What Does Link Building Mean?
Link building is a process where you acquire links from other websites that lead to your website. Officially, these kinds of links are called hyperlinks and backlinks, but nowadays, people call them simply links as well.
From the user’s perspective, these links help people navigate the internet from one website to another. Search engines use these links to crawl the website, and they use bots to do this. For example, Google calls them Googlebots. Their main job is to examine internal and external links (backlinks).
The main goal of link building is to reach a high authority website status in Google’s and other search engines’ eyes. The more high authority search engines deem your website, the more you will gain organic visibility, meaning that your website will rank higher on SERPs, leading to better organic traffic. Of course, it is not just up to link building to get high rankings, as search engine optimization includes other vital things you need to consider (such as page speed).
What Do External Links Tell to Search Engines?
When search engines have crawled through your website, they can take quotes from the content you offer and add them to their indexes. By doing this, search engines will understand whether you have a quality website and if it deserves to get good rankings on SERPs with specific keywords. But it’s not all about content for search engines. They also see external links as a ranking factor. To be more precise, they take into account the amount of backlinks and the quality of them.
Search engines see backlinks as a vote of confidence from one website to another. For example, website X might add a link to their blog post leading to website Z. When the linking website, in this case, website X, is a quality website, Google and other search engines deem this a vote of confidence for website Z. These kinds of links make it easier for search engines to understand which websites deserve to have high rankings on SERPs.
Why Is It So Crucial to Acquire External Links?
Google has openly said that external links, and links in general, are one of the three most important ranking factors regarding SERPs. So, if you want to rank high on SERPs, to be successful on it is next to impossible without quality backlinks.
How Do You Get Backlinks?
In today’s world, search engines are exceptionally intelligent. It means that the old-school black hat SEO methods, for example, buying a vast amount of external links and then spamming your website with them, don’t work anymore. In fact, it leads to the opposite result, as search engines such as Google will see what they are and the intention behind them: spamming.
The main thing with link building is to base it on quality instead of quantity. But how do you reach this goal? How are you able to get backlinks from high-authority websites? I can recommend three different methods for you to use. All of them are about your own actions. I will go through them more thoroughly in the following.
Adding Links on Your Own
In practice, adding links on your own means that you, or the person responsible for your website’s SEO, go and add your links to other websites you don’t own.
There aren’t a lot of content-based websites that allow you to do this, as handling link-building the right way is a high priority to them as well. So, what kind of websites offer you the possibility to add links manually?
- Social Media platforms: you can create a page/profile with a link to your website
- Comment fields: you can actively look for blogs that are relevant to what kind of content your website offers and leave comments
- Forums & Communities: this happens the same way as with blog posts
- Directories
- Job posts
However, it is crucial to remember that you should never spam. As adding these links yourself is easy, all your competitors can do it as well. That’s why search engines don’t see them as high-quality backlinks; as a matter of fact, they can react to it negatively if there are too many backlinks like this.
Even though manual link building doesn’t hold a sizeable effect, you should still take this step. Why? These links can benefit you from outside of SEO, meaning they can increase the conspicuousness of your brand and bring new users and customers to your website directly.
Asking for a Link
Finnish people aren’t good at asking. But if you want to have any success on search engines, asking for a link is an excellent link-building strategy – even a certain kind of lifeblood. So, yes, you should use this strategy, which means that you or your employees need to approach another website and ask them to link to your website.
Other website owners don’t care about your website – unless you are a celebrity. So, to get a backlink from another website with this strategy, you need to state intriguing reasons so that they have no other choice but to give a backlink to your website. You need to offer something they cannot refuse; money isn’t one of them.
But what is so valuable that they will give you a backlink?
- Offer yourself to them as a guest writer, meaning they will get valuable content from you for their website.
- If they have given a backlink to one of your competitors, offer them an even better link as a replacement.
- Offer them more information about a topic they have briefly mentioned in their content through your website.
- Mention them on your website in a positive manner.
- Write a positive testimonial to them about a product or service they offer.
- Ask for a possibility to exchange backlinks with them; just remember to use them wisely inside the content – instead of the footer, etc.
- Find a broken link from their website and offer a relevant link from your website as a replacement.
- If they’ve used a photograph you’ve taken and it’s a license-free image, ask them for a link in return.
- If they mention your brand on their website, ask them to add a hyperlink.
- Offer a news scoop or your comments as an industry expert to an online magazine and demand a backlink from them as compensation.
The sad truth is that getting backlinks by asking them from someone is extremely hard. That is why most website owners aren’t willing to do that. So, if you are first thinking like them, just remember that all the backlinks you gain with this strategy are worth the effort, as they will lead to better search engine visibility.
When you ask for a backlink, remember to ask for it as a DoFollow link.
Earning Backlinks
Earning backlinks is what it sounds like. You don’t need to reach out to anyone or add links manually – instead, another website will do it from their own free will. In other words, another website can, for example, write about something relevant to your website. And if they see you as a quality source and even quote you, you will earn a backlink.
It is always clever to verify that the backlink they have given is a DoFollow instead of a NoFollow.
Link earning happens almost always through quality, intriguing, and unique content. In the best-case scenario, you might end up as a regular source to a media outlet or a blog, meaning you will receive constant hyperlinks (backlinks) from other websites. But do not forget this: if the other website owners know nothing about your website and brand, often quality content alone isn’t enough.
How to Recognize High-Quality Backlinks?
Backlinks are like chains connecting all the websites. And when we talk about link building, there are good and bad links. Good links are like solid and trustworthy parts of the chain. And bad links are like those rusted and neglected parts that aren’t doing their jobs.
But what are these good and bad links, and how do you tell the difference between them?
In regards to good and bad backlinks, terms such as Domain Rating, URL Rating, and Domain Authority tell you everything you need to know. These factors will give you a clear picture of how trustworthy a website is or if a single page is deemed quality. There isn’t precise information on how Google and other search engines divide websites into good and bad ones. Luckily, we have free tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs Website Authority Checker, and Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker that can tell us directly how trustworthy the linking website or a page is. Ahrefs can also help you with keyword research.
The Trustworthiness of a Linking Website And Page
As I mentioned, Google sees a link from one website to another as a vote of confidence. And what this vote tells Google is that this website deserves to rank high on SERPs. But should you see a backlink from your friend’s blog as valuable as a link from Yle?
Google has always denied the existence of a link ranking system in its operations, but I and many other SEO professionals disagree with it; the trustworthiness (Domain Rating) of a linking website is simply way too important as a factor, and you cannot ignore it.
On top of the Domain Rating, URL Rating is an immense factor. And not even Google is denying this. So, if you earn a backlink from Yleisradio’s article that no one reads or from a news article everyone reads, there’s a huge difference. A popular news article will spread like wildfire around the internet, meaning your backlink continues its journey, becoming more valuable. And with the not-so-popular one, other media outlets and websites will ignore it.
Topical Relevance of a Linking Page
Let’s say you publish a recipe for a food that you love. In a scenario like this, is it more important to you that the backlink comes from the website of a celebrity chef, such as Hans Välimäki, or a personal blog from a TV- and radio personality, such as Jaajo Linnonmaa?
Even if Jaajo Linnonmaa has more followers than Hans Välimäki, he is not one of the best chefs in Finland. In other words, Jaajo can share anything related to food, even things you shouldn’t be eating, and at the same time, Hans knows what he’s talking about.
Whereas a link from Jaajo can bring your website more visitors in one day, in the end, a backlink from Hans holds its value better. Why? Because relevancy is a big thing for Google. In plain English, relevant links that share the same topic with your content are more important in the long run because they improve your search engine rankings. And these words also apply to organic traffic.
But why does Google see things like this? When a backlink comes from a trustworthy website from your line of work, Google sees your content as extremely valuable.
Link Placement
Did the linking page put your link inside its content or to the footer of the page? It turns out that link placement plays a role in Google’s eyes. If the backlink is part of the content, Google sees it as a valuable link. But if it’s, for example, on the footer, then the link isn’t as beneficial.
For the reasons mentioned above, a link exchange with another website isn’t that clever if the embedded link is on the footer or the sidebars (describing a desktop website) – instead of the actual content. The sole reason for this is the internet users: a link on the bottom or either side of a page isn’t as relevant to a user as a link inside the content. That is why Google sees them the same way.
Anchor Texts & Surrounding Words
Anchor text cites the words that include a backlink that physically leads a user from one website to another. In other words, anchor text is where the clickable link is embedded. In most cases, the anchor text tells, with a maximum of a couple of words, what the linked website or page is about.
Based on the preceding, it isn’t surprising that Google uses the same information to understand the linked page and what keywords it should rank high for – especially not after the fact that Google also considers the content in the same paragraph with the anchor text.
If there is something you want to change with the anchor text on the linking website, please avoid contacting them. Why? Google might notice this and consider it as anchor text controlling – especially when done systematically – and punish you in the form of rankings.
DoFollow vs NoFollow
If you, for example, have a WordPress-based website, you are in the editor, and you access the specific anchor text settings, you will see two options: Add rel=”nofollow” and Add rel=“sponsored”.
Per se, all WordPress websites use DoFollow links, meaning you are giving your vote of confidence to the website you are linking to. But if you change the link to NoFollow, you are not granting a vote to them – even though you are using them as a source and linking to their website. NoFollow link asks Google to skip the specific link.
In turn, Add rel=”sponsored” jumps into the picture when you have, for example, sold a guest post placement to someone, money changes hands, and the guest post has a backlink directing to their website. Google might notice this specific link, but it doesn’t impact the rankings as it’s not an earned link.
Buying Backlinks Might Be Dangerous if You Don’t Know What You Are Doing
Hyperlinks are nowadays also a business. What it means is that you can buy them and sell them.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, it might be a dangerous road – for more than one reason. Firstly, you will most likely just waste money by buying the wrong kinds of links, as you don’t understand enough about them. Secondly, when you don’t know what you’re doing, Google most likely notices that you are buying links, and then the whole thing turns against you.
SEO professionals know how to deal with these things without Google noticing anything. At the same time, it is crucial to understand that buying links always includes risks, even if so many are doing it to gain an advantage against their competition.
It Is Always Smart to Turn to a Professional When It Comes to Link Building
Link building is complicated. As it is, at the same time, crucial regarding your website’s visibility on search engines and financial success, you cannot ignore it.
If you don’t have the time, the resources, or the understanding of SEO and link building, you should turn to a professional.
I will gladly be helping you out with your link-building efforts, as with other things related to search engine optimization and your website. And with help, I mean that I will teach you thoroughly the means to acquiring backlinks.
I’m eager for the chance to handle SEO in Finland for you.
So, don’t be afraid to outsource link building to me. This way, we will get your website to where it belongs in SERPs. And at the same time, make your brand more recognizable.