February 25, 2025
What Is Link Building?
Link building is a key aspect of a strong SEO strategy. It involves acquiring backlinks from other websites to your own. But why is it important? Link building improves the trustworthiness of your website, which in turn boosts rankings and increases traffic.
Internal links are used to help the website user and search engines navigate through the website. Without these paths, conversions are hampered and the user can get frustrated easily. Combining internal links with external links to other domains is key. Having reputable links to other websites gives further knowledge to your audience.
Why Is Link Building Important?
For SEO, a high ranking website is always the aim. There are many ways to push your website up the SERP, one method is backlinks. Backlinks are good indications to Google that your site is an authoritative source of information within your industry. Google takes this into consideration when determining rankings.
Backlinks can come in many different shapes and sizes, and not all are great quality. Make sure you consider which ones you want to have. A strong backlink comes from a prominent and renowned website that provides value to your own. Google recognises this as providing relevant information and content. However, low quality websites can detrimentally affect your SEO. These can be potentially spam, irrelevant leads that come from untrustworthy sources.
Domain authority is a metric that predicts a website’s ranking on a search engine. It is widely used within the SEO industry. It is useful for comparing yourself to other competitors. Backlinks and domain authority work hand in hand, influencing your website’s credibility.
Types of Links
Natural Links
Earned without outreach. These are the ideal links for SEO. These can occur from someone using your assets or linking your site on their blog or website organically. These often occur from high quality content, such as infographics or “how to” guides.
Manually Built Links
Acquired through outreach and networking. Actively engaging with relevant sites and blogs is a great way to manually build links and improve your rankings. This is a focus much more on quality rather than quantity. This is essential for improving any website.
Common Link Building Strategies
Guest posting: This process is creating relevant and engaging content to place on someone else’s website. These would then link back to your own website, establishing a backlink to improve website ranking. This is a time consuming process but is a valuable strategy.
Broken link building: 404s are common on most websites, it happens when links are broken on a site. SEO tools can be used to find these links on relevant websites to you and fill in the gap with your own content.
HARO (Help a Reporter Out): This platform can be used to connect to journalists and build content for websites. It is great for creating linkable assets that can be used to make the ideal backlink.
Link Building Best Practices
When creating backlinks, make sure to focus on quality over quantity. Too many links can be seen as spammy. It is better to have one high-quality backlink than ten mediocre ones. Make sure to get links from a variety of reputable sources, content from several different areas will improve rankings more as you are seen to be more knowledgeable.
Make sure not to create a link and simply leave it alone. Various tools can be used to track and analyse the backlinks. GA4 can be used to see how much traffic comes from referrals. You can keep a track of your overall links in Google Search Console. Semrush can also allow you to see your domain authority trend.
Avoid buying links. Purchasing links often isn’t the best strategy to use. Unless the link is highly relevant and full of good information, Google is likely to see these as poor quality links, leading to a bad effect on your domain authority.
Conclusion
Backlinks are a key part of SEO strategies. Looking to boost your search engine ranking? It’s the best place to start when it comes to off-page optimisation. There are various methods of gaining these links, but key aspects to keep in mind are; quality over quantity, and keep the links as relevant and informative as possible.
Looking to kick start your SEO optimisation journey with backlinks? Get in touch with us today to see how we can help.
