Table of contents
Introduction
Part #1 Basics of Link Building
Part # 2 How to Discover High-Quality Links
Part #3 How to Use Content Marketing to Gain High-Class Links
Part #4 How to Use Email Outreach to Create Strong Links
Part #5 Black Hat Link Building: The Facts and Google Penalties
Part #6 Strategies for Link Building (Step-By-Step Tutorials)
Part #7 Tips for Advanced Link Building
Conclusion
In the online world, links are everything. The number of trustworthy links pointing at your website will boost its position in search engine results pages (SERPs). And the more visitors your website receives, the higher it will rank. In order to get those all-important links, you need to know what a backlink is and how to get backlinks. In this definitive guide, we will teach you everything you need to know about backlinks!
Part #1 Basics of Link Building
Link Building: What Is It?
The process of manually obtaining links to a certain website, page, or piece of content is known as link building. You can accomplish this by manually adding links from other websites or pages, requesting links from other website owners, and so on.
Links help Google and other search engines establish the authority of a website and where it should rank in search results. Due to this, SEOs and Internet marketing firms frequently offer link building as a service. However, a website often needs links to rank effectively, and getting these links without the necessary skills or understanding can be very challenging.
Why is it so important?
They Boost Accessibility in Search Engines
Backlinks have long been regarded as one of the most important ranking elements. This assumption was supported by the most recent SparkToro survey, which ranked backlink quality as the second most crucial factor behind relevant content.
Backlinks enable the transfer of "link equity" or "link juice" from one website to another. A site's authority is one factor that influences how well Google views it.
Therefore, the more credible backlinks you can obtain for your website, the better off it will rank and how visible it will be in searches.
They serve as backlinks for referral traffic
The aforementioned links demonstrate dofollow backlinks. On the other hand, some links—known as nofollow links—do not convey authority back to websites.
Therefore, even if you obtained a link from a reputable website, you won't benefit from it in terms of link juice. You won't be able to improve your organic traffic or Google rankings as a result.
This does not imply that nofollow backlinks are worthless for SEO, though. First, since 2019, Google has regarded nofollow links as "hints." The search engine is up to whether a nofollow link affects a website's ranking in organic search results.
More crucially, backlinks can direct visitors to your website. So you might gain a few clicks from the page where your hyperlink is positioned to yours if it gets a lot of traffic. This keeps you from having to rely exclusively on search engine traffic to reach your target audience.
Become Relevant in the Search Engines' Eyes
The two different link kinds you can obtain from websites demonstrate that backlinks are not all created equal. While some incoming links are fantastic for referral traffic, others can guarantee the SEO success of your campaign. Building backlinks isn't solely about acquiring dofollow links to raise your domain authority and search engine results. Creating natural connections leading to your website is the ultimate goal of starting your link-building initiatives.
Google penalizes websites that use link exchange tactics. And one way Google can recognize this is if most of the website's backlinks are dofollow connections. However, the truth is that websites that dominate search results for the most profitable keywords have a good balance of dofollow and nofollow backlinks.
In order to increase referral traffic and complete your link profile, you need nofollow links in addition to dofollow links, which will help you improve your organic search rankings. However, creating a natural-looking backlink profile may maximize the link juice from your dofollow links while still adhering to Google's standards.
Speaking about Google, their now-famous PageRank Algorithm completely changed the playing field. Google used how many people linked to a page in addition to its content when making search results.
They were accurate, too. Links are STILL the best way to assess the quality of a web page almost 20 years later. Backlinks are still Google's primary ranking factor because of this.
Part # 2 How to Discover High-Quality Links
Prior to getting started with detailed link-building techniques, it's critical to understand what makes a good (or terrible) link. You can then concentrate on constructing links that will genuinely raise your Google rankings. In light of that, here is how to recognize links that are truly worthwhile creating:
Authority of the Page
Does the page that links to you have a high PageRank? If so, that link will have a MAJOR impact on your rank.
Although the page that is connecting to you has authority, the page's actual PageRank no longer has nearly the same weight as it once did. This is because Google's algorithm has evolved to the point where the actual PageRank of a page is much less important than it used to be.
What's important now is the quality of the links pointing to your site. Google wants to see links from high-quality, relevant websites. So even if a website has a high PageRank, but it's not relevant to your site, it will not help you much.
On the other hand, a low-quality website with a high PageRank can hurt your site. Google is constantly working to improve its ability to identify low-quality websites, and links from these sites can drag your site down in the search results.
To sum up, focus on getting links from high-quality, relevant websites. The actual PageRank of the linking page is much less important than it used to be.
Semrush makes it simple to examine the PageRank proxy indication ("PageRating").
Check out Semrush's "Page Authority Score" by entering a URL:
Authority of the Site
Google loves authoritative sites. An authoritative site is trustworthy, credible, and has something valuable to say. To make your site more authoritative, start by creating high-quality content that other people will want to link to. Then, reach out to other websites and ask them to link to your content. You can also build partnerships with other websites in your industry to get your site more exposure.
If you can make your site more authoritative, Google will rank it higher in the search results, and you'll get more traffic.
A domain's overall site authority affects a link's quality as well. Normally, a connection from a well-known website, like NYTimes.com, would have a MUCH larger impact than a link from an unknown weblog. Even if these links are difficult to obtain, the work is well worth it. You can use tools such as Linkody to help you with that.
Relevancy of the Site
Sites with superior content are more likely to be pertinent to a user's search than those with inferior or irrelevant information. The relevance of a site's content can be determined by looking at the site's title, metatags, and other factors.
The sites linking to your site must be relevant to your industry. If you have a site about bicycles and you receive links from a site about automobiles, those links will be considered less relevant than if you received links from another bicycle site. In general, the more relevant the link, the more valuable it will be.
Link's Position on the Page
The position of your backlink also matters. Your link may not be as effective as one that is placed higher up if it is hidden near the bottom of the page. Conversely, the closer your link is to the top of the page, the more valuable it will be. That's because links higher up on the page are more visible and, therefore, more likely to be clicked.
Links that are located at the top of the page are likewise given more weight by search engines. So if you want your backlink to be valuable, make sure it's placed prominently on the page.
Most SEOs agree on one thing: links from articles' "content" are the most valuable, both in terms of the value they pass on to rankings and, fortunately, click-through traffic.
Is the Link Editorially Placed?
"Was this link placed by an editor?".
Has someone linked to you because they thought your website was outstanding, to put it another way? In that case, the connection is editorial. Or did you make a profile and post a link on a random website? That’s not an editorial at all. As one might assume, Google gives editorially-placed links MUCH MORE weight. An illustration of an editorially placed link is as follows:
Did you know that Google considers the creation of unnatural links, also known as links that weren't editorially placed or endorsed by the site's owner, to be a violation of their guidelines? Well, now you know!
Link Anchor Text
This one ought to be obvious to anyone who operates in the SEO sector: anchor text is one of the main ranking determinants. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that it ranks highly among the link qualities taken into account by search engines.
According to moz.com's research, "exact match" anchor text is more advantageous than merely including the target keywords in a phrase for anchor text.
Naturally, keyword-rich anchor text has been misused, just like in SEO. Building several exact-match anchor text links is now regarded as spam.
Here's an illustration:
In short, I don't advise creating links with anchor text that is heavy on keywords. However, it's time to celebrate if you DO obtain a link with your term in the anchor text.
Link Co-Occurrences
The words and phrases that appear close to your connection are called co-occurrences. Google probably uses co-occurrences as "baby anchor text."
Link From a Guest Post
By contributing an article as a guest poster to a website in your industry, you can obtain a backlink for your website. Of course, you must make sure that your guest post is of a high caliber and is published on an appropriate website for this tactic to be effective. However, if you can do this, you should see a nice boost in your website's traffic.
In this case study from 2021, Matt Diggity posted 100 guest articles on 100 websites that allow them, each of which contained 100 connections to a further 100 websites. You must agree that 100s are a lot. Afterward, he monitored rankings in a rank tracker for the following few months.
The outcomes?
- Across the board, 87% of sites had seen tremendous keyword ranking growth.
- Only 8% of the sites had neutral ranking changes.
- Because the rank tracker tripped up and ceased tracking their keywords, 4% of sites had equivocal findings.
- Rankings were negatively impacted by 1% of the sites.
What does this indicate? It proves to me that guest post links are still effective. So let's learn how to extract all of their SEO value from them.
Nofollow vs. Dofollow
One website may utilize either a nofollow or a dofollow external link when pointing to another. Dofollow links are just external links in their default condition; they aren't any special kind of links. By default, links from your website to other websites are dofollow links. On the other hand, nofollow links don't convey authority or link juice to the linked domain.
Therefore, the primary distinction between the two is that dofollow links transmit link juice to the other website, whereas nofollow links do not.
Part #3 How to Use Content Marketing to Gain High-Class Links
It goes without saying that content is the key to obtaining incredible backlinks. But here's the thing: Just posting content won't get you any links. It turns out that some content types are more effective for link-building than others. Here are the three categories of content that often attract the most links:
Visual Assets
Visual assets include:
- Images
- Diagrams
- Infographics
- Charts and other visually stimulating stuff
Why It Works:
Visuals are quite simple to link to. For instance, whenever someone shares a chart you've posted on your website, you'll receive a link. Text-based content simply cannot benefit from this strong relationship of "share my image and link to me when you do.
Statistics:
The "most significant" sort of content, according to 37% of marketers, is visual assets.
How to do this:
If you have any visual assets (like infographics or videos), include a link to your site in the description or caption. This is an easy way to get high-quality links from sites that might not be interested in writing a whole article about your company but are happy to share visuals.
To find relevant pages to link to, use a search engine like Google or Bing and search for terms related to your visual asset. For example, if you have an infographic about “The History of the Internet,” you could search for “internet history” or “history of the internet timeline.”
List Posts
List Posts include:
A bulleted list of advice, tricks, justifications, myths, or pretty much anything.
Why It Works:
List postings compress a lot of information into easily consumable bits.
Statistics:
List pieces outperformed quizzes, videos, and even infographics when BuzzSumo reviewed 1 million articles and found that they produced more backlinks.
Here's how to do this:
- Write a list post with at least ten items.
- Research each item thoroughly to ensure that your information is accurate and up-to-date.
- Find high-quality websites to link to for each item on your list.
- Reach out to the owners of those websites and let them know about your post.
- Include a link to your post in your email or social media message.
Following these steps, you can use content marketing to gain high-class links that will help improve your website's search engine ranking. In addition, you'll be providing valuable information to your readers, which is always a good thing.
Original Research and Data
Original Research and Data include:
New data-revealing content based on industry studies, polls, or original research.
Why It Works:
Data and statistics can be linked quite easily. Your website is linked to when someone uses your data. These connections mount QUICKLY.
Statistics:
According to SEO PowerSuite, data and research outperform every other type of content when it comes to link building.
How to do this:
You can do this in two ways: by conducting your original research or by analyzing existing data.
If you opt for the former, ensure your research is extensive and covers all the relevant points your audience would be interested in. Once you have your findings, put them together in a well-written, informative article or blog post.
If you’d rather analyze existing data, there are plenty of sources you can tap into. Start by looking at industry-specific reports, surveys, and data from government agencies and other reputable organizations. Once you have gathered all the relevant information, put it together in a clear and concise article or blog post.
Whichever route you go down, ensure your finished piece is high quality and provides value to the reader. If it’s something that people will find useful, they’re more likely to share it – and that’s when you’ll start seeing those high-quality links coming in.
Part #4 How to Use Email Outreach to Create Strong Links
Email marketing is essential to build white hat links in 2022 and beyond. But, How do you contact journalists and bloggers without landing in their spam folders? Then you must read on!
Find Likely Linker's Email:
The probable linkers, as their name implies, are those contacts who are most likely to get in touch with you or link to you. Reverse engineering is one of the simplest methods for determining possible linkers.
- You must conduct a Google search for the target keyword first.
- Search for the Email address look-up tool in Urgentexpert.com.
- Paste the URLs and submit.
- As a result, you'll see a list of all the emails found in that URLs
Send a Personalized Script:
If you wish to improve your skills, you must employ scripts. The basic strategy is to create a script that doesn't appear to be one. The discussion of the pattern follows. The best-performing email script will be one that follows a specific pattern.
Take note of how the script allows for much personalization with very little work.
Part #5 Black Hat Link Building: The Facts and Google Penalties
A chapter on black hat SEO is necessary for every link development manual. Black hat link building is rather obvious to identify if the links violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines. But does that imply that you should never engage in black hat link-building?
You are the only one who can decide that. However, whether you use white hat or black hat SEO, you must be aware of the punishments Google administers.
Let's simply discuss them now:
Google Penguin
- A penalizing algorithm that specifically targets web pages with unnatural links (like shady guest posting and blog comment spam).
How to Prevent It
Create only ethical links. By reducing exact match anchor text, you can avoid Penguin. Nevertheless, avoiding dubious connections is the simplest approach to avoiding Penguin.
Unnatural Links/Manual Penalties
- A manual penalty from a Google employee. In contrast to Penguin, Google will notify you via the Google Search Console:
How To Prevent It
Nobody besides Google is aware of how websites are chosen for manual punishments. My understanding is that an algorithm detects a website that might be abusing the system. And they send a bubble about that website to a Google employee for a human review. Consequently, maintaining a spotless link profile is the best defense against a manual penalty.
Furthermore, unlike Penguin, a manual penalty can be reversed by disavowing links and submitting a reconsideration request.
Part #6 Strategies for Link Building (Step-By-Step Tutorials)
Resource Page Link Building
One link-building strategy that can be very effective is to create a resource page on your website. Links to other websites that provide helpful information on a specific topic are provided on this page. If your website isA about designs, for instance, you may make a resource page with connections to websites that offer details on typography, colors, and illustrations.
Here is the procedure in detail:
Discover Resource Sites
Use these Google search terms. They are made especially to find resource pages:
"Keyword" plus inurl:links
"Keyword" plus "helpful resources"
"Keyword" plus "useful resources"
"Keyword" plus "useful links"
Size Up The Page
Finding out what kind of resource page you are working with is the first step. There are three primary types:
1) A page that's primarily a directory, listing resources in categories (examples: Yelp, TripAdvisor)
2) A page that's more of a "best of" list, highlighting the cream of the crop in a particular category (examples: Forbes' lists, BuzzFeed's gift guides)
3) A page that's a roundup of articles or posts on a certain topic (examples: CMO.com, Social Media Examiner)
How you proceed depends on what type of page you're looking at. To increase your chances of getting included, try to find something unique or interesting about your site that you can highlight in your email. For example, did you just launch a new feature that would be relevant to their audience? Are you doing something unique that other sites in your space aren't? If so, be sure to mention it!
Search for "Best Fit" Content
When you're looking for content to share as part of your resource page link-building strategy, it's important to look for "best fit" options. The best content is that which closely relates to both the interests of your target audience and the theme of your website or blog.
To find the best fit content:
- Start by brainstorming a list of potential topics that would be relevant to your website or blog.
- Following the creation of a list of probable themes, use Google to look up relevant articles.
- As you're searching, look for well-written and informative material, as this type of content is most likely to be shared by others.
In addition to looking for best-fit content, it's also important to consider the format of the material you share. For example, resource pages are often packed with text-based content, such as articles and blog posts. However, you can also include other types of content on your resource page, such as infographics, videos, and images.
Send the tested script
In your niche, get in touch with webmasters and bloggers and offer them your tried-and-true script in return for a link to your website.
Broken Link Building
One of the most effective link-building strategies is known as "broken link building." This involves finding broken links on websites in your industry and then offering to replace them with links to your own website. Therefore, with broken link building, you give value to someone's website instead of blatantly asking for links.
This is how you do it:
Install LinkMiner
This tool will highlight broken links on the visited pages as you surf the web.
Find Pages With Many External Links
Finding pages with plenty of external connections is one of the finest strategies for looking for chances to build broken links. Unfortunately, this means that many other websites are linking to this page, making it a prime target for broken link building.
To find these pages, you can use a tool like Majestic. Once you have found a page with many external links, you can use the "Check my Links" extension for Chrome to see if any of these links are broken.
Verify Any Broken Links
After that, look for any broken links. Although there are several approaches, using a tool like Check My Links is the simplest. Just go to the page you wish to verify after installing the extension, then click the symbol. The broken links will subsequently be highlighted in a list of all the links on the page.
To report a broken link, email the website's owner
If you're reporting a broken link on behalf of someone else, please include the following information:
- The page's URL where the broken link is located
- The URL of the page where you found the broken link
- Your email address
When you report a broken link, please include as much information as possible so that the website owner can fix the issue.
Part #7 Tips for Advanced Link Building
Obtain Simple Links Using Link Reclamation
If you've been in the SEO game for a while, you likely have a list of unlinked mentions. You can turn these into links using link reclamation.
To do this, simply reach out to the site owner and let them know that you were mentioned on their site, but there was no link included. Most site owners will be happy to add a link, especially if you provide them with some context as to why it's important.
How do you find these unlinked mentions?
Making use of a Google search operator is the simplest method. Just enter the following into Google:
site:example.com intext:"your brand name" -inurl:links
Replace "your brand name" with your brand name and "example.com" with the domain you want to search for. This search will return all mentions of your brand on that domain that don't include a link.
Reverse Image Search Can Help You Find "Bonus" Links
If you want to get creative with your link building, try a reverse image search. This means searching for an image that's already on the internet and finding websites where that image is being used. When the website owners use your image, you may then get in touch with them and request that they give you credit.
Here's how to do a reverse image search:
- Go to Google Images and click on the camera icon in the search bar.
- Paste the URL of an image that you want to search for.
- Click on the "Search by image" button.
- Google will show you all the websites where that image is being used.
- Reach out to the website owners and ask them to credit your site if they're using your image.
This is a great way to get links from high-quality websites and build relationships with other webmasters.
Submit emails in the afternoon
One of the best times to submit your link-building requests is in the afternoon. This is because most people are working during this time and are more likely to have the time to respond to your request. When people receive your email at 2 p.m. in the afternoon, they are eager to wrap up their workday and have just eaten their lunch. This can be an excellent time to schedule your email if the majority of your subscribers are office workers.
It is also a good idea to submit your requests early in the week. This is because people are generally more responsive at the beginning of the week, and you are more likely to get a response during this time.
Create conceptual, intellectual, and tactical visualizations
What makes this so effective?
Well, I COULD have just written a text description of the APP formula. My work would have been far less shareable as a result, though.
On the other hand, if you develop a visual, bloggers will be happy to utilize it in their writing (and link to you when they do).
Here's a sample from Backlinko:
Before going for the close, send out some exploratory emails
Should your initial outreach email to someone include a request for a link?
Short answer: perhaps.
A two-step procedure might yield greater results (Backlinko reader Mike discovered that feeler emails CRUSHED when they asked for links right away):
This strategy also saves you TIME, which is a bonus. Send quick "feeler" emails rather than lengthy outreach messages that nobody will ever read.
Participate in Podcast Interviews
As a business owner or business professional, you are an authority in your sector. Therefore, your target audience wants to hear from you, and you probably have a lot to say about your goods or services. This is where podcasts come in.
Instead of planning, writing, and editing a guest post, you simply turn up and share your expertise. Then, bang! You receive a link.
What's best?
A podcast covers every subject.
Link Intersect Can Be Used To Find Likely Linkers
One of the most effective ways to find new link prospects is to look for people who have already linked to similar content.
How do you locate websites with links to more than one of your rivals?
Tool Semrush Backlink Gap!
Just include your website and the names of your top three rivals.
Additionally, this handy tool will reveal who links to each one of them.
This is a fantastic approach to identifying fresh-link candidates who are probably also interested in your content.
Use pre-made lists of link targets
There are a number of lists available online that can help you jumpstart your link-building efforts. These lists can be a great resource for finding new linking opportunities, and they can also help you get an idea of what kind of links your competitors are pursuing. Search terms like "best [subject] blogs" or "list of [topic] blogs" can be used to find lists like these.
Conclusion
By this point, you ought to be well aware of what backlinks are and how they might benefit your website. You also know some of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks that will improve your search engine rankings. So what are you waiting for? Start implementing these tactics today and see how quickly your site starts to climb in the search results. If you need help getting started, contact Winterplay Studios, and we'll be happy to assist you.