What is Link Building? A Guide with Helpful Tips for Building Links

Link Building (also written as Linkbuilding and Link-Building) refers to the process of external websites linking to your website or creating internal links within your own websites. Link Building is a method of search engine optimization (SEO) assigned to the field of off-page optimization.

The techniques in Link Building are used to optimize a website's placement in Google or other search engines.

In search engine optimization, various factors are crucial. On one hand, it's important what happens on the website itself. It should be ensured that a website is technically well designed (Technical SEO) and that the content of a website is of high quality, relevant, and well optimized (On-page SEO). Moreover, it's important to note what is done outside the website (Off-page optimization). This includes how the link building is structured to ensure that traffic is directed from other relevant sites to your website.

Understanding Link Building and Off-page Optimization

Link building can be a time-consuming and difficult process because not all links or backlinks (links to your site) are of the same quality. Today, link building is essential for internet marketing success. Much has already been written about link building up to early 2018, with attempts at definitions or various shorter articles on link building. A complete guide with a holistic overview and useful tips was missing. Until now!

In this guide, we explain everything you need to know about link building and show you how you can become a link builder, thus creating high-quality backlinks.

We hope you find practical tips in this guide that can help you on your journey!

Fig.2 What is Link Building?

Link Building. Why is Link Building Important?

Google places a high value on the incoming links that a website receives from other sites.

The number and especially the quality of backlinks to a domain created through link building are among the three most important ranking factors for Google and other search engines. These parameters play a crucial role in evaluating a webpage when it comes to ranking the site higher or lower in search results for various keywords. Links act as signals to the search engine.

You can compare link building signals with your everyday work situation. Suppose you start at a company and achieve very good results. If none of your new colleagues notices this and it is not internally shared, no one knows how good you are and you might not receive the recognition you deserve.

However, if your colleagues and supervisors report in meetings how good your results are, a signal is set that can potentially lead to a promotion. This makes your work likely more popular with your supervisor. While this example is quite illustrative, it functions similarly with links and search engine optimization. The theory and the ideas behind it are that a webpage becomes more important the more views a page receives from different websites of an industry.

Fig.3 Links as a Sign of Popularity

A domain with many high-quality incoming links, also called backlinks, is better rated in Google than a website with fewer high-quality backlinks.

What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important in SEO Link Building?

A backlink is a reference (in the form of a hyperlink) from a foreign website to your own website.

When a website refers to an external website, it means that the external page is relevant to its own site for one or more reasons. The reference can, for example, be used for additional information on a specific topic or placed as a source reference.

Fig.4 Example of a Backlink

A backlink can also be seen as a rating that a website gets. Many ratings have a positive influence on the position in search results. Backlinks thus serve as the PR and marketing of your site in Google.

What is a Link?

A link (or hyperlink) is a connection from one place to another place on the internet. When someone clicks on a hyperlink, they are referred to a new informational path. Links connect different web pages and the internet together. The anatomy of a link is essentially: What is a link in HTML?

To understand link building and to work as a link builder yourself, it is necessary to first understand the basics of what a link looks like and how a backlink is created.

The image below shows the anatomy of a hyperlink in HTML code:

Fig.5 Explaining What a Link is

• Start: A hyperlink starts with an anchor tag (<a>) indicating to search engines that a link is following.

• Reference: The href attribute indicates a link's position. The text in the quotes determines the URL to which the link refers: ( href="https://www.marketinglenses.nl/linkbuilding" ).

• Anchor Text: The anchor text (also known as anchor text) is the text displayed in the clickable part of a link. This gives both visitors and search engines an idea of what topic the linked page refers to: (>linkbuilding<).

• Closure: The link is then closed by the closing tag of the anchor element ( /a>).

Differentiation: Dofollow and Nofollow Links

As described above, there are two different types of links. By default, the link is dofollow (and looks as described above). In response to spam techniques regarding search engine optimization (more on this later), the nofollow tag was also introduced. With nofollow links, webmasters can ensure that while a reference is sent from their site to another site through link building, no PageRank (or link juice) is passed. In other words: Google does not assign any value to a link with a rel = nofollow attribute in the HTML element as it would with a normal link.

In forums or blog comments, you can expect that nofollow links are automatically set there.

Below is an example of a nofollow link:

Fig.6 Explaining What a Nofollow Link is

Are nofollow links bad then? No, not at all. In fact, it is good and natural to have nofollow links in your link profile (more on this later).

Quantity vs. Quality of Backlinks

What is Linkbuilding in terms of quality and quantity?

For Google, a link is a signal of popularity and relevance.

Fig.7 Link Relevance and Popularity

The more different domains link to a website and the more backlinks a site gets, the more popular it becomes (due to the quantity of links) in the eyes of search engines like Google.

It is also important which other domains a website gets backlinks from. A backlink from a reputable page is more valuable than a link from an unknown page.

Moreover, the content of a page from which the links are sent is relevant.

For a website about automobiles, it is, for example, more valuable to get a backlink from another domain about cars than from a domain about women's clothing. All this should be considered regarding the quality of a link. An irrelevant link will have little positive impact on visibility in a search engine and can even have the opposite effect (more on this later).The quantity and quality of backlinks of a particular website were formerly translated into the so-called PageRank (PR) of a website.

This method is based on an algorithm named after Google founder Larry Page. It calculated a score for a domain (from 0 to 10) based on backlinks to the relevant page. The higher the value, the stronger the signal that the website contains relevant content.

Before Google, only the absolute number of backlinks (also called inlinks) was important for link building. This has changed significantly since PageRank. As a result, the entire approach to link building has changed dramatically.

Today, various indicators from multiple SEO marketing tools are used in the SEO world to evaluate the so-called "link profile" and the domain and link popularity of an existing site.

Examples of this are the Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow (CF) from Majestic, as well as the Domain Rating (DR) from Ahrefs. These ratings indicate whether backlinks from other domains have a good reputation and high authority.

The Domain Rating in Ahrefs increases when a domain receives more links from other domains. Pages that in turn have high DR weigh more heavily than those with a low domain rating.

Fig.8 Ahrefs Tool for SEO with Domain Rating

While the Trust Flow indicates the trust or "quality" of the incoming links to the website, the Majestic Citation Flow indicates the "quantity" of backlinks to the corresponding website. A link from a reputable site in a specific field carries more weight and transfers more trust to a website than, for example, a small, unknown blog.

Fig.9 Majestic Link Building Tool with Trust Flow and Citation Flow

Websites with a high rating quickly gain better positions in Google's search results and other search engines. Generating backlinks through link building is also crucial in 2018 to rank higher in Google in the future.

This is not only based on previous statements from Google itself but also from various surveys aimed at determining which factors have the greatest impact on higher placements in Google. Verified by various studies from known SEO websites, information from the MOZ research, the Searchmetrics ranking correlation study, as well as the Stone Temple research from 2017 shows relevant data on the relationship between links and rankings in Google.

Fig.10 Google's Ranking Factors for SEO and Linking

These studies show that, compared to other important SEO factors, the number of referring domains most strongly correlates with higher positioning in a search engine (referring domains). Therefore, link building (off-page optimization) is essential to make your website visible to your target audience on the internet.

What Does Good Quality in Link Building Mean and What Does a Natural Link Profile Look Like?

Link building has a strong positive impact on the rankings in the Google search results.

• But what exactly is a good backlink?

• What influence does the anchor text have on placement in search engines?

• And what does a natural link profile look like now?

Questions we will answer in this section.

What is a Good Link Profile?

In a natural link profile, the number of organic backlinks grows and varies. This is how Google and other search engines evaluate it.

Therefore, link building should be carried out regularly. This means that links are best created continuously (in a natural time frame).

It is not recommended to build many links in one week and then not create any for several weeks or months. This is "unnatural" and search engines penalize websites that attempt to achieve higher positions through manipulation with link building. A penalty (or penalty) from Google can result in a large number of keywords being removed from the Google index, and your site appearing poorly or not at all in search results.

For this reason, a thoughtful and professional link building strategy is essential.

To satisfy these requirements, link builders need to regularly receive multiple good quality backlinks from large and small websites for their domain.

Important factors are also the varied distribution of anchor texts (distribution) and a balanced distribution of do-follow and no-follow links.

The Ideal Anchor Text Distribution

A 100% perfect anchor text distribution does not exist as it depends on your industry, the behavior of the competition, and the alignment of your website. However, SEO experts agree on what a desired and safe distribution during link building is. The following table provides an overview of the recommended distribution with associated anchor types.

Fig.11 Distribution for a Natural Link Profile

• 70% Brand Anchor Text: Google favors strong brands. Backlinks with your brand name are the least likely to be marked as spam. The main part of the anchor text should preferably be the brand anchor.

• 20% URLs: Another natural anchor text is linking without an anchor text. This means that no anchor text is specified, and the complete URL is the anchor (more on this under the heading "Anatomy of a Link").

• 5% Generic Anchors: These are called safe and neutral words that do not relate to the content of your website. Examples include: "More Info", "Read More", or "Continue on this Site".

• 4% Partial Keyword Match Anchors: With these anchor texts, you can use the words you want to rank for on Google, but in combination with other neutral words. If you want to rank for the keyword "driving lessons", "More Information on Driving Lessons" would be a partial keyword match anchor.

• 1% Exact Match Anchors: The anchor text matches the exact keyword you want to rank for in the search engine. This is obviously the most effective anchor text to score with but also the most dangerous. Overusing exact anchor text in link building is one of the main reasons for Google's Penguin penalty (more on this later).

For more information about the different types of anchor texts, we recommend the GotchSEO article on anchor texts.

Are All Links Equal? No! Some Are More Equal

The quality of the pages and the authority of the domains from which the backlinks come are important because they can speak for your domain's relevance. High-traffic websites from similar topics are more likely to make links to other quality websites and are less likely to be linked to smaller, less visible sites.

What is Link Building today? And how does that differ from the past?Over the years, the implementation of search engine optimization and thus link building has evolved significantly. Due to various algorithm updates from Google, techniques that were used years ago for link building have no effect anymore in 2018. Outdated approaches can even be harmful to your site today. The most important update for off-page optimization (link building) is the "Google Penguin Update".The purpose of this algorithm is to have Google evaluate the quality of links between different web pages and penalize unauthorized link building techniques to prevent abuse and unnatural manipulation. This algorithm has been continuously updated since its introduction in 2012 and is now so advanced in 2018 that we speak of the real-time Penguin algorithm (Penguin 4.0). This means that Google Penguin now punishes domains continuously and faster than ever when using prohibited link building strategies.

Fig.12 Understanding the Difference Between Black-Hat SEO and White-Hat SEO

Some examples of black hat techniques (unauthorized search engine marketing techniques) are:

• Automatic link placement on many different websites.

• Web logs that only focus on sending links (link farms).

• Spam commenting (link placement as a comment under an article).

• Links to unimportant directories (industry directory).

• Unnaturally many link references from the same website.

• Link building through exchanging backlinks with other irrelevant websites.

Are these techniques no longer used today? No, they are indeed still frequently used because these link building methods are often inexpensive and do not take up much time.

There are still many so-called "link building experts" who use these techniques and offer their customers link building packages, whereby many links are placed at a relatively low cost.

This might sound appealing to a layman, but as mentioned, this type of link building will negatively impact websites in the long term.

Black hat techniques may have a short-term effect. However, from our experience, Google Penguin can quickly recognize this and penalize your domain for these practices. The consequence would be that you are not discoverable on the internet for your target audience.

Therefore, use legal (white hat) techniques that do not violate Google's guidelines.

Relevant Links from Various Domains

In 2018, it is more important for your marketing than ever to receive backlinks from high-quality domains and that these links are relevant to the topics (the content) of your own website.

If your website is about clothes, it is beneficial to get backlinks from other sites like clothing stores or blogs, but not from a site about cars.

Also, a backlink from a new additional domain is better than a link from a site that has already given you a link.

You can compare it again with the colleague who tells in a meeting that you do a good job. It obviously has more impact if in a following meeting another colleague also says you do a good job, than if the feedback always comes from the same person. This is how it also works with link building.

The better the links, the better the result of your webpage in the search results, which can ultimately lead to greater success for your company.

How to Build Links? Various Ways to Obtain Backlinks

What does link building mean for you as a link builder in practice?

The purpose of link building is to get backlinks from other websites to your own.

Linking multiple backlinks to your domain improves your SEO and allows you to rank higher on Google for various relevant keywords so that you are better visible in the search results on the internet for your target audience.

• But how can links be built?

• What should you do so other websites refer to you?

• What should you particularly focus on?

Link building is a comprehensive process that takes time and energy. At least this is the case if you handle off-page optimization properly.

It is important that the focus is not necessarily on inserting as many links as possible, but that interesting and relevant content is created that can be found by your target audience.

Fig.13 How to Optimize Content for SEO

Valuable content is shared faster both in the form of links and on social media. You can benefit from this. A number of link building strategies can help you create more backlinks.

Some off-page strategies take more time or are more effective than others in search engine optimization.

Various Link Building Techniques

Below is a list of various link building techniques that you can perform yourself and with which you can start immediately:

• Register your domain in relevant industry directories. It is important that the directories are of good quality and relevant to your own target audience.

• Create unique content on your website. This content should provide added value for your target audience. If the content is interesting enough, it will also be linked.

• Link Baits are interesting and visually high-quality content offered to "attract" links from others to your site. This is particularly welcomed in videos, infographics, and white papers.

• Write guest posts for other websites, known as "guest blogging". You can offer other website owners to write a relevant article on a topic that fits well with the interests of their readers. You can then place a link to your website in this article.

• Publishing press releases. If you want to report something new to your company or industry, you can write a press release about it and send it to (local) news portals or other domains in your industry. If they publish the articles, you usually get a backlink in the form of a source reference.

• Be active in various forums and blogs and then respond with a link to your website in the comment (often these links are automatically in nofollow).

• Conduct an SEO Link Building Competitor Analysis. Analyze where your competition gets their backlinks. Are these interesting sites for you as well? Then ask those sites to also link to you.

• Use an ABC Link Exchange. Since a link exchange between two websites often brings little and can be detrimental (more on this above), this is a good and effective link building technique. Simply put, website A refers to B, site B refers to C, and website C refers to A. This way, you get a backlink on domain C without having to put a link there directly.

Fig.14 ABC Link Exchange for Link Building

• Broken Link Building: This is a labor-intensive but very effective link building strategy. Here, you check if there are called "broken links" on linked websites from which you want a link. This means that a link reference was previously placed on a site, but it no longer exists (e.g., because the site is no longer online, and the link is therefore broken). You can point this out to the article's author or webmaster and ask if they would like to change the link to your website.

• Product Reviews: Have a blogger from your industry test one or more products (for free). In return, you get a product review on their site with a backlink.

For more various link-building techniques, we recommend our article on backlinks and building backlinks as well as the article by Jon Cooper that he wrote for Point Blank SEO on link building tactics.

Every link builder has their own preferred link building techniques. Which of the above options you use is for you to decide. The orientation of your link building strategy depends on what business goals you pursue and what priorities you want to set (also in terms of possible costs).

It is important in any case to ensure quality and relevance for the user through the linking.

Link Building Tips

Here are a number of practical tips on what should and shouldn't happen during link building.

Link Building Tips you can use as a link builder now:

Fig.15 Tips and Advice for a Link Builder

• Make sure you get both dofollow and nofollow links. This is more natural than simply placing dofollow links. (For example, you can easily get these in forums or social media channels).

  • Backlinks from different domains with different IP addresses are more valuable than links from domains with the same address. Make sure you get recommendations from many different websites with unique IPs.

  • Make sure your links vary with varying anchor texts during link building for a natural link profile.

  • Consider reciprocal link building (exchanging links) only with strong domains and ensure this link always has a clear added value (otherwise, this technique is prone to Google's Penguin Penalty).

  • Make sure you get links to various (sub-) pages of your website and not all backlinks are aimed at one single page. Make sure you're linked with both your homepage and other landing pages (also called deep links).

  • A backlink from a website in the same language and the same country-specific top-level domain (ccTLD), like .de, is more valuable than a link from a page written in another language.

  • How many other external links are being sent from the page from which you get your backlinks? Who else is being linked? Ensure that the page does not have too many other outgoing links to other websites.

  • Share your content also on social media. Although social signals (such as social links, likes, and shares) are not nearly as important as those from websites, social media activities are increasingly influencing search results on Google.

Further recommendations and tips can be found in this SEO Link Building article by Brian Dean from Backlinko. What Shouldn't You Do During Link Building?

• Don't create links to bad internet sites located in "bad neighborhoods". Avoid linking to the 3 Ps pages (pills, porn, and poker sites) as well as spam forums.

• Don't build your incoming links in an irregular time pattern. Building too many links in a short time and then not creating any for a while will be recognized as an unnatural link profile.

• Placing irrelevant links. Ensure that the reference you place as a link builder is always linked to the topics on your own site. If you have a website about shoes, a backlink from a fashion blog might be interesting, but not a link to or from an online office supplies shop.

Become a Link Building Specialist (Off-page Optimization)

With this guide, we have familiarized you with the concept of link building (or synonym off-page SEO). The importance and key concepts were explained, and we provided a number of useful and practical tips and strategies.

Earning a top position in the search engine is very valuable today as more and more people in Germany use Google. The off-page part of the complex SEO specialization plays a key role in your website's success.

We hope we were able to answer the question "What is link building?" and that you are now also enthusiastic about off-page optimization and can advance your SEO as a link builder.

If you prefer to have link building carried out by an experienced expert, you can, of course, outsource link building to a professional to achieve optimal performance.

Fig.16 Question and Answer on Link Building

What Can We Do for You?

If you have questions about various concepts and topics, off-page SEO techniques, or want more information and explanations on how to achieve sustainable and effective marketing results, we are happy to help you! Ask your question and we will be happy to advise you on developing a successful link-building strategy to ensure you don't lose visitors to your competition.