Regardless of whether you're a beginner to link building or have been doing it for some time, we're certain you'll discover something helpful in this guide. The scene of SEO and link building is continually changing, and today, the significance of building high-quality links has never been higher. The need to comprehend and actualize high-quality campaigns is essential in case you will and flourish on the web, and that won't change any time soon. This guide is intended to make you go rapidly and the correct way. There is a ton to take in, yet we've split everything up into simple to-process parts and have included bunches of models en route. We trust you appreciate The Guide to Link Building!
Definition of link building
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.
Why is link building important for SEO?
So as to understand the significance of link building, it's essential to initially understand the basics of how a link is made, how the search engines like Google, Bing, etc. see links, and what they can interpret from them.
Anchor tag/ Start tag: ( the "a"), this opens the link tag and tells search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.
Link referral location: The "href" stands for "hyperlink referral," and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn't always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download. Occasionally, you'll see something other than a URL, beginning with a # sign. These are local links, which take you to a different section of the page you're already on.
Anchor text of link: This is the little bit of text that users see on the page, and on which they need to click if they want to open the link. The text is usually formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with blue color and/or underlining, signaling to users that it is a clickable link.
Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link tag to the search engines.
What links mean to Google, Bing, etc. search engines
There are two fundamental ways that search engines use links:
To discover new web pages
To help determine how well a page should rank in their results
Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add them to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they feel a page is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords. When they are deciding this, the search engines do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.
You can understand the gist here 👇
However, SEOs soon discovered how to manipulate PageRank and search results for chosen keywords. Google started actively trying to find ways to discover websites that were manipulating search results, and began rolling out regular updates which were specifically aimed at filtering out websites that didn't deserve to rank.
More recently, Google has actively penalized the rankings of websites that have attempted such overuse of these techniques—often referred to as over-optimization—in their link building. Google’s regular Penguin updates are one such example. Knowing which link building techniques to avoid and stay within Google’s guidelines is an important subject that we’ll discuss later.
How can link building benefit my business?
As we've discussed, links are a very important signal that the search engines use to determine rankings. So, we know that increasing the number of high-quality links pointing at your website can significantly increase your chances of ranking well.
There are other benefits to link building, though, that may be less immediately obvious yet still worthy of consideration. Increases Your Rank
Link building is important to the success of a website because, as we mentioned previously, it is the main ranking factor on every search engine. Most queries on the internet start out with a search engine and most people conducting these queries click on one of the first 3 search results. Since search engines place so much importance on links it is physically impossible to rank well with search engines without acquiring backlinks in some way, shape, or form. With that being said if you have a quality website with great information people may link to your website naturally without you having to put much effort into link building. However, that only works if people already know about your website. Most websites need to put their efforts into link building before they can get to that point.
Drives Website Traffic
Link building can also help to increase traffic to your website. Building links can increase your organic traffic by improving your ranking on search engines, thus resulting in more clicks to your site (especially if you make it to the first page). The more links you get on high-quality sites with a high number of organic traffic, the more results you will see in traffic to your own website. Not only do you want these links to be placed on sites and pages that are relevant to your website so you aren’t penalized, but also to increase referral traffic. You want the content to be relevant to what you have to offer because we know the reader is interested in the article you are linked in (they clicked on it, didn’t they). If your link is relevant to the content, they are more likely to follow the link and explore your site as well.
Increases Brand Exposure
Other than helping your site to rank higher and ultimately increase your traffic, link building can also be beneficial for brand awareness. The ultimate long term goal for any website or company is to become a household name. The whole goal behind link building is to find external sources that will link back to you, or in my terms “link back to our client’s site.” Eventually, if you get enough quality sites to link back to your domain it can not only increase your non-branded organic traffic but also your branded traffic due to the awareness and eyes getting put on your domain. The search volume on your brand can increase ten-fold.
So there are mainly 3 categories of Backlinks you should be knowing.
You can learn more here👇👇
Types of Backlinks
