In the past we posted an article all about the best way to approach link building, but it struck us that it’s only going to be of any use if you actually know what link building is. So we decided to create another one of our “Concise” guides, to fill you in on the essentials of one of the cornerstones of SEO, without any of the fluff.

What is link building?

A link is any online text or image that can be clicked on to take you to another webpage.

Links from one webpage to another on a different website are known as ‘backlinks’ or ‘inbound links’. They are displayed as ‘hyperlinks’, which are links hidden behind anchor text.  They’ll typically look something like this sentence.

Link building is the process of getting external pages to publish content that will link through to your webpage when clicked on.

The idea behind link building is to get as many external pages as possible linking to your website in order to boost the reputation and search engine ranking of your site. But they can’t just be any external pages, they must be quality – we’ll get to that later.

Why do I need to build links?

Because links are a major part of search engine optimisation (SEO) and one of the most important search engine ranking factors. While there are over 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, it is widely accepted that link building is one of the most influential.

In Google’s own words:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.” – i.e. link to.

You need to build links to improve your SEO and enhance your search ranking. Refer to our ‘3 minute guide to SEO’ for everything SEO-related.

Some of the benefits of link building include:

  • Improved visibility in search engines
  • Respect as a thought-leader and industry authority
  • Easier indexing of webpages in search engines
  • More traffic from sources that have linked to you

 

How do I build links?

Google says that you’re more likely to rank higher for targeted keywords if external websites are ranking to you.

You can do this by:

  • Creating relevant, informative and engrossing content that other websites want to share, reference and link to in their own content
  • Getting links from business partners and friends in respected industry-related positions
  • Getting your products and/or services reviewed by influential industry websites and bloggers
  • Submitting content to established press release websites

 

Check out our article on ‘How to build links and live to tell the tale’ for the lowdown on safe link building. Incidentally, the link to that article is an example of internal link building, if you’re interested.

Why does quality matter?

Because Google penalises anything that doesn’t meet its high standards. Link building is very much a case of quality over quantity – 10 links from quality sources will have a greater effect on rankings than 10,000 links from low quality sources.

Quality link building involves implementing superior content that people feel compelled to link to on their own websites and social media accounts. These are the sort of links that search engines place the most value on. The problem with these natural and ethical methods, though, is that they take a lot of time and effort. They are also reliant on websites that you don’t control.

Link building methods that search engines don’t take kindly to (i.e. methods you should avoid) include:

  • Paid linking – paying another party to link or build multiple links to your site
  • Guest blogging – submitting blog posts to low quality websites solely for SEO purposes
  • Content spinning – creating multiple paraphrased versions of the same article and submitting them to low quality websites
  • Link swapping – exchanging links with websites of poor quality or no relevance to your website

 

Dofollow and nofollow links

You’ll hear these terms a lot during link building campaigns.

‘Dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ are attributes designed to influence search engine bots.

Dofollow links force search engine spiders to follow a link and index the page for the benefit of the search engine and humans.

Nofollow links see a HTML attribute placed in a link to stop link juice spreading to other pages. Basically, Google won’t crawl the link.

A nofollow link looks like this:

<a href= http://www.website1.com rel=”nofollow”>Website1</a>

<a href= http://www.website2.com  rel=”external nofollow”>Website2</a>

In summary

Link building is a fundamental part of SEO and essential in reaching the ultimate goal of a first page search ranking. Links must be earned rather than built and done naturally through quality content that offers value to the user.

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This article was originally published on the Pea Soup Digital blog. We've been helping UK ecommerce brands with SEO, Shopify development, web design, and Klaviyo email marketing for over 20 years.

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