In this era of expanding technology, SEO is rapidly becoming a necessity for every online business. With the versatile benefits of SEO techniques, companies are investing more and more resources in their SEO strategies. Link Building being a necessary part of SEO is no different.
In this Beginner’s Guide, we will go through the fundamentals, advantages, and tactics of Link Building for SEO in order to create a trustworthy and user-friendly website experience for customers.
WHAT IS LINK BUILDING?
Link Building is a crucial component of any SEO strategy. It endorses the authority building of a website by acquiring a strong backlinks network.
A strong backlink is the link of the website having relevant quality data about that particular topic and Higher Domain Authority. The main focus is on the relevancy, quality, and diversity of backlinks.
It generally assists you in expanding the reach of your business to potential consumers.
BENEFITS OF LINK BUILDING
Link Building has some amazing benefits which include
- Backlinks act as a vote of confidence for a website by their trusted market companions.
- Helps to build authority for the website.
- Helps to increase organic traffic.
- Existing backlinks can lead to more backlinks.
- Strengthen your networking and relationship in a niche.
- Enhancing sustainable referral traffic.
- This leads to better search ranking and SEO scores.
TIPS FOR EARNING LINKS
In order to earn links, we have a couple of tactics to opt for. To be able to get genuine, reliable and quality backlinks, keep these things in mind.
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Backlink Worthy Content
Content is the expression of views using words as a tool to deliver your message. When it comes to backlink-worthy content, it usually asks for audience-oriented content.
It can be achieved by answering the most common queries. Link-worthy content includes Trends, Educational content, Research material, inspirational content & Evergreen content.
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Outreach for backlinks
Getting out of your comfort zone and approaching other authoritative websites for backlinks is another way you can strengthen the quality of your website’s backlinks. The best way to outreach is by using official email as a medium.
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Originality is Necessity
With the availability of AI technology, lots of SEO content service providers use AI tools for the generation or rephrasing of their content automatically. The problem lies here that google can identify duplicate content, which leads to the penalization of that website.
To avoid these hustles, opt for original content. It leads to more authentic backlinks from authoritative websites, which increases your credibility as a valuable asset to other websites for backlinks and also builds your brand as a market leader.
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Quality over Quantity
More isn’t always good. This rule is also the same for SEO content writing. Just placing tons of data in a document does not increase its credibility as quality content. Quality content means enriched with relevant and informative data.
With quality content, the phrase “Less is More” is justified. It provides better opportunities to get organic strong backlinks.
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Relevancy is Key
While working on any content, relevancy is the way to go. Being relevant will help to be able to provide the required content to get the appropriate backlinks.
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Blogpost for influencers is worth the effort
During the current situation, influencers are taking over almost every other field. While working with them can be a win-win situation for both parties. Collaboration with influencers to generate quality content can lead to an organic stream of visitors to your website.
After creating quality content on your website that mentions an influencer, you can contact that influencer and request that they share your content on their social media accounts. Many people will share it, while some may not.
Since, influencers have a really big audience already, delivering audience-oriented content can also work as a great way for backlink generation.
TYPES OF LINKS
In order to use backlinks, first we must know what kind of links are available and how they work.
There are only 2 types of links available.
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Nofollow Links
As the name suggests, it tells search engines not to follow that specific backlink. It is accomplished through the “real” command. The no-follow link indicates that this backlink might not be the exact site you want to refer to.
Although Google bots do not follow these backlinks, this does not mean that no follow links are not important for SEO. Nofollow links, like the following type of backlink, contribute to your SEO strategy and the development of your domain authority.
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Dofollow Links
These type of links redirects search engines to follow the mentioned backlink. It suggests that this is the website/webpage that is being referred to explicitly through this backlink. It generally increases the authority of the website as being used by browsers for crawling and ranking the sites.
TYPES OF BACKLINKS
There are several types of backlinks depending on the websites and their importance.
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Guest Blogging Backlinks.
In this particular type, blogs/articles are being written for other websites to be published there, which leads to backlinks for your website. In short, you are getting links in exchange for your content.
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Editorial Backlinks.
In Editorial Backlinks, the backlinks are received from trusted websites due to the quality of the content on your website. This is generally an organic way of getting backlinks and shows the potential and authority of your website.
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Backlinks obtained from the webinar.
In webinars, people are invited for an online session, which might be pre-recorded. After the end of the session, the organizers send links to their videos. If it provides value to the people, they will include it in their content, creating backlinks for you.
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Free Tool Backlinks.
Some websites provide a free tool for any specific service like keyword explorer, free eBooks & website analytical tools, etc. It will lead to more traffic to their website and also add value to it. As a result, more organic backlinks will be generated over time.
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Comment Backlinks.
A lot of Blog posts, articles, and websites have a comment section to connect with the relevant audience. But people on the internet often misuse it to share spammy referrals. These links in the comment section are known as comment backlinks. It is often categorized under Black Hat SEO due to being misused by a lot of people.
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Acknowledgment Backlinks.
A common way to generate backlinks is through publishing acknowledgment posts. These are often published after some industrial event hosting or guest appearance sponsored by the company. It helps to organically generate genuine backlinks.
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Profile Backlinks.
Profile backlinks are created when another website of a similar niche mentioned your site in its content. This is a great way of creating backlinks for the mutual growth of both businesses as it generates referral visits for both websites.
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Badge Backlinks.
A really smart tactic some websites use to generate backlinks is the badge program. In this program, they usually offer certain badges on their website depending upon their amazing work online. So, when a brand earns a badge, they often love to provide a backlink of their website due to the free promotion they are getting while this website is getting a good referral link in return creating a win-win situation for both.
Is there anything like bad backlinks and how to deal with them?
YES, it does exist.
Just like everything else, Good vs Bad lies in SEO links too. It depends on the authority and quality content of the site. Getting a referral link from a site with higher Domain Authority (DA) is considered a good backlink while spammy and ill-quality references are counted as bad backlinks.
To resolve this issue, the first thing we need to look for is the reason, why it is considered bad. The most obvious explanation is that it is either irrelevant to your niche or is nothing more than a lame spammy promotional site with a negative reputation. Acquiring backlinks from these domains will might lead to the penalization of your website by search engines.
To cater to this condition, the best way is to constantly update your backlinks to more qualitative, relevant, and worth-sharing domains. It will gradually enhance the DA of your website thus boosting the e-traffic for your brand over time.
How to kickstart Link Building
Link building is the key stepping stone when it comes to Off-page SEO. To kickstart the optimization of your newly created domain, let us go through a few crucial things to follow.
Content is the 1st pillar of any SEO strategy. The stronger this pillar is, the more support your website will get in terms of backlinking. After that go for customized promotion for your online business profile.
Alongside promotion, outreaching out to the relevant sites could lead to the generation of more links, to build your credibility. In this regard, collaboration with influencers of the same niche will also assist you to drive traffic to your website.
These basic small steps will slowly grow your organic audience and thus gradually increase the DA and authenticity of your domain.
Top Backlinking Strategies
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Designing Shareable Content.
We’ve already discussed the value of content in backlinking, but keep in mind that mere simple words are not content. Users nowadays want to view graphical representations of content rather than extensive paragraphs of text.
So, designing it according to the audience profile and relevance with your specific niche will help interested people to connect and interact more proficiently.
If they found what provides value to them, they are most likely to offer backlinks to connect with it. Thus, creating trust for your brand.
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Look for missing/lost Backlinks & Reclaim them.
To find the lost backlinks, we first need to understand the reason why it is happening. The most common ones are
- The author removed it while updating their domain.
- The page does not exist anymore (404 error).
- The webpage is either redirected or not indexed on the search engine.
To reclaim those links, find them using site explorer. There are several options available for it including Ahref and Moz site explorer.
Now to reclaim those broken backlinks, these steps can be followed
In case of author removed it during updating or the page doesn’t exist now, reach out to the author with either relevant or better content and request for reconnecting that.
If your content doesn’t match the new upgrade then ignore the site. For redirected broken links just redirect them to the new site.
One thing to always keep in mind is that you are always going to lose or gain backlinks. So just focus on your approach with the appropriate steps continuously for constant growth.
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Provide valuable free resources.
Offering value to the audience is a huge deal for a website. Depending on your niche, a couple of features, software, eBooks, or tools can be offered to organically increase your trust among the audience. If done correctly, it can lead to generations of trusted links for Off-page SEO of your website.
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Pop up through Influencer collaboration.
Influencers are some of the most impactful people in any field due to their audience’s attention and influence. Collab with them can help you become the talk of the town in your niche. Their audience perceives it as a trustier brand when endorsed by their favorite person. Thus, automatically improve your audience on the website & will be helpful to get more backlinks quite flawlessly.
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Engagement with the Experts.
Having constant interactions with field experts is a requirement to keep yourself updated with new techniques and knowledge. This can be achieved by conducting tech talks and joining different events or conferences. Aside from personal links, it is a great way to earn backlinks from people who are not your direct competitors but are working in a similar field.
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Find unlinked brand mentions.
If your brand is already doing well, this strategy will work even better for you. Software like a content explorer by Ahref can be ideal to find those mentions. Then, through an email, you can politely ask for the backlink. They are more likely to provide you with that link as they already found you valuable enough to list your brand on their website. Then Boom, you have another backlink for your domain with just a little bit of clever work.
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Social Media
Having an Era of technology today, social media is taking over every field. So, it is important that link building can’t be ignored. We can use these platforms to grow our reach by
- Keeping our profiles up to date including personal & business profiles.
- We need to track our followers, which helps to form better audience-oriented strategies.
- Infographics can also be taken into account for better engagement
With the help of above mention steps, a relevant community can be formed which would be a great way to earn genuine links. There isn’t any fixed strategy that miraculously works for everyone and shows immediate results.
These techniques can take time to show their impact and add value to your website. Different strategies can work for different brands. You can try multiple techniques from this list to try to improve your backlink situations and constantly analyze them to visualize the effects.
The proper way to outreach people for backlinks
Outreach is an amazing way to generate solid links for your domain. But there are certain things to keep in mind while using this very specific tactic.
- Go for a decent amount of research before reaching these people.
- Prefer Email as a medium of communication and try to use professional email for it.
- Write in a professional, polite way and on-point message. Don’t write extensive salutations and avoid lagging text. Otherwise, it would appear as spam mail to the receiver and they won’t be giving the required attention to your message in their busy schedule.
- Avoid sending unnecessary and too many follow-up emails to be considered spam. Else it would have a negative image of your brand.
Are Backlinks not important for SEO?
YES, until you want to fall yourself into the pit of bad ranking.
Backlinks serve as a backbone for the traffic of websites. They offer votes of confidence for your online domain. Google considers those sites more trustworthy with quality backlinks. It will gradually enhance their ranking on SERP. Although, this needs a lot of time, patience, and constant analysis to see the outcomes. But if done correctly can do wonders. In short, “BACKLINK IS THE MOST CRUCIAL TOOL” to upgrade your SEO.
