Complete Guide On Link Building & its Benefits in SEO

Link building is a part and parcel of SEO. I know if you’re new to SEO then you may get the question what is link building and why do you need it for your website? The outlook of SEO and link building is not the same as it keeps on changing every time. Therefore, you also need to keep yourself updated with the latest techniques of link building and Google algorithm as well. This guide will help you to develop the right strategies for your website to get ranked in the search engine easily.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the process of getting backlinks from new websites to your own website. A hyperlink is a link that navigates users between pages on the internet. With the help of these links search engines crawl the links between the individual pages on your website. Plus, they’ll crawl the links between entire websites.

There are various techniques for link building and each of them is different from the other.  However, one of the toughest parts is building backlinks from high authority sites. Many SEO professionals try to do it properly and it’s also time-consuming. Therefore, it’s suggested to do it properly otherwise you’ll waste your time. Additionally, if you’re expert in building high-quality links then no one can stop you from bringing your website on top in search engine rankings.

Why Link Building is Important for SEO?

The hyperlink anatomy

 

 

To know in-depth about link building, it’s necessary to know the basics of link creation and how the search engines consider the links, and what they can elucidate from them.

1. Start of the link tag

It is known as anchor tag ( that is “a”), this opens the link tag and indicates search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.

2. Link referral location

The “href” indicates “hyperlink referral”, and the text inside the quotation marks tells the URL about which link is pointing. It’s not necessary that the URL will be on the web page only; it can be the address of an image or file to download. Sometimes, you’ll see words beginning with a # sign that are local links, which is utilized to take users to a different section of the page that the user is browsing.

3. Visible / anchor text of the link

This is a very small part that users see on the page, and click on the same to redirect on the new website. However, the formation of text is different in comparison to other text that is written in the article.  Generally, appears in blue colour or is underlined, signaling the users for clicking.

4. Closure of link tag

This indicates the end of the link tag to the search engines.

Related: {Beginners Guide} What is SEO and How Does it Work?

What Do Links Mean to Search Engines?

Search engines use the link in two different ways that are explained below:

1. To find a new web page
2. To determine how professionally a page should rank in their results

After crawling the pages on the web, search engines withdraw the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. By doing this, they can decide the page quality and keyword rankings for that page.  While deciding this, the search engines not only monitor the content of the page but also the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and quality of those external websites. It’s also said that the more high-quality websites that link to your website, the search engines are more likely to consider your website.

Link building is a ranking factor that has helped Google to influence the search engine market since the 1990s. Larry Page one of Google’s founders created PageRank that Google uses to monitor the quality of a page based on a number of links pointing to it. This benchmark was later started, counting in ranking algorithm and became a strong point for deciding the quality of a page.

Link of the external website should be so effective that it counts as a vote of confidence about page or else it will not pass any link juice if it’s not that much worth. In addition, it will affect the domain authority of the website. Generally, the theory is that when someone links to another website, they count as a good resource because they know it will pass the excellent benefit to their website.

Search engines soon located the strategy for manipulating the PageRank and search results for selected keywords. Further, they started pointing those websites that were manipulating the search results and rotated the updates that aimed to filter out the incompetent websites.

Before, Google used to encourage a number of link building techniques that only required submitting your website to web directories and getting a link in return. Later, due to the overuse of this technique, Google banned this strategy.

Moreover, Google also penalized those websites that have overused this technique and referred to as over – optimization. Penguin updates are one example that we can count as Google’s regular update. This gives rise to the adoption of new techniques in link building.

Know About Nofollow Links

In link building, there are two attributes of link tags one is dofollow and second is nofollow. Both the link attributes have their own uniqueness and benefits. Here, we’ll discuss no follow tag link.

Example:

<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Example</a>

The addition of rel = “nofollow”. This informs Google not to pass any PageRank across this link to the target URL. In short, you’re telling Google not to trust this link and it will not pass any benefit to targeted URL.

The websites that add rel = “nofollow” attribute means they are not confident enough to display their link juice to Google. Check below some example of nofollow links:

• Blog comments
• Forum posts
• Guest post comments
• Yahoo answers

From the above-mentioned sources, you can easily add links because of their size and it’s not practically possible to check every single link from those links. So, to know the spammers and avoid them to take advantage of a website’s PageRank, the website owner tends to choose nofollow link tag on such posts. It is also useful for advertisers that use nofollow link tag in paid ads.

Benefits of link building in SEO

1) Develop a good relationship

Link building is all about getting backlinks from other relevant websites and blogs of your niche. It’s a form of promotion with an aim to get a link, but more importantly, is to build long – term relationship with influencers of your industry.

Also Read: What is Influencer Marketing?

2) Help to get referral traffic

I have explained the impact of links on search engine rankings, but more important is the impact of links on referral traffic.

If you’ve built a link from the highly reputed site then it will drive good traffic on your website and increase the traffic. If traffic is genuine then it will increase the sales and also generate the leads.

Therefore, it’s suggested to select the best websites for getting backlinks otherwise you’ll face consequences like blacklisting, spamming and de-indexing.

3) Brand building

Building good backlinks will help you to build your brand or incorporate you as an authority in your niche. There are various link building strategies, such as content writing, that will help people to know about your expertise. This will develop a long term relationship towards your brand. Further, Google and other search engines will also start considering your website and this increase the trust among users and search engines.

Closure Words

In SEO, link building is a never-ending process and its importance will never get down. In short, you can assume that when the internet will stop its working then SEO and link building process will also get a stop. So, read this guide carefully and implement accordingly for your website.