Link building is a way of acquiring links to your site from other sites, and it is referred to as backlinking in the context of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
In this article, you will get an overview of link building and the best practices to follow. We will also discuss how search engines use these links.
Earlier, search engines just used the text on a webpage to rank a webpage. And it was noticed that web publishers added irrelevant keyword phrases to help rank their pages.
This led to poor user experience as the pages started to rank for irrelevant keywords.
Then search engines noticed that the best pages on the web had a greater number of links. And it was concluded that the sites with more links are more important than the sites with less links.
Today, modern search engines use the fusion of AI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning, total number of links accumulated on a webpage, and page analysis to rank websites.
As you read, you will also find a gist about an email lookup tool.
Link building – Why is it so important?
Let us assume your business site is new and has not earned much authority yet.
By acquiring links from other trustworthy websites, you can help Google to view your site as more authoritative.
Since pages with more backlinks rank higher, it is important that you create high quality content worth linking to and use link building strategies to help bring maximum backlinks to your website.
It is recommended that you start the process sooner instead of pushing it away for later; this will give you an advantage over your competitors
How does it work?
There are many ways to acquire backlinks, such as analyzing competitors’ backlinks, social media promotion, guest blogging.
Never go with building backlinks from irrelevant or spammy sites, as it is never going to help you rank better.
The ideal approach to enhance your site authority is to earn backlinks from excellent quality, credible websites.
Now let us take a look at the types of links.
Types of links
When you are working on your link building strategy, you will come across diverse types of links. Let us look at several types of links one by one.
Nofollow and Dofollow links
Nofollow links are used when you want to link to a website but do not want Google to crawl that site.
You can use these links when you need to link to a site but do not want to share your SEO link juice with them.
Although nofollow links do not pass authority directly, they are still valuable as they still provide you with brand recognition & referral traffic.
When you are mentioning about other brand and are adding a link to their site, you can let them know about this by sending an email. There is a chance that they share it with their fans & followers, this will get traffic to your post.
If you do not get the email address of the right contact person, then you can use an email lookup tool like GetEmail.io.
What is an email lookup tool?
GetEmail.io is an email lookup tool that allows you to find email addresses of anyone on this planet. The tool uses machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to locate the correct email addresses.
In contrast to the nofollow links, dofollow links are regular links consisting of attributes to tell Google to crawl the page and pass PageRank.
Dofollow links are used when you wish to pass on authority to a trusted site and guide search engine bots to understand what the content is about.
Links from users
Making use of user generated link is not the ideal route for link building. In fact, in the past, Google penalized users who tried to make use of user generated links.
Some of the examples of such practices are profile pages of users, unmoderated blog comments, embedded infographics, press releases with optimized anchor text in the signature.
Though the links from these sources do not hurt your site, it is not a promising idea to spend time on it as this strategy will not pass any authority.
Natural links from external blogs
These are links that you get without asking users to give you a backlink. Natural link is considered a good link and is one of the safest link building techniques.
Concluding thoughts
Although search engines still use links as a medium to measure a webpage’s authority and popularity. It is no longer the only factor to determine the rankings.
Search engines keep improving their algorithms to get rid of artificial or irrelevant links. I hope you got some basic overview of the link building concept.