It might be the case you are new to building links on a website or you have some experience, but as things change so quickly in what is the best way to build quality links it is good to have a refresher every one and a while.
SEO and link building has gone through some drastic changes, and what used to be seen as the optimal way of building links can now be seen as grey hat techniques.
Here we’ll show you link building strategies and what is the best way to use your keywords.
Why is Link Building So Important?
Everyone who has a blog or website needs to thrive online, and the need to understand how to construct link building strategies is a must.
The whole concept of link building is obtaining hyperlinks from various other websites. These link between pages whilst the search engines crawl the web and use this links to visit pages on your site or crawl through the links on an entire website.
There are numerous techniques when building links and can vary in difficulty of construction. The main thing to learn is how to build links and do it well without placing yourself in danger of receiving a Google penalty.
To fully understand how important link building is, it is crucial to know how links are constructed, and how a web crawler will interpret them.
- Start of link tags: this is call the anchor tag (referenced by “a”), this opens a link tag and informs the search
engines a link to another location will follow. - Link referral location: “href” is short for “hyperlink referral.” The text inside the quotes is the referring links where the link is pointing. If you see something beginning with a # sign. This indicates local links which take you to another area of the page you’re already on.
- Visible/anchor text of link: This is text which users see web pages. These are clickable to take users somewhere else. The text is usually blue so, signaling to users it is a clickable link.
- Closure of link tags: These signal the end link tags to search engines.
Search engines use these anchor links in two ways:
- Used to discover new web pages
- Aids in determining how well the given page should rank in search results
The search engines take what they find and use it to add content to their indexes, and also check the content quality to be ranked for any relevant keywords. Search engines also check the inbound link quantity and the quality of these links which are pointing to your website.
Early on Google used these links as a metric to see how good a page was. It wasn’t long before SEO found a way to create backlinks and to manipulate their rankings. It was at this point Google began releasing updates to counteract this.
This black hat technique was frowned upon and is one of the fastest ways of receiving a google penalty.
Types of Link Building
Quality links are more important than ever now the search engines are taking a dim view of the techniques to try and manipulate rankings. The basics of SEO should show the white hat ways of doing things rather than trying to teach you any ways that can lead you into trouble.
In the short term these slightly underhanded methods can bring a quick boost to rankings, although the risk is very far from worth it. Anyone who tries to show you these methods should be disregarded as creating backlinks can be hard enough without trying to recover from a penalty against your website.
Editorial Links (Natural) – these are links which are naturally given by other site owners when they link to your content. When this happens there has been no coercion into giving you this link. It is for this reason they are the best type of link to receive.
Outreach Links (Manual) – this way to build links can be one of the most common. This is where other sites need to be contacted and physically asking them to link to your site. With this in mind, anyone whom you contact has to have relevant content to yours.
Non-Editorial (Self-created) – this is one method which is frowned upon due to the nature of the link creation. When you create links yourself in this way the search engines see them as manipulation. Many people even bought old domains and created a PBN (Private Blog Network). When this has been created all of the PBN link building is directed back to one parent site where the business makes its money.
In a PBN all of the anchor text will direct the (old) domains toward the larger site. The search engines become suspicious when these PBN’s are constructed and can tell if one has been built as the smaller domains have hardly any activity, and can be full of keyword stuffing with the intention of building up backlinks which hopefully improve the parent sites rankings.
There is another type of link which falls outside of the above, however they are still seen as important.
This social linking to social media might not carry the full weight of editorial links, but with the sheer volume of users, the addition of like buttons to your product pages can quickly give word of mouth about good services or products. Such is the effect, around 1 in 4 people will purchase a liked product.
Importance of Local SEO Link Building
Generally websites look at the entire internet to present their product or services. Moving closer to home in your link building can reap its rewards.
It has been shown that around 50% of Google searches are local. This means there are people looking for what you offer in your area.
A local SEO guide shows the following statistics for local search:
- 89% search once per week
- 58% make daily searches
- 72% will visit a store within 5 miles of where the search was made
When any link building strategy is put into place. It is advisable to stay close to home first. You might rank highly overall.
However, when people are searching, you can miss out and all your hard work has gone amiss if you don’t show a presence in your area.
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