One of the essential SEO factors to achieve positioning is popularity; it is necessary to work on Link building, but… do we know what link building is? Do we know how to work a link strategy to improve our visibility and our positioning? What should we take into account to perform a link-building strategy?
To clarify what link building is and all that it entails.
What is link building, and how to work it? Let’s go by parts.
Today I am here to talk to you about a topic that I work on a lot, and that seems essential to me in the SEO (search engine optimization)of medium/high competition sectors, link building.
What exactly is link building
Briefly and directly, link building creates high-quality links from other web pages to your web page.
The creation of these links is one of the main parts of an SEO Off-Page strategy, thanks to which we will be able to give our website greater relevance to Google.
However, we must think that not all links are equally useful for SEO, so in the next points, I want to explain what a link means for Google, parts of a link, and more relevant factors, among many other things.
Broken link building and link reclamation: Find and reclaim lost and broken links to your site, or find unlinked mentions and generate new inbound links.
What does a link mean to Google?
If we go to the most basic definition, a link means for Google a “recommendation” from one relevant website to another.
However, let’s dig deeper and think about when there were no social networks or practically no search engines on the Internet.
The only way to get to a website was through a link on another website, link directory, etc.
Therefore, Google chose to take these “recommendations” into account at that time.
To understand link building is; we must understand the Internet as a set of nodes (web pages) and edges (links); where to reach a node, we must do it through an advantage: the more bites, the more possible paths for a user to end up on your website.
However, we must also remember that building links has changed over time, and now nothing works, and quality is much more important than quantity in most cases.
Parts of a link
We must understand how a link is composed to work effectively with links.
Mainly a link is composed of two parts:
Anchor text
The anchor text or anchor text is the text with which it is linked. This text is of great importance for SEO because the amount of all the anchor text will make up the anchor text profile of that specific URL. It is important that this anchor text profile looks natural and is not over-optimized so that Google’s “alarms don’t go off.”
Link URL
The URL where the link points is also important, and we must bear in mind that we do not always have to get links to the home page of our website and other areas that we are interested in positioning in Google.
Most relevant factors of a link
As I have commented previously, not all links have the same value, nor will they help us equally in SEO (search engine optimization).
For this reason, it is important to know which factors to which Google gives the most relevance to take them into account when working on our link-building strategy.
URL where the link is placed
The URL where the link is placed is very important.
Similarly, the specific URL from which the link is also made matters within the same portal. If they put a link to us in a URL linked from the home page through internal linking, it will pass us a lot of relevance. However, if they link to us in an area in a sub-sub-sub subsection, no matter how powerful the web is, practically no authority will pass to us.
The theme of the web where the link is placed
The web theme from which they link to us will also have great relevance.
Let’s think about the real world; who is more relevant to recommend us if we are neurosurgeons?
– The butcher
– A family doctor
– A surgeon
– A neurosurgeon
The weight recommendation will be that of the neurosurgeon, and the one that will have the least weight will be that of the butcher since it is understood that the more specialist who recommends you, the more he knows what he is talking about.
The same thing happens with the links; a website that is more “specialist” in that subject is supposed to make a much more valid and powerful recommendation.
Anchor text
It is important to keep in mind that we must work on the naturalness of the anchor text so that the links appear natural.
But we can also play with the semantics of the keywords we are interested in positioning. For example, if we want to position “dog food,” we can work with other synonymous anchor texts such as “dog food,” “dog food,” and many other derived words.
On the one hand, this will give Google a new naturalness and, on the other hand, context to understand what we want to position without the need to over-optimize the anchor text profile.
Link position
The link’s position will also be relevant since it is not the same as linking to a 10,000-word URL at the beginning rather than at the end.
In the same way, a link in a single article will not be the same as in several articles or in a footer or sidebar where the link is repeated in every one of the URLs of the web (which could be beneficial in some cases, but dangerous in others if not handled carefully).
Number of outgoing links in the URL where they link to us
The number of URLs from the area where they link to us will be relevant because the strength or juice of that URL will be more distributed to more links, and therefore less quantity will reach us.
Let’s think of the transfer of force or juice as if they were glasses of water. The more links one of the vessels (URL) receives, the more water (juice) it accumulates and, therefore, the more water it has to distribute to other vessels that it links to.
Context
Just as Google can read our link, it can also read all the text in the URL from which we link and the words around our link.
For this reason, it will be important that the context of our link is related to our theme and what we want to position so that everything is consistent and we can give relevance to that link within what we want to position.
How to get links (manual, payment, link baiting)
We can obtain links in many ways, so it is important to know as many as possible to consider and include them in our link-building strategy.
Link baiting
Link baiting is called getting links naturally because of our high-quality content.
It sounds good, but keep in mind that we must first have visibility, and therefore if we do not have the visibility, we will never have link baiting.
That is why this link baiting thing is good and that they “link us through the nose,” but for this, we will first have to work on other link-building strategies where we can get links that make us go up in SEO and therefore give us visibility.
Free links
There are many ways to get links for free, as many ways as your imagination can give you.
We can create links in many forums, profiles, bookmarks, and blogs 2.0 where we can register and enter the links manually ourselves.
We can also spend hours and try to appear as guest authors on blogs, set up our network of other websites to get links, exchange links, and much more.
All this will take time, but if you have it or have someone who can do it for you, welcome to your link-building strategy.
Payment links
There is also the option of resorting to link-building tools, with which you will have access to a large number of media, authority blogs, etc., where you can post links.
It will save you a lot of work, and you can also combine it with getting links for free to give your link profile a natural look.
It is not normal that you buy links on super powerful sites, but people talking about your website or your brand do not link to you from well-known forums.
Therefore, always think about having a balance that makes your link-building tactics natural.
How to index a link
In addition to getting the links, we must bear in mind that if Google does not see them, it cannot value them, and therefore we must try to index or see the URLs where we place those links.
Normally, most links are only detected by Google if they are links of decent quality.
However, there are indeed certain links that we can create in profiles or sites a little more remote on other web pages that Google may take longer to reach.
In that case, we can wait for it to find them naturally or “force” a bit so that it finds them by creating links to those links or directly using paid indexers.
Conclusions on how to work our Link building strategy
When making a link building strategy, there are several things:
- It takes time to figure out where to put it
- Link building is important, especially in sectors with medium/high competition.
- As important as the link itself, the context is also important; the words around that link.
Like everything in this life, to do things well, we need either time to train and learn how to do something or, to have a professional who will do the link-building tactics for us.
What is clear is that off-page SEO, led by link building, is one of the pillars on which web positioning is based, and it is essential to work on it to make our website visible and competitive.