What is Link Building? How To Attract Quality Links?

Link building is a concept which got more importance when Google’s co-founder Larry Page invented PageRank in the 90’s. Since that time generating links has been the primary way for search engines to determine rankings. Getting an inbound link from other websites has become the most crucial SEO ingredient, only if those are obtained naturally, safely and within search engine’s guidelines. 

 

Building links is one of the most important tasks in website ranking. Google itself stated that “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages”. You need to know how to build links of high quality if you are aiming to rank higher in the search engine results pages.

 

Making backlinks is a time-consuming process because all links created will not give equal results. The main task of creating links is to increase our website PageRank.

 

Google’s PageRank algorithm states that “each hyperlink to a web page acts like a vote of confidence for that page, similar to a popularity contest”. It also states that the PageRank system doesn’t give every backlink an equal vote because some backlinks can have a negative impact on website ranking, in order to overcome the site suspected to have unnatural backlinks the search engines had been updated.

 

Backlinks are mainly divided into three types they are as follows:

• Good backlinks: These are the links from genuine websites which are in the field of your website, experts who write about your topic, or non-spammy sites that have content which relates to your content.
• Bad backlinks: Links from irrelevant websites, for example, a dog training website linking to your website which is an insurance brokerage don’t do you any good and could look unnatural.
• Ugly backlinks: Links coming from spam sites, which are known to sell links, or low-quality content (such as pages with lists of random links and no text) can make your site down.

Link Building Factors Affecting on Ranking

Linking Page Authority

The Page ranking of a website varies from different relevant pages, for example, a link building from the reliable page will increase our web rank more than the link from the less authoritative page. Here smaller links are useless but explaining that value will be low compared to a large reliable page. There are many online tools from where you can easily check a proxy indicator of PageRank (“PageRating”) such as “Ahrefs”, just enter a URL into Ahrefs and check out its “URL Rating”:

Linking Site Authority

The site authority of a backlinked website also controls the PageRank of the website by the quality of a link. For example, a link from Times of India will have a bigger impact than a link from a small name blogger site, though these link buildings are not easy to get but they will definitely bring a huge change in PageRank.

Many online tools like Moz and Ahrefs can also be used for knowing the domain rating.

Position of the Link on the Page

The position of the linking page is also one of the important factors to get a huge page ranking, for example, the link at the top or middle of the page can have a huge impact on the ranking of your website than the link at the bottom or links in the footer. The links in the bottom line can benefit only when it appears on the front page or main body of the web page.

Editorially Placed Link

Not only having a link on top or middle of the web page to the linked website is important, but it is also important that the link is placed editorially. One can drop a link randomly in sites by creating the profile which is not considered as an editorial link, the link building which is considered as an editorial link only when someone links to you because they think that the site is relevant. The editorial link is very important because Google has created more SEO tactics on editorially placed links.

Anchor Text Links

Anchor text is nothing but the text which the user can see with a clicking link option. Google uses anchor text for ranking signals. For example, if your website got a link from another site with an anchor text “mobile”, Google SEO assumes that the link is provided to a page which contains information about mobile phones as the keyword is mobile. Using the same anchor text most of the time is considered spammy in link building.

Co-Citations Link

The words and phrases which appear around your link are known as co-citation which is used by Google as “baby anchor text”. Google SEO has an ability to assume your website by following these co-citations.

Is the Link from a Guest Post?

Here are some points which can make guest link building spammy:

• Someone is paid to publish the post
• The post contains exact match anchor text
• The site exists solely to publish guest posts
• The site is unrelated to yours

 

But if you publish a mind-blowing guest post on an influential, relevant site that link can help you to rank.

Link popularity is not a numbers game anymore. Even more important than the quantity of your backlink are the quality and relevance of the sites where those links are coming from. Your site becomes a trusted, authority site by association only when you get links from relevant, quality and trusted sites.

Ways to Attract Quality Links

Attracting quality links to a website is not an easy task but it is something that could be done without having to make heavy changes on a website. By assuming a website from user’s perspective there are some improvements or changes need for website that may attract quality link, they are as follows:

1. Quality of Content

Having quality and attractive content is one of the best practices to attract more visitors to your website.

Attractive in the sense that the website should contain more relevant data and relevant images for the topics listed if a possible video can also be added to the website because visitors nowadays prefer video content than written content.

 

The target audience of a local carpenter may not really care about the history of carpenter work. They might care much more about some instant tips written by the carpenters themselves though, or tips on a few things to check when your furniture is not doing well.

Think about what your users want to see, what they need, what they’d find useful and helpful, and see if you can create it in such a way that people outside of your target audience could also benefit. In the carpentering example, that kind of information would be helpful to people who might hire this carpenter.

 

Due to great, quality content the visiting of new users increases which increase the site popularity by seeing which many links follow.

2. Keep Your Content Fresh

The content of the blog should be updated frequently because visitors visiting your page search for fresh content rather than the old or outdated one. If the visitor is not satisfied with the content the visitors to your page gradually decreases due to which there will be no new visitors which gradually leads to the low ranking.

So attracting visitors with new content is very important. Some of the ways to update content are posting a blog regularly, maintaining the article section for your site, and adding new support pages which strengthen your brand.

3. Titles

Writing a blog with a best suitable title is very important because a visitor visits your page by seeing your title so you should not make a visitor assume that they have been misplaced by seeing the title because of which the bounce rate of the landing page increases which affects the reduction of page ranking.

Images, Videos, and Interactive Content

Images can be excellent for link building purposes, but if it’s true that writing a post with an image on it can increase the chances of attracting more visitors on your content page, that obviously increases your chances of getting links.

 

Nowadays definitely more visitors are fond of images but if a visitor wants to know how to do something, it would be easier to read the steps written out rather than learn by looking at a set of images. Many people are just the opposite. That’s a great reason why including images and text is very important, as it covers all your bases.

 

And also make sure that your images, video or interactive content actually works! Moreover, visitors have a bad habit of landing on posts that contain videos that don’t load. If you’re getting data or something like this from another site, make sure it’s reliable.

4. Promote Your Content in Social Media

Promoting your content on social media is one of the best tasks to perform which increases the visitors to visit your site. In social media, we have a wide range of ways to post your content such as link posts, image posts, and video/rich media posts. Image posts are the first which people are going to notice, posting images will not promote your website but by following these we can make the content eye-catching, inspire curiosity, entertain viewers, may spark emotions etc.

 

If you are going for paid promotions in any social media channel make sure that not more than 20% of the image should contain text. Nowadays video content also became famous but having a large video with boring content may not achieve the best results.

5. Internal Links and Searchability

Internal links are mainly used to provide links to all relevant internal pages. The user searches to the link page for the relevant data based on the keyword. If the keyword and the data in the page linked to the keyword are not related that makes a visitor frustrated. Making a page hard to read with a lot of information is not a good idea. If you have a services page but have a page for each of those services which go more in-depth, then give a link to it! It works better.

6. Outbound Links

Outbound links are the links which you are going to link other websites to your site with a relevant keyword. Before linking the website you have to do research on their website as one done when they are going to link your website to their blog. Linking a site which has high positive comments will definitely help but only if the comments are not spam.

7. User Engagement

User engagement is one of the main tasks to maintain a high traffic in your site. If the number of visitors increases on your site the traffic in your site increases simultaneously. One of the main platforms to increase user engagement to your site is to promote it in social media, nowadays everyone is talking about social media and its benefits for ages but it is true that still some sites don’t have social share buttons on their content. If someone is linking your content, it would be better if people can easily share it so that you can get more links, traffic, and conversions.

Conclusion

Make your content informative, attractive that we want to link to, something which can be easily shared on Social media. Make your website easily accessible and make sure it looks good, and check AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages) on mobile devices.

Final precautions in link building to be followed in order to attract Backlinks are Focus your efforts on creating great content, optimizing it for SEO, and building relationships with your target communities online.