Linkbuilding (which in most sites in Spanish appears written as a single word ‘linkbuilding’) is a widely used resource in digital marketing campaigns .
As you will already know by now, among the most important SEO techniques to enhance the visibility of your project, the acquisition of external links is one of the most important. Under the term of link building those actions that we initiate are grouped with the objective that our web is linked by other sites to increase our popularity in the network. Here we tell you everything about this strategy.
Link building basics
If you wonder what link building is , keep reading this article. We are going to tell you the foundations of one of the fundamental strategies of digital marketing.
Link building is based on the idea that the more websites that link to ours, the greater our popularity will be, which can be essential to achieve the expected success. However, not just any website works for us, they must be quality sites with a good positioning and that meet certain characteristics.
What you should know before proposing your link building strategy is that the fundamental thing when working on link building is to get natural links and that they are made from authoritative domains . Do not worry if you do not know what we mean, because we are going to elaborate carefully on each important aspect of this strategy, in order to give you a guide that can help you understand it and put it into practice.
What is link building?
As for what is link building, we could summarize it in that it is a digital marketing strategy that consists of establishing connected paths between various web pages ; in this way, the administrators of each site will be benefited by the traffic of those websites in which links to their site appear. And Google will have many alternative ways of getting to your site and deciding to show it in search results.
In short, link building strategies are used to reach an agreement with the administrator of another site to have links to our site appear on theirs and to place links on our website that lead to your site. Through this strategy we can enhance our visibility and help the visibility of our “partner”; This is because both sites will be linked in some way and will benefit from positioning.
Surely you have heard of the concept of black hat SEO . Do you know what is it about? We will tell you. The “black hat” in search engine optimization brings together those not recommended practices that are carried out to deceive search engines with the aim of obtaining profits. As you can imagine, it is not a habit that Google likes very much because we are trying to evade its rules of fairness and naturalness; However, if we execute them wisely, they can be very useful for the search engine positioning of our portal. Link building is in this category of practices; Only recommended if they are to be done carefully and carefully because, otherwise, they can seriously damage our prestige with Google.
But as the saying goes, “made the law, cheated” and sometimes it becomes essential to play with risk a little, in order to function efficiently. It is a question, then, of looking for those legal loopholes in the search engine laws, to take advantage of them and manage our site, achieving long-term positive results without resulting in penalties.
Regarding link building, although to a certain extent it could be a kind of misleading advertising, it is very effective in achieving visibility. Therefore, it is a practice that we can learn and do on our site without breaking the rules. Learning to work this trap correctly does not make us cheats but rather cunning .
Do you want to be smart and improve the work of your site? Here you can learn to link building in the most efficient and effective way possible.
Why are links so important?
The main objective of link building is to expand our audience . That is, that visitors to other sites know of our existence and visit us. However, the links must be well done to get the positive results.
It is essential, mainly, to take care not only of the type of link, the web with which we link but also that they are natural. Which means that there is coherence. We cannot insert our links with corkscrews because they will not be useful and will be misleading to readers. To achieve this naturalness we must, therefore, take certain precautions when doing link building.
How to find high-quality links
Now let’s move on to the important thing: knowing how to cheat implies knowing the rules that we should never break for the world. The limits in digital marketing are not to defy the rules of search engines, never interrupt the navigation of users with malicious techniques and work with subtlety on the exchange of links.
The main thing in a link building strategy is knowing how to find high-quality links, that is, that are useful for your positioning. For this, there are many seo tools that help us to analyze the visibility of a website and its level of search engine positioning. Using them can be of great help to understand if this exchange can be effective for our portal .
Finding good domains for link building is extremely important. What use would it be to propose a strategy that would lead you to link to a website that does not have many visits or that does not appear in search engines? This is probably a bad idea to carry out the exchange. Therefore, we must be vigilant and think very well about our steps to follow. We tell you what things you should take into account to know if the exchange is convenient or not.
Authority of the Page
The authority of a page is the rating it has for Google . The higher this number, the more authority the page has, and our sharing will be very enriching for us. The authority of a page, however, is variable since its value is divided into those pages that are linked. For example: if a page has 100 authority and has two links to other websites, each of them will receive 50 points. If, on the other hand, it has 10 links, the value that each link receives is 10 points.
To know the authority of a page we can use tools such as Page Authority (it bases its algorithm on the well-known Google Check Page Rank, but with some very interesting improvements) and Domain Authority (it goes on a scale from 0 to 100, and although sometimes may have a lower level of precision, it has the advantage of guiding us also with regard to the strength of each domain).
Through these tools you can compare between different domains and know the advantages that you could have if you cross links with one in particular. It is a more exhaustive and functional analysis when it comes to web positioning .
Site Authority
In the exchange of links, authoritative websites are those with the highest traffic that are used to link and enhance the visibility of those with less traffic.
When you propose a link building strategy, you must take this information into account. And you must ensure that the website with which you make the exchange can offer you good visibility, so if it is a website that has less traveled path than you, the exchange will not be of much use to you.
However, achieving this will not be easy, because those websites better positioned than yours will not accept the exchange, so targeting websites of your level could become the best option .
Site relevance
Obviously, in life we have to know how to make good decisions to be successful. When it comes to positioning, good decisions can help us emerge almost magically.
That is why knowing how to choose the web with which to do the link building is essential . You must take into account not only the theme of the web with which you will link (which must be the same as your portal) but also that the links are of quality; Since linking to good content can be vital to your site.
Link position on the page
It is not a minor data. The link to your page should be near the title or a subtitle (h1 or h2) to get more visibility possibilities; It should also be close to a keyword on the site or topic.
This information must be kept in mind when doing link building , just as we should carefully analyze other data, such as a website hosted within the same country, with its own domain and with a title that contains keywords that are not very different from those we have in our site. That is, a website that has a digital marketing approach similar to ours.
Is the link within the content?
The link should never be in aggregate information or as aggregated data. For example, within phrases like “click here” or others of the kind. The main advice that we must not forget is: the links must be natural. The more fluid and natural a link is, the better.
Bearing this in mind, when proposing link building strategies we must ensure that the links appear in the middle of a relevant phrase of the content, as if they really had to be there. It should never be noted that we have forced such a link. In this way, users and Google will instinctively click on the link and our plan will begin to give good results.
Link anchor text
Choosing the word that will be embedded in the link is very important. The anchor text is another of the fundamental elements of link building .
This text must contain some information related to the niche or the theme of our site, so that it collaborates with precision in our positioning. For example, if we have a literature blog, a good anchor text might be “Literature blog”, “Literary blog”, “Literature blog”, or not too distant variations. The important thing, however, is not to repeat ourselves; because if we always use the same anchor text, Google can realize our trap, which could lead to penalties.
In a link building strategy, you have to think about the anchor text very well . Keep in mind that the word or phrase that leads to our website must be as descriptive as possible and also natural. If the link is made from an image, it must have an ‘alt’ that acts as anchor text, in order to notify the user of what they will find on the site where they are linked.
Link Co-occurrences (Context)
This is an alternative to anchor text that is beginning to be used more and more in link building. It consists of looking for new ways to understand what the keyword of a site is , without depending on anchor texts but using context.
When managing a site it is important that we bear in mind the co-occurrences; setting a good tone in our texts, offering powerful content and maintaining a coherent and stable editorial and work line.
This means that if our content is solid and has a good speech, the search engine will know how to find the topic, its keywords and will help us in positioning. Citing documents from our same website or from others, in a contextualized way , can also be essential to improve our popularity.
Is the link from a guest post?
This other practice has been used for years and usually gives good results. It consists of exchanging posts between websites or blogs to achieve visibility within the audience of the other space.
The guest post strategy is carried out between sites that share a niche or theme and is very useful for getting “dofollow” links , which we will talk about later. It can be an excellent strategy to improve the prestige and enhance the visibility of the brand.
Nofollow vs Dofollow
The “Dofollow” and “Nofollow” links are important when it comes to link building .
To be very clear to you. A “Dofollow” link on a page tells Google when it analyzes it that it should follow that path and include that other website in the analysis. When Google does, the authority of that page decreases because it must share it with that other page. In link building, the use of “nofollow” links is recommended to avoid diminishing the authority of our website.
However. You should know that all links are “dofollow” by default; In other words, if we do not specifically indicate it in our content, all the links that we include will be used by Google in the tracking. The way we have to avoid it, and incidentally prevent our authority from descending, is by converting them into a “nofollow”; for this you must add the attribute « rel = nofollow» next to the link.
But let’s keep digging into this matter. Having only “nofollow” links is not a good idea; Because Google will be struck by this list of “cut roads”, for calling them in some way, and it can get a not very pretty idea of your site. So, while making “dofollow” links will take away a bit of authority, it can also score you points with Google, so the best strategy would be to combine “nofollow” links with other “dofollow” links on our website.
The ideal would be to have a ratio of 70 out of 30; this way, Google will know that you are doing things right. Remember, also, that if all your links are “nofollow” you will not be able to rise in the positioning because it is almost as if you have no links on your website and Google will practically not be able to get an idea of your identity and your content. Knowing this is essential to propose a good link building strategy .
How to get TOP links: Best link building strategies
The best way to get started in link building is to be guided by certain structured ideas and work on it wisely, taking advantage of the weaknesses of others without harming them and using them to our advantage.
In this way, it is essential to locate spaces on the web with certain problems that can get us some positive point in our favor, with whom to develop plans together. We tell you some things that can be of great help to propose a good link building plan .
Resource page linkbuilding
A resource page is a dedicated space within a website to link content from the same niche. A good way to make yourself known is to create one of these pages on your site, to get backlinks, and thus, achieve more visibility.
Offer useful content to other webmasters
If you offer content that is useful to other managers or people who work within the niche, the links will come by themselves. Focusing on content can be a good SEO strategy to increase your rankings.
Linkbuilding with broken links
Do a crawl in your niche, looking for broken links on other sites and talk to the administrators of the websites that lead them to propose an alternative that leads to your website, clearly; in this way, you will be able to get good links, showing solidarity at the same time with other webmasters.
Instalar Check My Links o LinkMiner
Check My Links and LinkMiner are two tools that can help you track the internal links of your site and be able to check if they are well implemented.
To link building correctly you need to know that the links within your site are collaborating with your positioning. Thanks to these tools, you will be able to analyze them and see a solution registered in which the correct links appear in green and those that are broken in red. Thus, in a simple way, you can correct those that are not working.
Find pages with many exit links
A site with too many outbound links is not a good image for Google. If you do link building, try not to share a page with too many sites at the same time. A page with many links is not going to be useful to you, because the authority value of the page must be distributed among all the pages that it includes. Remember what we told you before about the authority value and how it balances in proportion to the number of links.
That you have to take into account as a basis. However, sometimes appearing on an authoritative website where there is a resource page with a long list of outbound links is not a bad idea to gain visibility. Because by appearing there you will be able to reach a new audience and enhance the chances of your success. Of course, try to think about it and plan it well.
Check for broken links
Tracking the links in your niche can be a good idea to consider link building actions . In this way, when you find broken links on sites with pages that have good authority and that are related to your content, you can try link building.
To do this, you should try to contact the administrators of these portals to communicate what you have seen and propose a solution: that they link you. In this way, they will have a good link and you can improve your own visibility.
Email the webmaster about his broken links
If you find broken links then you should contact the site administrator to let them know . No webmaster likes to have broken links on their site, so if you propose to change that one that does not work for a link to your website, you may receive a positive response. This is another link building strategy that can come in handy for you.
Advanced link building tips
Making good decisions in link building can help you greatly improve your visibility. And, although everyone can make their own plan appropriate to the needs of their site, there are some ideas that can serve us all.
Here we give you some tips that can come in handy in link building .
Get easy links with the link claim
As we said, if you get in touch with other administrators, you can get interesting links. He finds a broken link on a page with good authority and proposes to change it to a link of yours. What does it get better if we look for alternative ways to improve our positioning?
Links using reverse image search
The reverse image search is another technique that is widely used in the linkbuilding. Through the tool that Google proposes, we can track the specific data of an image; searching both from a url and from the image itself. In this way we will be able to find the spaces in which that same image is found, its attributes and general characteristics.
It can serve you, among other things, to find out if someone has used images of your property without permission and in this case, ask that they link you correctly. Likewise, it can be very useful to offer link exchange to a good website where an image that you like has been published.
Being interviewed on a Podcast
This is another excellent alternative to achieve visibility. By being interviewed by someone who has a Podcast channel, you will be able to expand your network of contacts, reaching a completely audience. Likewise, this visibility will allow you to better develop your brand image , having the opportunity to speak a little more about yourself, your work and show how prepared you are to do what you do.
Use «Link Intersect» to discover possible links
Why does this portal link to these websites of my competition but they have not included me? Generally the answer is much simpler than it seems: they don’t know us. If we do not have a good positioning, we cannot expect to be registered. And if they don’t come looking for us, then we will have to go to the mountain.
Knowing those sites where there are links to websites in our niche can be of great help to get related links to our website. And with this tool we can find them, get in touch, and get a presence in those common spaces.
Ahrefs ‘link intersect’ tool
Through link intersect you can track the sites that are linking to the websites of your competition and that still do not link to you, to find a way to do so. It is a very easy-to-use, intuitive tool that can save you a lot of work. Keep in mind that appearing on resource pages where your competition appears can be essential to improve your visibility .
Conclusions.
As you can see, there are many alternatives to propose a link building strategy , and although you do not need to put everything mentioned into practice, surely most of these actions can help you improve your prestige.
Including Linkbuilding in your digital marketing strategy is not only not a bad idea but it could be a great help to achieve success. But, we remind you that you must do it carefully. It is important not to go overboard, to avoid that Google penalizes us and that all our work goes to waste due to errors of this type.
In addition, we must remember that any action in the field of SEO positioning works if it is implemented together with others and with constancy and always having clear objectives. A single decision, a single strategy, will not do you much good if what you really want is to launch yourself to stardom.
Therefore, in addition to considering a good link building strategy, you must take into account other aspects that help you achieve the prestige you want. This means paying close attention to the web design of your site, the content, the anchor text of your links and the optimization of your images. If you manage to carry out a good global strategy, you will surely obtain good results for your site.
