The Complete Guide on Link Building for SEO

What is a Backlink?

When a webpage receives a hyperlink from another website, it is known as a backlink. Backlinks are also known as inbound links. 

Why is Backlink an Important Ranking Factor?

When a web page receives more and more backlinks, this helps the search engine understand that your web page's content is valuable, which makes the other websites link to you, thereby gaining their trust. As search engines love unique and valuable content, they consider it to rank high in search results. This makes backlinks an important ranking factor and a symbol of trust as well. 

However, it is not necessary that if you get a lot of backlinks, that means you will rank high for sure. You will rank high only when you get high-quality backlinks. Backlinks are high quality when the link juice or authority from one website is passed to another.  

No-Follow Links vs. Do-Follow Links 

A website can link to your page either by do-follow links or by no-follow links.

Do-follow links are beneficial in terms of SEO. When a website links back to your site by do-follow link, it passes the authority or the link-juice of their website to yours. This helps to improve the authority of your website, thereby positively affecting your ranking.

No-follow links don't pass the authority or link juice to your website; therefore, are not beneficial in terms of SEO. However, even though it directly does not affect the ranking of your website, the no-follow links are good for driving user traffic from one website to another. 

White Hat and Black Hat Techniques 

Optimizers mostly follow the white hat or the black hat techniques. The white hat technique helps to gain backlinks under the search engine guidelines. Whereas black hat techniques involve spammy methods of gaining backlinks, and one can get penalized by search engines if search engines detect the black hat methods.

Link Building 101 for Better SEO   

Before you begin adding a bunch of links to your website, it’s essential to get the basics of SEO link building under your belt. That way, you can manage your links so they’re more intentional and valuable to your end goals. 

Link Building For SEO

The following are the six best backlink-building techniques used in the SEO industry.   

1. Skyscraper Technique - This technique is originally said to be found by Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko. Publishing skyscraper content can help you ‌bring the backlink from high authority sites. For this, you need to do basic research and find the content that is doing well in your industry. Once you find the content, create a better version of this content with additional unique information. Now all you need is to promote your content. You can reach out to experts with similar interests and ask them to add the URL of your content, which will be the add-on to their existing content. 
2. Publish detailed guides - Detailed guides are a form of longer content. Studies say that longer content tends to gain more backlinks. However, publishing longer content will only work if and only if the content is unique and informative. 
3. Broken link building - Find the informative pages that are relevant to your industry on the web that have dead links or 404 pages. 404 pages have a negative impact on search engines. If you have relevant content that could replace this 404 page, do reach out to the owner of the content and have a humble ask to replace the dead link with your content. Definitely, it's difficult, but yes, this technique really works.  
4. Find Listicles - Listicles is a piece of writing that has a list included in them. Find the content which has a list of the relevant topics. Check if it includes your site as well. If not, you can ask the content owner to include your site with a brief description of how it is helpful and relevant to the existing content.  
5. Guest Blogging - Guest blogging is a simple and easy technique to earn backlinks. First, identify the blogging sites with high domain authority. Create a blog post relevant to your industry with the links of your site and add this post to the blogging sites. Do not add too many links, as they will appear spammy in the eyes of search engines, which may prove harmful to your site.
6. Link Gap building - Link gap analysis is the quickest way from which one can easily discover link-building opportunities. With link gap analysis, you can find the sites that link to your competitors but not you. Say suppose if you find a website that links to more than one of your competitors, their chances of linking you increase. 

Types of SEO Links

When we’re talking about search engine optimization, there are three types of links that matter most, including:

• Internal Links
• Inbound Links
• External Links

Internal links are links that only exist between pages on your own website. For example, a link from website.com to website.com/blog is an internal link because it doesn’t leave your website domain. 

Source

Inbound links, also known as backlinks, are links that come into your website from a website other than your own. Third-party websites often link to other sites to support their content with additional information. For example, if Apple.com links to one of your articles on its site, that would be an inbound link for your website (and a valuable one at that, since Apple.com has a high domain authority).

Source

Out of all the types of SEO links, inbound links are the most valuable and the hardest to obtain. That’s because you have no control over which websites decide to link to your website. When they do, it becomes an important ranking signal for search engines trying to understand what your website pages are about and how important they appear. 

Without control over which sites link to you, however, there is also a risk of receiving links from spammy sites or those with a low domain authority. Both of which can hurt your SEO performance. If you’re concerned about bad links, you can enlist an SEO professional to conduct a website audit.  

Outbound links are links from your website to a website other than your own. These help in your SEO link building by giving Google and other search engines a better understanding of your website, based on which sites you’re linking out to from your pages. 

How to Start Your SEO Link Building Practices

No matter how you approach your SEO link building strategy, there’s one focus to always keep in mind: relevancy. All internal and outbound links should be relevant to the content you’re linking to from your page. Again, this helps search engines understand your content, which helps your overall ranking performance. 

Of course, there’s not much you can do about the relevancy of inbound links, but again you can always clean that up once you have an idea of the sites linking to your pages. 

To begin, you may want to take on just one type of SEO link building, so as not to get overwhelmed. For example, if you want to start with building internal links (those are the links between your own website pages), then you might start with a broad category and work out from there.

One way to do this is to look at one of your main topics (digital marketing, for example) and more specific yet related pages (how to start a digital marketing career, for example). Linking between these two types of pages would be natural and relevant, so it assists your SEO efforts. Look for other similar pages and do the same. 

If you want to approach inbound link building, then make sure to focus on developing high-quality content other sites will want to link to — this is how you build natural inbound links from sites with high domain authority that can influence your search rankings.

Backlink Building Tools

Here is the list of some helpful backlink building tools with their features - 

Master many facets of SEO including keyword research, technical SEO, link building, analytics, with the Search Engine Optimization training course.

Conclusion

Link building in SEO or backlink building is one of the important factors in search ranking as it shows the trust of one site in another. Gaining high-quality backlinks make search engines understand that the content on your website is valuable, thereby making it eligible for higher rankings. However, due to spammy methods, backlinks are a factor that can be easily manipulated. As you know that search ranking algorithms are continuously updated, and backlinks will continue to be an important factor, but the unique content and user-centric content will be more valued. 

Check out Link Building with UX, which has some unique perspectives on integrating links with user experience. And, if you want to learn more about SEO, be sure to look at Simplilearn’s Search Engine Optimization Training Course.