What is Link Building? 4 Reasons to Invest in the Technique
Need to understand what link building is?
In this article, we’ll explain everything about this technique and how it fits into SEO, CRO, and website optimization strategies.
You’ll also find here recommendations of best practices so you can start applying them to your pages right away!
Let’s go?
What is Link Building?
The link building technique aims to get links that point to your site’s pages in different ways — which we’ll discuss shortly.
This strategy increases the relevance and authority of your site on search engines like Google, thus improving your organic results.
That makes the traffic volume on your site grow, as well as ensures users navigate through a larger number of pages, which also helps improve your brand’s positioning on search platforms.
Types of Links
As mentioned, there are different tactics within link building that can be explored to achieve the desired outcome.
These are divided into internal links, external links, and backlinks.
Let’s cover each of them.
What are Internal Links?
Internal links are those applied to pages within a site that direct to the same domain.
Here on Leadster’s blog, we use this resource when, for example, within a blog post, we direct the reader to another content that might interest them.
These internal links enable the user to spend more time on your site and navigate through more pages.
Both of these factors are measured by search engines, and good results will boost your ranking.
What are External Links?
External links are links included on your site that direct to different domains. This boosts the linked site’s results and can be applied when you use another site as a reference, example, or partner.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links from different domains that point to pages on your site.
For example, your site might be linked on a partner’s site, or some content published on your site might be referenced as a link on another external content.
Backlinks are one of the main factors that contribute to your pages’ ranking on search engines.
More than a large quantity of links, relevance increases with quality links from sites with domain authority and relation to your business.
What is Link Building For? 4 Reasons to Invest in the Technique
Besides helping your pages rise in search rankings, link building is essential for SEO and CRO strategies to optimize your site, build authority, create relationships, strengthen your brand, and get more visitors and leads from strong references.
Check out this detailed list of reasons to invest in link building:
1. Improve your Organic Ranking
Link building is one of the pillars of SEO techniques and involves creating internal links (that point to other pages within your own site) and external links (other sites that point to yours as a reference or recommendation).
With this strategy, the main goal is to bring a higher volume of visitors to your pages, who can then be nurtured through the sales funnel to become leads and potentially customers.
2. Strengthen Relationships with Other Brands
One way to implement link building is by building partnerships with other brands, using tools we’ll discuss later in this article.
Besides boosting the organic results of both brands, this move also puts your brand alongside others that may be strategic in many other ways beyond link building.
3. Receive Visitors from Trusted Sources
If a user is browsing a site they trust and regularly consume content from, they will feel more secure clicking on a link referenced there.
Moreover, your brand will be, in some way, recommended and associated with the trusted brand, which highlights your page.
4. Build Domain and Brand Authority
A good link building strategy increases trustworthiness and consequently the authority of your domain.
More than that, by creating quality content, it also helps your brand establish authority and reference in your market.
Check also – 3 Current Growth Hacking Cases — and How You Can Apply This Method
How to do Link Building?
There are several resources you can explore when doing link building.
They are divided into “white hat” techniques, which are good practices, recommended and compliant with search engine guidelines, and “black hat” techniques, which use methods against search engine rules.
Let’s start with the white hat techniques your company should explore:
Internal and External Linking
Including links on your pages and internal publications, both to the same domain and to different references, is one of the practices we already explained and is recommended to start link building work.
Don’t stick only to your site’s navigation pages: if you’re not yet working with Content Marketing, this is an excellent way to build presence and brand authority, as well as multiply the pages on your site that can be ranked and can include both types of links.
Guest Posting
Guest posting consists of publishing content between partner brands.
You invite an expert from another brand to write on your brand’s blog, for example, or provide content for the other brand to publish on their blog.
These contents contain backlinks that can attract visitors from one site to the other.
Some SEO experts consider this technique somewhat controversial because theoretically, it goes against Google’s guidelines as it may be seen as an attempt to manipulate the algorithm, and sites can be penalized if the algorithm detects something wrong.
Despite that, it is a very common practice.
Content Partnerships
You can also create content in partnership with other brands — a strategy called co-marketing.
The materials produced can be in various formats, such as e-books, guides, webinars, etc.
Besides working link building into this type of strategy, it’s also interesting because the content is distributed not only to your audience, followers, and leads but also to the partner brand’s contacts.
Whether through co-marketing or guest posting, always strive to produce quality content, select partners with a good contact base and domain authority, and make a personalized approach when offering a content partnership.
Linkable Resources
Besides articles with internal links, external links, and backlinks, you can also include links in different, less obvious formats that are easily shareable and linkable, such as images, infographics, and social media links.
How NOT to do Link Building — Practices to Avoid
Some link building techniques may seem tempting but are not recommended because they’re unethical and penalized by search engines. They are:
“Black Hat” Techniques
As mentioned, black hat techniques break search engine rules.
They do not only involve link inclusion, but here we will focus on them.
Among black hat link building techniques are:
- Link farms: when multiple sites, aiming to improve ranking, link to each other without context or relevance.
- Private Blog Networks (PBN): artificially generating links through networks of blogs and sites for that purpose.
Buying and exchanging links
Buying or exchanging links is also considered a technique against search engine guidelines and can be penalized.
Any link generated with a reward, whether money or other negotiation, is considered a paid link.
Spam or Automatic Comments with Links
Automatic comments including links on blogs or forums are also a controversial and penalized way to generate backlinks.
There are even tools that generate this kind of spam, but with the search engines’ use of the nofollow tag, such comments no longer affect ranking.
Best Link Building Tools
There are some tools we recommend if you want to create a more complete link building strategy.
To track and measure the relevance of links pointing to your pages, check domain authority, and even spot suspicious links, you can explore options like Ahrefs, Check My Links, SEMrush, MajesticSEO, and Moz.
These tools have many other functionalities for SEO and organic content optimization that go far beyond link building.
Did you like this article on our blog?
Also check out the post “Website Optimization: Is it Better to Focus on SEO or Conversion?”
