Link Building for SEO: The Ultimate Guide

Link building are essential for improving the online visibility of your business, attracting more web traffic, and placing your website at the top of search engine results. In short, backlinks are useful when you want to increase your website’s authority in the eyes of search engine giants like Google.

Search engines discover new content through links and also use them as parameters to determine content quality published on your site.

Wondering how is this done?

Google considers high-quality contextual backlinks as a vote of confidence attesting to the content’s merit. However, it is not surprising that link building is one of the determining factors for search engine ranking.

A targeted SEO strategy often makes things easier and link building is no exception. 

Yes, it doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or a pro at handling your business operations, you definitely need to hire a dedicated agency. That curates custom SEO strategies for your business to get the most out of your link building and perform well. If not, your link building efforts in the organization can spell a major disaster.

Don’t worry! If you understand the what, why, and how, of link building in Search Engine Optimization for your business website, the problem is not difficult to solve.

Let’s walk you through link building and its detailed aspects step by step!

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the practice of getting links back to your site from one or more websites.

These links help users navigate from one web page to another to access more information relevant to their Internet search.

For search engines, links allow bots to crawl, index, and rank web pages.

Why Is Link Building Important For SEO?

Link building is one of the most effective techniques to get high authority and dedicated websites to endorse your site. When you get backlinks, you are creating a bold and descriptive backlink profile for your company. Depending on the strength of the link profile you build, your website can influence the Google algorithm and achieve higher rankings.

Despite all the rumors spread, you cannot ignore the Link building technique when optimizing your website for SEO.

Spoiler Alert: Baking a perfect cookie doesn’t happen overnight. In the same way, link building takes time, but it is always worth the effort put in.

When you put targeted and genuine effort into link building, it pays off with long-lasting and organic results. This is the crux of this whole idea.

The concept of links is central to how Google search works. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came up with the beautiful concept of PageRank.

The PageRank algorithm helps Google identify and rank new pages based on the Quality Signals. So, what this means is that Google’s core algorithm weighs high-quality backlinks as one of the most important ranking factors, and ignoring them can hinder a website’s growth.

What Is Termed As A Good Link Building In Search Engines?

For certain, nobody knows how exactly Google measures the worth of each link. However, the SEO community believes that the following link-evaluation concepts might be true:

Authority

As you may know, Google considers links to be “votes” that a given page deserves to rank high. But, surely, a link from searchenginejournal.com cannot have the same impact as a link from a friend’s personal blog, right?

Google, on the other hand, has consistently denied the existence of a sitewide website authority metric in its system. Nonetheless, many SEOs believe that the concept of “website authority” makes too much sense to dismiss completely.

What is more important, however, is the authority of the page linking to you.n other words, a page with some strong votes of its own will vote more strongly than a page with no votes. This straightforward principle underpins Google’s well-known PageRank algorithm.

Relevance

Assume you’ve written a guide on grilling the perfect steak and want it to rank high in Google. Which do you prefer: Thomas Keller or David Chang to get a link from?

I’m guessing it’s the latter. Chang has a larger following than Keller, but he is not a world-renowned chef. As a result, his cooking advice could easily be incorrect.

And it appears that Google takes this into account when ranking pages. Links from websites related to yours are thought to be more valuable than links from irrelevant websites.

Anchor Text

In case you are unfamiliar with the term “anchor text,” it is a clickable snippet of text that links to another page. In many cases, it summarises the content of the linked page.

As a result, it’s not surprising that Google uses the words in the anchor text to better understand what the referenced page is about and which keywords it should rank for. So, how do you use anchor text to build links?

It’s probably best if you don’t. The more you try to control how different pages link to you and stuff all the “right words” into the anchor text of your backlinks, the more likely Google will suspect manipulation and penalize you. So it’s best to simply let the author of the linking page decide how to refer to your page.

Nofollow vs. Follow

The link attribute “no follow” tells Google that the linking page would rather not vote for the page it is referencing.In the past, Google did not count votes from “no followed links” (or so it said). Then, in 2019, it switched to a hint model, which means that some “no follow” links now have an impact on your search rankings. As a general rule, you should get “followed” links because these are supposed to cast the most votes for your website.

However, if you see an opportunity to obtain a no followed link from a relevant high-authority page, you should definitely take an advantage of it.

Wrapping Up!

Link building is a continuous process and you can never expect to hit a dead end. Although it may seem like it takes more effort than any other SEO strategy, the payoff is huge and it lasts a long time.