A Beginner’s Guide to Link Building Strategies

Link building is a marketing, SEO practice that works to acquire backlinks in order to gain authority and trust. This, in turn, will improve your rankings within the search engine, so you’ll be more likely to appear in the Google search results, above your competitors, for instance.

A backlink is a link that goes back to your own website and it’s beneficial as it’ll help to keep readers on your site for as long as possible. They’re often acquired by pitching quality, useful content to other businesses and websites. This way, anyone reading their page will stumble across your link and find their way to your content.

Link building and backlinking, together, is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Negating other factors, links will help Google to decide whether or not your website is actually worth ranking in comparison to others.

Before working on backlinking and link building strategies, there are four key things you must understand first and they include:

• How search engines work
• Why Google rates such links
• The difference between optimisation and over-optimisation
• The links you need to include

How do search engines work?

Search engines, such as Bing and Google, use a complex algorithm in order to decide which website pages should be displayed. This algorithm has since become smarter in recent years, helping it to present us with more accurate, reliable answers to our never-ending list of questions and overall searches.

The algorithm is based on an extensive number of factors but in the end, it essentially comes down to the following:

• Does your website contain quality content?
• Do you have a variety of different links that point back to that good content?

Basically, the key to ranking highly on the search engines is having quality content on site that’s not too long or too short and a robust backlink network.

Why does Google ‘like’ links?

Google ‘likes’ backlinks because it makes them money. They’re essential for users to navigate their way smoothly and quickly around the internet. Consequently, this builds trust, reliability and authority, but why are links detrimental to Google’s search engine algorithm?

Google makes its money, mainly, through advertising. In order to keep getting paid, it’s paramount that Google retains its searchers and keeps people navigating through the internet for as long as possible as frequently as possible. 

Once this happens, Google can sell potential “clicks” to a number of different advertisers, which is why some adverts might start appearing on social media accounts after you’ve searched for it on Google.

Google relies on superior user experience (UX) to make a profit. Without this, Google wouldn’t survive and so other search engines will become more popular. Before Google, Yahoo was a popular search engine for many, but that was soon pushed out to make way for this internet giant. 

The difference between optimisation and over-optimisation

With good UX being Google’s main goal, it’s no wonder that it can identify link manipulation in a quick and efficient manner. Google doesn’t blindly accept links as a tell-tale sign of quality content as the algorithm is constantly being changed and improved to mitigate that issue. 

Updates are also made in order to punish sites that try to manipulate ranking signals using underhand tactics and tricks to obtain links. This will then result in your rankings being considerably demoted, often automatically. However, these updates can benefit websites displaying excellent content and obtaining links the good, old-fashioned way.

What links do you need?

Your backlinks need to be:

Technical – is Google able to crawl the link easily? If one of your backlinks ensures great UX but isn’t technical then it won’t hold its value in Google’s eyes, so to speak. A technical link should be relevant, make sense in context and be placed higher up the page.

Beneficial in terms of UX – backlinks should point back to relevant, useful and important information on your website. The UX must come first in order for Google to rank it highly. For example, if you wrote an article about repairing old air conditioners and you have a service available that repairs air conditioners, then link back to your service page.

Authoritative – is your backlink reliable and from a trusted source? Is your backlink present on a high-quality site with relevant information? If the answer is yes, then your backlinks will be deemed as having authority over other links and websites, especially if they have backlinks that don’t make sense or appear on low ranking sites. 

Kumo Digital is on hand to provide excellent SEO and PPC services that can always be counted upon. If you’d like your website to rank higher on the search results page, then get in touch with a member of our professional team today – we’re always happy to help.