What is Link Building?

Link building is an SEO tactic that involves building relevant and quality backlinks to a website, increasing the websites search engine rankings and brand awareness. Creating a strong backlink profile builds trust and authority with the search engines. Various outreach tactics are used in link building to acquire links, such as reaching out to website owners, bloggers, and experts in your field and requesting backlinks. Backlinks can be acquired through various tactics such as guest posting, creating link worthy content, and collaborating with reputable industry influencers.

Creating a strong link building strategy that builds quality backlinks from relevant and reputable sites can improve your search engine rankings, trust, and authority, as well as brand awareness, thus bringing more traffic and sales to your website. When building backlinks, it's best to focus more on the quality of the links rather than the quantity of links. A backlink profile with many low quality and irrelevant links and few quality and relevant links is far less desired than a backlink profile with a handful of quality and relevant links and very few low quality links. It's important to follow the webmaster guidelines of the major search engines when building your backlinks to ensure links are acquired ethically and naturally.

Link Building Tips

To keep your link building strategy on top, make sure to complete these five easy tasks every day. By consistently implementing these tasks, you can maintain a strong link building strategy that helps improve your website's visibility and authority in search engine rankings.

Create Linkworthy Content

It's a good idea to create engaging content that people will link to. A mixture of text, graphics, video, and other media should be used. Create various types of content such as informative articles, blog posts, infographics, audio recordings, videos, and other types of content your target audience is looking for. Focus on creating user first content. Make sure your content is crawlable and search engines can find your links in the content.

Build Trust And Authority

By building trust and authority in your niche, others will naturally want to link to your content. Establish a relationship with key influencers and authority figures in your field. Engage with their content, share their posts, and offer valuable insights and collaborations. This can lead to them linking to your content, mentioning your brand, and boosting your link building efforts. Process link requests promptly. Not every link request will be desirable. If you reject a link request, let the webmaster know why. They may be able to fix the issue and become a desirable link partner.

Create A Buzz With Your Content

Creating a buzz with your content is a great way to gain exposure and build backlinks. Guest posting for reputable sites and blogs in your field can be a great opportunity to create a buzz for your site. Guest posting can also be a great way to build trust and authority by providing valuable content that showcases your expertise. When guest posting you want to provide information that readers find useful rather than try to promote your business. Be sure to engage with readers to establish authority and help drive traffic to your website.

Leverage Social Media

Leverage social media to promote your content and build relationships with potential prospects. Increase the visibility of your content by posting and sharing content regularly, engaging your audience, and participating in relevant community discussions. By increasing the visibility of your content and engaging your audience you can increase link building opportunities. Create attention grabbing images that people want to share and engage with, infographics that share valuable information, videos that entertain and inform, and posts users engage with and share.

Monitor Your Backlinks

Check the quality and relevance of your links. Any links that are low quality should be removed. If you've purchased any bad links, get rid of them. Track your links and make sure they are from a trustworthy source. Make sure to clean up any dead links. If you're unsure about any of the links, check them. If you have a lot of links, you should be able to manage them and clean up links that are no longer relevant. Make sure that your links are labeled to reflect the page they link to. Organize your links, placing the best ones first and putting them into categories. Creating a directory may be beneficial if you have a large number of links.

Check for Robots.txt Disallow and noindex Tags

Some websites will block search engines from crawling their links pages using the Disallow instruction in robots.txt, this prevents the search engines from properly seeing those links, making them useless for SEO. You can check to see if a website has a robots.txt file (or several) by typing /robots.txt at the end of the root, subdomain, or directory URL you want to check.

Some examples of where a robots.txt would be are:

https://dom.tld/robots.txt

https://sub.dom.tld/robots.txt

https://dom.tld/dir/robots.txt

Also, be sure to check the source code of the links pages and make sure they do not have a noindex tag. The noindex tag will tell search engines not to index those pages. Having your links on pages that are not indexed will not do anything to help your SEO efforts.

Avoid Cloaking Scams

Cloaking is a search engine manipulation tactic where a site shows search engines a certain version of the site and visitors a different version of the site. Cloaking is used to manipulate search engine rankings and mislead users. Avoid linking to sites that use cloaking schemes. This is against search engine guidelines and is considered spamming.

Audit Sites You Link With

You want to make sure you link with sites that have high quality and relevant content and abide by search engine guidelines. One way to get a good idea of where a website stands with search engines is to perform a website audit. A website audit is a general analysis of a website that provides insight into the web pages on the site and the traffic it receives. By performing a website audit you can see if a website may have any issues you want to avoid being associated with such as indications that the site may be involved in practices that are against search engine guidelines, issues with search engine ranking, etc.

Be Careful Buying Links And Exchanging Links

Paid links should be used with care. If you buy a large number of backlinks, this can be seen as a manipulation tactic by search engines. You can buy links if it's not done excessively and not done to manipulate search engines. It is best to avoid buying links unless you know what it is you are doing. Also, be careful when doing link exchanges, this can also be seen as a link scheme by search engines, so again you want to make sure you know what you're doing when asking for backlinks in exchange for backlinks.

Avoid Pages With Excessive Links

Although there really isn't a specific number of links a page should or shouldn't have on their site or web page, you want to avoid sites and pages that have an excessive amount of links, particularly if those links are low quality and unrelated to the website content. Sites with an excessive amount of links can be seen as link farms by search engines. A good general rule of thumb is to link to web pages that have under 25 links on them.

Take Time To Tend To Your Site

Take time to tend to your website on a daily basis. Make sure everything is in working order, all links are working, etc. Make regular updates to your content, always adding fresh new content, updating old content, etc. By routinely maintaining your website and updating and adding new content on a regular basis, not only will this help search engines better understand your site and be able to give you the best ranking, it will keep users coming back for more, generating more subscribers, sales, etc.