase on a webpage that links to another webpage. The is the most important factor when the search engines consider backlinks. It determines the keywords a website will rank for. Do not over optimize your anchor texts. This may lead to a penalty by Google.
Different types of anchor texts:
- Keywords and phrases (for example- “Pizza recipe”)
- Brands (for example- “webdesignplus”)
- Branded terms (for example- “pizza recipe by webdesignplus”)
- Generic anchors (for example- “recipe”)
- Naked URLs (for example- “webdesignplusseo.com)
- CTAs (“click here, “learn more”)
How does Google determine the quality of backlinks
There are 3 important factors to determine the quality of any backlink-
- Domain Authority
- Page Authority
- Other link profile quality metrics
By link profile quality metrics we mean, some good metrics by Moz or Majestic that evaluate a link quality. Some important metrics by these tools are:
- Moz Page Authority (PA)
- Moz Domain authority (DA)
- Majestic Trust Flow (TF)
- Majestic Citation Flow (CF)
A high value of these metrics indicates the better quality of backlinks.
Trust flow means that sites that have links on a trusted website will have better scores than the ones linked to a poor trust score site. Citation flow determines the overall influence of a URL depending on the number of sites that link to it.
Make sure that the site you put your link on, should be relevant to the content on your website. If you have a site dedicated to pizza recipes, you can not put your link on a travel guide website.
The place you are putting your link on is equally important. Link placement should be in the main article or some important section of your content. Links placed on headers or footers have less value. Choosing sitewide links also is a good idea. They appear throughout your website. They are usually put in the footer, header or sidebar. Their potential from SEO point of view might be less in comparison to single links. But they do bring in a lot of site traffic.
Link building techniques
Some popular and fruitful link building techniques are:
- Content-based- Try to write content that will attract backlinks in a natural way. You will also get good and natural referral traffic and social shares.
- Engage in social media- Share the content on your website on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and more. Social media is a good way to interact with your target audience in a broad way.
- Guest posts- You can get much good quality and relevant backlinks by submitting guest posts. You can buy Guest Posts Here.
- PR articles- These articles are written by professionals and published on various news portals. This may take up a bit of your budget by they also give good quality backlinks.
- Forums and Q/A sites- You have to be little cautious while using them. A major number of such sites are nofollow sites.
- Email outreach- Analyse the websites that link back your competitor site. Contact the people from these sites with a good content to get a link to your website.
- Niche Edits: these are basically contextual link that is placed inside an established and aged niche related page or blog. You can buy niche edit backlinks here
- Grey or black hat SEO techniques- A good example is private blogs network (PBNs).
Penalties for Grey and Black Hat SEO techniques should also be considered while you use them. Try to be as natural with them as possible. PBNs are a group of websites that link to some other website. This might be quite costly. You will have to pay for domains, hosting and some blogs. Google may even ban such links if you are even a little bit careless.
Best tips for Link Building
- Link building requires regular efforts. It is not a one-time effort.
- A few numbers of good quality backlinks is better than many low-quality backlinks.
- Avoid getting backlinks from any spammy network.
- Focus on link placement that can generate referral traffic.
- Try to replace competitor backlinks.