What is Link Building? Basic guide and most effective strategies

If you have ever read about SEO or have worked on it for your website, surely you have already heard about Link Building. This is one of the strategies that we must take into account when positioning our page in search engines such as Google, Bing o Yahoo. Of course, it is not the only SEO strategy and having a good link building does not guarantee that your website will rank well organically. There are many other issues that we must control, such as content, SEO On Page, etc.

But in this article, we want to focus on link building so that you have a clear understanding of what it entails. We will cover the key aspects to consider when engaging in effective link building, including how to generate quality links and how to ensure that those links do not have a negative impact on our website.

What is Link Building?

Link building is a strategy to improve the SEO positioning of a web page. It consists of obtaining external links from different pages that give us greater authority in search engines to our website. With external links we refer to links to our website that are placed on external pages, blogs, forums, etc.

These links can be generated in different ways, as we will now see, and there must be some important issues, so that these links give us what we want. Our goal should be to give our website greater authority in the face of Google and other search engines. Before getting fully into this technique, it is important that you first know that this work must be done properly and not generate links “like crazy” and in large numbers. We recommend following a strategy that prioritizes quality over quantity.

Guide for an effective Link Building

To achieve the desired quality we discussed, several aspects and techniques should be taken into account to help us identify the best websites to place our links.

• Related content: this should be the starting point when selecting the websites where we want to host our links. For these external links to be better valued by search engines, that is, to provide more authority to your website, they must come from web pages, blogs or forums related to the theme of your page. For example, if your business is selling sunglasses, it doesn’t make sense for you to have a link on a blog that talks about rugs. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to include links in so-called “link farms,” which are websites specifically designed to provide links to other websites with the aim of improving their positioning. We discourage this practice because what will happen is that there will be thousands and thousands of links on different topics, countries, languages… and it will contribute little to the authority of your website. You have to be careful, because they usually charge for it and this is a practice highly penalized by Google, among others.
• page authority: the magic word of SEO, authority. That a website has a higher authority means that Google (or another search engine) is ranking it better because it is intuitive, fast, and above all, because it provides a lot of good information to users. Therefore, it is ideal that in your link building strategy you include pages with a lot of authority to introduce the links to your website. Again we return to those of better quality than quantity. Sometimes these pages with the highest authority are specialized media or blogs that can charge for these links. There are different ways to achieve this, as we will explain later. You can find very interesting extensions for Chrome or Firefox browsers, and that at a glance indicate the main SEO parameters of a website. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar or MozBar, are two of the best you can find and give you a lot of information about the authority.
• Number of links: another important point when selecting the website where we want to insert a link is to review the number of outgoing and incoming links it has. Well, what really matters is the balance between outgoing and incoming links. For example, a website that has a large majority of outgoing links can be detected as having a large number of links, probably paid links. This can be measured with tools like Check My Links or those mentioned in the previous point.
• Analyze the competition: in any area of marketing or any business, it is crucial to know your competition, understand how they operate, what works for them and what doesn’t, and replicate what is working better for them than for you. In the case of link building, it may be interesting to analyze your web pages and, if they are well positioned, extract information about the websites from which they receive links. This can make us discover new pages in which we are interested in having our own links. The tools of Ahref or MOZ’s Link Explorer can give you all that information.
• Link positioning: once we have chosen where we are going to introduce our links, we must try to place them as best as possible. It is important that they be placed as high as possible, but within the text or body of the article, news, post or page. Ideally, it should appear in a place where it makes sense to apply it, that is, where something related to our website is being discussed.
• Use anchor text variables: regarding the links, it is important that in our link building strategy there are different anchor texts for the links. The anchor text is the term or phrase on which the link is inserted. You should vary and not always use the keyword. You can use the name of your company, or calls to action such as “click here”, “more information here” or directly the url when it makes sense.

How to generate external links?

After this link building guide to find the best places to insert our links and work on them, it’s important to learn about the different techniques to acquire them. Ideally, these links would come to us naturally, that is, that we do not ask for them, and of course, that we do not have to pay for them. There are several ways to get links naturally:

• Contribute interesting content such as a webinar, a tutorial, a masterclass or an infographic. It must provide a lot of value so that other websites decide to share it for their users and followers.
• Publish reports or analysis. Again it is important that these have a real value that encourages sharing. If we extract information worthy of a catchy headline, much better so that it can go viral.
• Together with the above, if we manage to make content go viral, because it is controversial or funny, this can attract many external links. Of course, we always advise that it be truthful content and that it adds value. And be careful not to generate a controversy that could negatively affect our brand.

Another way to create links is manually. This is where most of the SEO work in terms of link building is found:

• Write interesting content for websites and blogs that allow collaborative articles from external bloggers. In the world of marketing it is a common practice, for example.
• Search for forums related to the theme of your business and introduce links as a recommendation or provide information for users who have made a query or are having a conversation in which we can help.
• Pay for links or articles on a website of interest as specialized media. In no case are we referring to link farms or pages that will have a negative impact on us. There are tools like Coobis is one such tool, where by paying a certain amount (which will be higher for websites with more traffic, relevance, or authority), you can publish an article that may even be written by them on your behalf, containing dofollow links to your website.

In short, link building work is not an easy task. But by following these tips you can create a good number of external links, and above all, quality ones. It is important to analyze the websites where we are going to include our links and try to avoid link farms and sponsorship websites that do not provide any value to users.