Link Building is all about earning and gaining quality links for a website to improve its social media rankings. But surely link building is not just the only practice required to improve a website’s ranking.
The face of Search Engine and Link Building keeps changing now and then, the reason being the search engine’s consistent efforts for better page rank results. Google similarly keeps launching Penguin Updates to filter out websites that need not to be ranked due to lack of quality content or poor search engine optimisation.
As a beginner, there is a lot that you need to understand and learn about link building. Here’s what link building is all about:
What is Link Building?
Link building is the practice of gaining relevant hyperlinks from other websites to your own. Users on the internet tend to use hyperlinks (also known as links) to move between webpages and navigate them. Search Engines similarly use these hyperlinks to crawl into websites and analyse the quality of webpages. The Search Engines not just crawl into a website but also crawls into the hyperlinks successfully linked with it, this is to ensure the quality of links being earned by the website.
Link Building is one of the major players when it comes to improving a website’s search engine rankings. If you master the techniques of building quality links (the right proportion of good and bad links) you can surely make your website thrive on the SERPs- search engine result pages. But what are good and bad links? Here’s the answer…
Types of Good and Bad Links for Link Building
As a beginner, you might have come across link building techniques previously used such as adding your website to web directories. This was once a highly appreciated practice by Google, yes you have read right, Google itself used to promote this practice but in contemporary times, this is highly discouraged. Search Engines today appreciate earned links over deliberately asked for links.
Earned Editorial Links
To receive something without being having to ask for it is the best feeling in the world! I’m sure you must be agreeing to the fact, similarly, links that come your way on their own are the best ones. I’m not saying this on my own but search engines especially Google says this.
Such links are called Natural of Earned Editorial Links which come to a website naturally, this means that you do not need to ask internet users and webmasters to share your hyperlinks. This often happens when your website provides unique or exceptionally crafted content that bloggers and other users share with confidence.
Manual Outreach Links
As a new website owner and beginner, you will probably be using this method of acquiring good links for your website. This process consists of contacting webmasters and bloggers to share your website’s content as links on their respective digital platforms.
This is another good practice for gaining links without any fear of being penalised by Google or other search engines. But to do so you need to contact webmasters of your niche and provide them with an appropriate reason to link to your website.
Non-editorial, Self-created Links
The practice of acquiring such links falls under black hat practices. This means that these links are generally a no for your website. Webmasters often use these to fool search engines and increase their website rankings, but search engines are powerful mechanisms that easily analyse what is being done and how.
Webmasters often try to gain links by being part of article directories, infographic embeds, user profile pages etc.
More About Good and Bad Links
These above-mentioned link types provide a clear outlook on what types of links you need to earn for your website, but what if natural links are not your niche relevant or come from an unsecured website? At times you might not be sure about the quality of links due to multiple reasons such as irrelevant content, unknown source etc.
This when you need to utilise the ‘nofollow’ attribute. This attribute is like magic, by adding this to certain links associated with your website you inform search engines not to crawl into those links. But remember, this does not stop users from accessing those links.
The code of such links might appear as:
Example
The rel=”nofollow”, when added to a link, can help you in multiple ways. But you must know that these nofollow links shall not help organic reach rankings in any possible way.
Importance of Link Building
Links on your website act like votes of confidence in the eyes of search engines. This means that a greater number of good quality links means more chances of being recognised by the search engine and being ranked in the top searches. Link building can help your website and business in multiple ways:
Sending Traffic
A quality link from a highly-visited website can increase your website’s traffic as well. Users tend to access links with the desire and need of getting their queries answered. If the website link was from a relevant niche, there are chances that they may tend to increase your sales as well.
Relationship Building
By being in contact with influencers and bloggers especially of your relevant niche, you can build strong relationships which can benefit you later as well. With such strong relationships with well-known influencers, your website, content and brand become highly valued and trusted, this can also consequently build your brand.
How to Start a Link Building Campaign?
A linking building campaign is a process of actively trying to acquire links for your website. Following Strategy can help you to run a successful link building campaign:
- Set Goals
Link building is just as setting up a marketing campaign which means that you need to know your goal. What the campaign is really for? To get more links or to get quality links?
People often misinterpret that more links mean more traffic and a better ranking, but that’s not true. The truth is that quality links make everything work. Thus, be clear and set agendas, to begin with the link building drive.
- Assess your Assets
You need something on your website to attract links, that’s where you need to assess your assets. The aim is to know what you can use to attract bloggers and webmasters to build links with your website. Your assets can be the content, the data, your products and services and the personas associated with them. Thus, wisely assess your assets and use them to efficiently attract links.
- Determine the Link Type
It is vital to know the link types that you need to acquire. You must consider where shall the link be placed and what content it must hold. Home page links, deep pages links, links containing keywords are among the few types.
- Find Link Targets
By analysing your niche, you can easily know what type of people might be interested in considering your content. Once, that you are clear about it start searching out relevant link targets. This means you need to look for bloggers and influencers that might be interested in your assets and you must find them.
To find link targets after that you have listed them down, you need to use social media and search engines to find them and their contact details.
- Craft Your Message
After analysing link targets and considering their outreach, contact them confidently and craft a convincing message. Inform your targets why they should value your offer and how this may benefit them in return. Let them know that you are not a spammer but a genuine prospect asking for quality links.
- Value response
Value every response that you receive in return of the offers that you must send and act wisely. You can gain great links by conversing efficiently with the targets.
Link Building can highly benefit your website and as a SEO beginner, you need to value this practice. Link Building is among the key factors that search engines like Google analyse while ranking a website. There’s more than just this to link building that you need to know, get into a conversation with us! Comment below to learn more.
