Link Building Guide For Beginners

“For people to discover your website, you need to build pathways and big, flashing signs that lead them there. In digital marketing terms, this means you need links, links, and more links.”

– Luisito Batongbakal

In this guide, I will give you a brief about all the major link building strategies for beginners. If you go beyond reading and implement these tactics on your website they will definitely help you in the ranking.

For any successful SEO campaign, links are one of the most important ranking factors by Google. There are more than 200 ranking factors that Google considers before ranking a website, but the top three ranking factors are Links, Content, and RankBrain.

Links are essential if you’re going to compete and grow online, and that is going to be more important in near future as well. Which means for ranking higher organically on Google search result page you must have to build links or I would say you must have to earn them.

There are lots of link building strategies out there but knowing which one is best for you and how to build them is something which most people don’t know. 

Here in this post, I will share some of the important aspects of link building. Along with, I am going to show you some link building strategies you can follow to increase your website traffic drastically.

You are going to have a guide on link building for a better understanding of the concept behind the successful websites and their strategies regarding link building practice and how they increase the traffic on their websites.

Before we move on to link building strategy, you need to understand what exactly links are, how these links work. So, without any further ado, let’s get started.

What is Link Building?

Link building is a process of getting links from another website to your website. Links are used on a webpage in two ways, First, it is used by users to navigate from one page to another page and from one website to another.

Second, for search engines, it has a completely different significance as they use it to crawl the web pages on the website and from one website to another to find out new content for indexing. They also use it to determine the ranking of the webpage.

Link, Anchor Text, and Referring Domain

A link is a word, phrase, or image, when you click on it, it redirects from one web page to another. A link generally appears blue in color. For example, this is a link.

A word or text that a hyperlink displays in blue color is called anchor text. When you click on it, you get redirected to a new website or web location. 

Suppose, website A has the link to website B, when someone clicks on the link, he/she gets redirected to website B. Here, website A is working as a referring domain. Hence, a referring domain is a website that redirects its readers to another web document or web page. 

What Is the Importance of a Link?

To understand the concept and the importance of links you need to go back in time. Before Google, Search Engines like Yahoo! and Alta Vista were the dominant players. And, they used to show search results completely based on the content on a webpage.

Then Google entered the market with his PageRank algorithm. Instead of analyzing the content of a page for ranking, the Google PageRank algorithm evaluated how many people linked to that webpage.

Still, after years, links are the best way to determine the quality of a webpage.

In the layman language if people are talking about you on their website (by linking to your website) Google considers it a signal of trust and authority and ranks you higher in search results.

A hyperlink directs the readers to another website containing the related information that your website page has. In case someone is using your website page link on his/ her website page.

In this way, a Link has significance in the organic ranking of your website. If someone uses your website page link on his website page, Google gives priority to your site by considering that link as a vote of trust for your website.

The more websites links to you, the more credibility it gains. A hyperlink extraordinarily works for promoting the websites and building authority in your industry. 

Factors That Can Affect Your Website Ranking?

Google ranks those websites that have high-quality links from relevant referring domains (number of unique domains referring to your website).

The ranking of websites depends on the following three factors.

The below given Ahrefs research data shows how these factors can affect Google ranking.

Page Backlink Factor

Page backlink factors mean factors of referring pages (External web page linking to your web page) which can affect the ranking of your site. These factors are:

1. URL rating – It is the strength of the referring page.

2. Referring domains – It is the number of unique domains referring to the referring page.

3. Referring pages – Number of pages referring to the referring page

4. Backlinks – Total number of backlinks referring page has

Domain Backlinks Factor

Domain Backlinks factors mean, referring domain factors that can affect your site ranking. These are :

1. Referring domain – number of unique domain

2. Domain rating – Strength of that domain

3. Referring pages – Pages referring to that domain

4. Backlinks – Total number of backlinks pointing to that domain

Suppose, your website has many referring domains but the ranking depends on the factors such as the referring domains relevancy with your site. Google prefers high traffic domains and also Google checks the quality of content a referring domain has. 

You can find the referring domain which is using your website link through Ahrefs site explorer. You can remove your link or continue as per the quality and rank of the referring domains.

On-Page Factor

Next website ranking depends on on-page factors such as keyword in the title of article or blog, keyword use in heading if you are using keywords in your content, and targeting keyword in your meta description. In research by Ahrefs of over 2 million keywords to measure backlink factors, they found a correlation between page, domain, and on-page ranking factors. In the below graph, you can see how each factor is important for your website ranking.

Content Matching

The referring domain’s content should match the content of your website. 

Suppose website A creates stock market-related content, website B creates education-related content, and website C creates mutual funds related content.

In this case, if website A is the referring domain of website B and website C. It means website A is the referring domain for both websites, then Google considers backlink from website A to C more relevant than website A to B. This is how content matching works.

Content Quality and Word Count

According to the Research done by Backlinko and BuzzSumo long-form content has a greater possibility of earning quality backlinks, which contribute significantly to improving search rankings.

Here’s a graph from Hubspot that depicts the correlation between content length and linking domains.

It’s very clear that Long-form content gets more links than short articles. Therefore, long-form content appears to be ideal for backlink acquisition.

The above picture shows how your website traffic increases as your referring domains and links increase. 

You can also see from the graph below why you need to write at least 2000 words articles for ranking in the top 10 results.

Apart from the importance of backlinks, keyword research is another determining factor for the ranking of your website. 

Without keyword research, your website can’t rank in Google SEO. You can do proper keyword research, and then only you can write an SEO friendly article. 

Competitor Backlink Profile Analysis

When you perform a competitor backlink analysis, your competitor is someone who shares an audience similar to yours. During this research, you assess your competitor’s number of backlinks and overall online authority.

After that, you build your link building strategies based on that data, Because it is easier to get links from those websites from which your competitor already getting links.

Ahrefs is the best tool that you can use for competitor analysis. In the below image, you can see the URL strength (UR) of your competitor page and domain rating (DR) of your competitor.

With the help of Ahrefs tool, you can check how many websites are linking to your competitor website, there you can check the referring page URL rating (UR) and its domain rating (DR).

To check backlinks and Referring domain, go to Ahrefs site explorer then insert your competitor domain name in the search box.

Here you can see the detailed analysis of your competitor referring domain profile.

Referring Domains are very important in terms of SEO. Google does not rank your website if the referring domains are not-relevant to your niche topic. Which means you need trustworthy, high-quality, and authoritative backlinks to rank higher in Google.

Best Link Building Strategies for you

Link Bait

Create content that attracts links naturally due to its high value or unique proposition. Links are considered ‘earned’ rather than ‘built’. Although that is not to say that Link Bait content does not require promotion.

In simple terms, link bait means creating content that attracts links naturally to your website because of the high quality and the value it adds to the reader. It requires in-depth research and creativeness for creating something unique.

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is a tactic used to find out a broken link on another website (i.e., dead) link, then you need to create better content than the earlier one. After that, you can outreach to the website owner and ask him to rather than linking to the dead resource he can link to a new and updated version of the resource.

It works very well in most of the cases because nobody wants to link to the dead links on their website, they add to a poor user experience.

Guest Blogging

This strategy is very effective for link building the meaning of Guest posting is writing and publishing an article on someone else’s website. For that, you need to approach your industry-specific websites then need to send an outreach email to them.

Infographics

An infographic is a collection of images, data, graphs with minimal text that gives an easy-to-understand overview of a topic.

Infographics are popular nowadays and it’s been a very effective link building strategy as well. People love to consume visual content, they are easy to share and linkable.

Use HARO for Quality Backlinks

HARO is a free service that provides sources to journalists for upcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources to answer them.

HARO (short for Help a Reporter Out) is one of the best ways to get backlinks from authoritative sites.

Press Releases

The press release link building technique is usually a great way to attract links through press release websites. They have high domain authority which helps you in organic ranking.

Again, the important thing is good content, that is newsworthy. Usually, this content has to be fresh and new in your industry in order to get the notice of publishers.

Participating In Niche Forums

Forums are the place where people ask their industry-related questions and experts can answer them.

It’s a good start for those who are beginning their link building campaign. Forums are more about helping others or adding value through your response rather than self-promotion.

Start by finding your niche related forums; remember every forum has its own set of rules. Read the guidelines carefully, then follow the next steps.

If you do it naturally and add links to relevant resources when required, then they could become the medium of quality referral traffic to your site.

Here is an example of the link which I had built for my website from this high DA forum website webflow.

Blog Commenting

Blog Commenting means participating in the comments section of the website by posting valuable comments on the posts or blogs which are related to your industry.

It can be a very effective tactic that helps you in building a relationship with the webmaster, but also with the visitors to that page.

You can post comments in various ways, it can be an appreciation, a question, a topic of discussion.

Quality comments, which add value and show expertise, can drive traffic to your site and help to grow your audience.

Conclusion

I hope this article on link building will help you understand the importance of backlinks and how you can earn Backlinks for your website

In reality, there is no shortcut for link building. You need to add value through your content to your website users. Quality content is the result of research, creativity, and your unique way of explaining things.

It’s a gradual process, if you remain persistent in your efforts surely you will be successful in your efforts.