Linkbuilding is placing backlinks to your website in the content of other websites. This is not only to find potential customers directly. If a site is linked to by many ranking web pages, Google perceives it as authoritative. Its status grows and it shows up higher in organic search results. This increases traffic to the site, and the number of customers grows without further investment. Linkbuilding is one of the basic tools of complex promotion. How important is it? How to properly build up the link mass? Let's take a closer look at what linkbuilding is. What are its features?
Linkbuilding in simple words
A website can be compared to a cafe, and the links to it are recommendations from other people. The more such "word of mouth" advertising it receives, the more popular it becomes. It is the same with a website. The more quality links to it from other resources, the more valuable it is perceived by the search engine and shows it higher in the results of user queries. This is what linkbuilding means in simple words: links to a website from different web pages bring visitors to it and increase its reputation in Google.
What tasks linkbuilding solves:
- Improving search engine positions. The more links to a site, the more likely it is to show up in the top of search results.
- Attracting traffic. Visitors who follow links to the site from other resources may become interested in its content and become regular readers and customers.
- Audience Expansion. Getting links from different sites attracts new visitors who were previously unaware of the site.
- Sales increase, the number of regular customers increases.
How does a backlink attract visitors to a website? For example, there is a blog about traveling, about the attractions of popular places. A reputable tour site puts a link to this blog in its article or in the tour card. Customers of that site want to learn more about the area where they want to go on vacation, and go to the travel blog via the backlink.
Linkbuilding Examples:
- Guest Posting: Inviting other sites to publish articles with a backlink to your site.
- Link Exchange. The owners or managers of a site agree to reciprocally link to each other's sites.
- Commenting on forums and blogs. Active participation in discussions with publication of links to the site.
- Press releases. Placing information about the site on popular news portals with backlinks.
- Social Media. Publishing content with links to the site on social media.
Who is linkbuilding for?
Linkbuilding is necessary for everyone who does business online. Regardless of topic, target audience, geolocation. It also doesn't matter if it's a large multi-page website or a lending site. Who especially needs backlinks:
- Linkbuilding for an online store is a good advertising opportunity. Links remain on the sites for a long time and bring customers without further expenditure of time and finances.
- Backlinks for a corporate website are an opportunity to introduce your brand and offerings to your audience.
- For service sites, backlinks are needed to find clients for physical work outlets. This is how hairdressers, masseurs, dentists, cosmetologists, and repairmen find their clients.
Famous brands are actively building backlinks. Airbnb is a service for booking accommodation in more than 190 countries. It actively uses linkbuilding, working with bloggers and owners of tourism websites to post articles and reviews about its accommodations: apartments, hostels, hotels, with backlinks to its website.
Amazon is working on increasing its link profile by using several strategies at the same time. These include guest posting on relevant websites, creating interesting content for their blog. Amazon works with influential product reviewers and bloggers in their niche.
Coca-Cola, Nike create unique content that evokes an emotional response from the audience. They actively distribute it through social networks. This helps brands to attract the attention of users and increase the number of backlinks to their website.
How to build link mass
It is important to choose the right sites to place your links. These are blogs, online stores, groups in social networks with a related topic or related areas. The link is inserted in a guest post or article that talks directly about the product or service or a related product.
Which sites are suitable for backlinks:
- Backlinks are placed on sites that match the geolocation, language and type of audience. This territory can include not only the area of physical location of the store, but also the territory of delivery. This is a city, neighborhood or country. If delivery is also possible to neighboring states, select suitable locations. When a business is not geographically bound, the geolocation indicator is not so important.
- Choose sites with a high flow of visitors. Then the links will be seen by more people. If the web page has few views, there is no point in placing a link there, because it will not bring buyers and it has a low reputation for search engines.
- Among suitable sites on the subject pay attention to what DR rating they have. This is an indicator of the authority of the domain for all its backlinks. URL rating determines the link popularity of a particular web page. These indicators can be checked on special sites. There are free services.
It's not easy to find quality sites with high rankings that fit the topic. It is even more difficult to get backlinks from them. There are several ways to do this. It is desirable to use all of them to increase the number of received links.
The best ways to get backlinks
Google has a negative attitude towards buying links and perceives it as artificial link building. However, it is an effective method of promotion. Most sites that have backlinks, buy them. After all, if you create useful content and passively wait until someone wants to link to it, there will be little chance to get quality links. You need to actively promote such materials.
How to get backlinks for free:
- Use outreach - partner with public personalities, bloggers. Brand owners, companies, private entrepreneurs cooperate with Influencers to place mutual backlinks on websites and social networks. They host joint podcasts, live events. So through outreach they become partners, exchange audiences.
- Create content that people will want to share with their subscribers or exchange with people they know. This can be charts, infographics, research, questions, online tools, guides and tutorials. Often, to promote them, you need to lead social media: shoot reels, make stories that would encourage viewers to take advantage of these useful materials and click through to the site.
- When placing backlinks manually, in other people's social network profiles, business directories on forums and blogs, it is important to keep in mind that they should not look like spam mailings. They are placed where they can really interest users. It is believed that links that a site visitor could place on their own, Google perceives as less valuable. Therefore, it is better if they are published by the owner of the blog or forum.
- They find broken links on sites that might be good places to place their links. Then contact the site administrator and offer to link to their web page on relevant topics. To do this, it is important to create very high quality content on their pages that would be useful to the audience. Ahrefs contacted 515 website administrators who had backlinks leading to web pages that were no longer working. In return, they offered them their quality article. As a result, they got 36 backlinks. Of these, 21 of them were from high ranking sites. This helped bring the article to the top of the Google search results.
- Analyzing competitors' link profiles helps identify opportunities for backlinks from the same resources. Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, has developed the "skyscraper technique". He finds links that lead to competitors' web pages. Creates better content and invites site owners to link to it. Backlinko created an article with data from the latest SEO research and invited 160 website owners to link to it. Of those, 17 of them agreed. This is how Backlinko managed to get so many quality backlinks for free.
- Offer their partners and clients to place links to the site on their web resources in exchange for bonuses, discounts.
- A backlink can be an indication of authorship, if some site, social network account uses content from someone else's site.
- Cooperate with popular bloggers who publish a fragment of useful material from the customer's site and provide a link.
There are services for finding sites to place backlinks. You can check their reputation and rating. In order for backlinks to increase search engine rankings, it is important to design them correctly. Let's consider several factors.
Peculiarities of the design of backlinks to the site
Google is likely to perceive links that are immediately visible on a web page and are at the beginning of the main content as more valuable. This increases the likelihood that a reader will click on them. If you place backlinks at the bottom, in sidebars, visitors may not notice them.
To make the search engine better recognize the subject of the site, on which the users are to go, make an anchor text. What you need to consider when designing:
- Briefly describe what the web page is about.
- It is recommended to use descriptions that are similar in meaning.
- The text should not be repeated word for word. The system may consider this as manipulation of the rating.
It is important to periodically analyze backlinks. The "Referral Traffic" report in the Google Analytics service can help with this. You can see which websites supply traffic and add more backlinks from such resources.
How many backlinks do you need?
It depends on many factors: the type of business, its territory of operation, the size of the site, its content and purpose. In some topics it is easier to get backlinks. They are more willingly placed when articles or other content provide solutions to problems, training, unique information: statistics, research results, surveys. Web pages with such material is easier to bring to the TOP.
In the first few months after building a website, you usually need 10-20 links per month. Post one backlink per few days. Further increase the quantity. The higher the quality and rating of backlink donor sites - PageRank, the less they need. Only very famous sites of popular brands and companies can naturally build up links in such quantity and more.
To buy links yourself, use special exchanges, aggregators, sites. It takes time to find suitable sites, to make sure they are reliable. It is not easy to find reputable sites whose owners will agree to place a backlink.
You can order SEO website promotion from the agency, which will significantly save time and effort in creating external link mass on the site. Specialists already know how to quickly identify authoritative sites. They have a database of reliable resources for buying links and will find sites for new topics. SEO-specialists know how to design backlinks so that the search engine perceives them as natural.
In addition, SEO promotion gives maximum results only in a complex. Backlinks alone are not enough. It is necessary to optimize the content, enter the appropriate keywords, make the correct internal linking, design tags and much more. The service of complex website promotion from SEO-specialists qualitatively solves all these problems.
