What is link building? A strategy for quality backlinks

Link building also called link construction, is the building of inbound links, or backlinks, to a website in order to improve its visibility in search engines. Popular link building strategies today include content marketing, building useful tools, public relations, email outreach and fixing broken links. Let's MONA Media take a closer look at what link building is below.

What is link building?

Link Building is the process of getting links from external websites to your own site. It is also known as Backlink. Most website link building campaigns aim to increase search traffic from Google in the future. Even links from popular websites such as news outlets can be a great source of referral traffic.

After our research, we found that the popularity of links (that is, the number of links pointing to a website from other domains) is strongly correlated with Google rankings.

In the chart below (from Ahrefs' study of more than 2 million keywords), links show a much higher correlation than on-page factors (such as meta tags or keyword use…).

Why is link building important?

After learning what link building is, many people still ask why it matters. To see how important backlinks are, we need to go back to the days before Google. You may remember search engines like Alta Vista and Yahoo!? They ranked results 100% on the content of a page.

Today, the well-known Page Rank algorithm has completely changed that “game”. Instead of simply analyzing a page's content, Google looks at how many people link to that page. This is why, almost 20 years later, backlinks are still a Google ranking signal and still seen as the best way to judge a website's quality. It also means that, thanks to updates like Google Penguin, Google now focuses on the quality of links rather than only their quantity, as it used to.

Ever wondered whether linking out helps your competitors or hurts you? It's a common fear, especially for people new to SEO. But done right, external links make your website much stronger. Watch the video to learn how to get the most SEO value from outbound links!

Skills for sustainable link building

To build links effectively in the era of the “Penguin” update, a modern SEO link builder has to be a well-rounded marketer with:

• A logical, analytical way of thinking (analyzing competitors and their strategies).
• A creative mind (link bait and content ideas).
• Good communication skills (connecting and reaching out to the community).

You could even say effective link building has a psychological side, because the main job is finding a way to get someone to link to you. Let's look at two of the most important link building skills: research and outreach to competitors.

Researching competitors

A good starting point for most link building campaigns is analyzing competitors' backlink profiles. In detail, use Ahrefs to collect data on competitors' websites and gather their backlink data (page-level and site-level links). This data is found in the referring domains report and shows all the domains that link to a website or an individual page.

Analyzing the backlink profile of a few competitors will:

• Give you insight into your competitors' link building strategies.
• Create opportunities to replicate those links for your own website.

One tip: work out why your competitor earned a particular link, then decide whether you can learn from their approach.

Community outreach

Outreach is considered the most important skill in the link building toolkit and also one of the hardest to master. Apart from rare cases where content suddenly goes viral and spreads naturally, to earn links you have to put your website or content in front of people at the right moment.

And even with all the media available today, email is still seen as the most effective way to reach out.

How do you make outreach more effective?

A great way to improve your outreach is to react quickly to link opportunities (close to real time). Which of these are you more likely to get a new link to:

• a) An old article published last year that you may have forgotten about; or
• b) An article you published in the past month and are still actively promoting?

MONA is sure you'll agree the answer is b.

A tip for you:

If someone links to your competitor's content, contact them quickly and ask whether they would consider linking to your similar resource.

And if someone writes a new article that covers keywords your target topic, reach out quickly and point them to your own resource.

→ A guide to SEO that gets your website to the TOP

Effective ways to build links

To build links most effectively, you need to master the methods below:

Understand it right to build lasting links

Link building in SEO Offpage is the process of creating backlinks to your website. It can happen naturally if your site is well known for good content. Still, you can speed up link building in several ways.

Backlinks matter a great deal because they directly affect where your website ranks on Google. The factors involved include:

• Trust level: The more reputable your website is, the greater its influence. This can be judged by the amount of traffic or the PageRank the site has.
• Chain links: This refers to how relevant the websites that link to you are. For example, if a site you link to spams links to other sites with the same level of spammy backlinks, the effectiveness of the link building pointing to your site will drop.
• Anchor Text: This is the text shown in place of the linked site's domain address. It should be related to the content and meaning of the topic being discussed, because search engines compare this text with the content of the page it points to.
• Declining freshness: When a site you link to gets less traffic and updates its content less over time, for whatever reason, the relevance of that link tends to fall. What you should do is add newer, higher-quality links, a signal that what you mention is still relevant, and it will help your website improve in the rankings.

Find blogs and forums related to your website's content

This is very important in a link building strategy: look for sites whose content relates to your field. Most forums and blogs have a spot where you can set a signature or fill in your profile, and you can place a link to your website there.

Each time you leave a comment, your signature is added by default to the post and shown to all readers, search engines included. So use this to check and monitor how the backlinks you have set up for your site are growing.

So you have the answer for building a good link network. The first thing to do is find websites on the same topic as your website. Don't worry about competition. Do the opposite: if you try working with other site owners in the same field, you will see positive signals appear.

Publish useful content

Publishing articles can take a while to pay off as a link building technique, but if you publish related articles regularly, it can improve your site's ranking too. Choose websites on the same topic as your field.

You can start by writing a short article about issues related to your website's content. Then publish it on a site that lets you publish such articles for its readers. And don't forget to include a link to your website in the source section at the end of the article. While crawling, search robots will find your link as they browse these sites.

However, because of a new update to Google Panda algorithm on February 23, 2011, this method is no longer as effective as it used to be.

Use RSS to spread your content

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an online format used to publish articles in a standard format, such as for websites, blogs and news. An RSS feed, also called a resource, contains the text and data published when a website or blog is updated. It is a big advantage because publishing through an RSS feed lets webmasters set up automatic publishing of content on their website or blog.

The more pages you publish through the RSS channel, the more your content will appear in search engines. Like most other link building techniques, if you have several websites, you can publish RSS feeds for your website or blog.

One thing to remember: make sure all your posts are updated through the RSS channel and published in the right RSS category. This brings you a large number of readers who follow your new content regularly, and that creates natural, lasting backlinks.

Answer questions

This is another effective way to build links, but it takes a lot of your time. Most websites where people post questions for experts to answer let you add a link to a source that answers the user's question.

This means search engine crawlers will find your links, and users will find the answer and click the link you provide to reach your website. This can noticeably improve your site's ranking, because Google favors Q&A sites like this. Don't overdo it, though: answering a few questions a week is enough.

Write content on a blog

Writing blog posts is another good way to build links. It helps your website a lot, but it takes a lot of time. If you manage it in an organized way, a blog can do more than create links to your main site: it also adds to the site's credibility and brings in new visitors.

To keep the loyal readers you already have, add your own content or banner ads on your blog, without needing anyone's permission. And don't forget to add a link in your post.

List your website in directory sites

• A web directory introduces businesses and organizations from many fields, with links to each listed website under its own category (for example: trangvangvietnam.com; yellowpages.vn; laban.vn…).
• Some sites update your link manually, while others let you edit your own listing details in their system.
• Adding link-building entries to directory sites takes a lot of time, so it is usually handed to an outside provider to save time and cost, or to a staff member who does link building full time.

Approach other websites directly about links

If you find a promising site that could give your site a high-quality backlink, contact its administrator directly and propose a monthly paid link or a link exchange between the two sites, so both sides gain credibility.

Example: If your website gives health-care advice, get in touch with websites that sell health products.

Clearly, SEO link building matters a great deal in a company's SEO strategy. When many quality links point to your website, it can reach a high position in Google's search results. To run an effective SEO plan while saving time and cost, you should find a SEO agency you can trust to work with.

FAQ

1- What is link building?

Link building is a key term in search engine optimization (SEO). It describes the process of increasing the number of links to a website from other websites. Put another way, link building means building a network of inbound links (backlinks) to a target website to raise its trustworthiness and popularity on the Internet.

2- What is a website's link structure?

A website's link structure consists of links from the same domain, grouped together in that site's search results. Search systems analyze the link structure of your site to find convenient paths that save users time and help them quickly find the information they are looking for.

That covers what link building is and a few ways you can build links effectively, even for free. I hope the information MONA Media has shared helps you find the link-building strategy that suits your website best. Good luck.

-> Read more:

• What are Referring Domains? The role of Referring Domains in SEO
• what is SchemaHow to strengthen your website with Schema Markup?