By skyforbes 
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There’s no doubt that link building is a huge, complex and important subject of SEO fundamentals. There are questions about types of link building, types of web links, link building tools and link building strategies.
There’s enough to talk about to have a blog entirely on the subject (which some people have done!) but for our purposes, let’s take a look at the basics of link building – what is it and why is it important?
What is link building?
Link building in its most basic form is the process of acquiring hyperlinks (or just links) from another website to yours. These are little footpaths that allow people to move around the internet would needing to do a fresh search each time.
They are also ways that search engine bots move around websites and between websites – this makes them an important SEO factor.
In fact, not only is it an important search engne ranking factor but it is one of the top three factors used to rank a website. According to Search Engine Land, the top three factors for SEO are links and content followed by RankBrain. The third of these is the AI program that Google uses to process search queries and to transform everything into a format that computers can understand.
Why link building is important
So it is clear from that the answer to the question of why link building is important is because Google ranks it so highly in the factors it uses to rate your website.
Google were the first company to use these ideas when previous search engines like Yahoo simply went by what was on the page. Google introduced their PageRank Algorithm and this forever altered the world of SEO.
Links became so important under this new system as they were seen as a vote of confidence. You link to a page that you trust, that you found useful and credible and you would be happy for your visitors to travel to.
Therefore, links were a type of currency that showed the quality of the website on the other end – after all, you wouldn’t send your friend to a lousy restaurant any more than you would recommend your visitors go to a lousy website.
Link building strategies
Of course, no sooner did people realise that these links were valuable, did a certain element start to find ways to exploit this. Tactics and strategies such as using web directories and purchasing backlinks were born and soon made the whole process somewhat muddy and unsavoury.
The result is now that if you want to rate your site well, you need to engage in ‘white hat’ link building and avoid all those dodgy tactics from the past. It may mean it is harder to get those important backlinks but it also means that each one you get has a firm and positive value for your website, versus potentially negative effects from poor quality, ‘black hat’ links.
Linking to authority sites
Quality, not quantity, is key to most things with SEO and the same is true with links. Therefore, when you are linking to websites, it is important that you only link to quality, authority sites. But how do you know what these are?
Some websites you just know will be quality – Wikipedia, major news outlets, massive bloggers or companies whose name everyone knows. This doesn’t mean you should only link to these big sites, however, because there are tools to help judge the authority of any website.
One example is Ahrefs and another is MOZ. Both of these have a system where the domain rank or domain authority can be seen and therefore the quality of the website judged. There’s nothing to stop you linking to a lower rank website for some links if it is relevant but make sure you use a lot of good quality sites for your outgoing links.
You should also ensure that you place your outgoing links in the body of your text to have the biggest benefit, not in a sidebar or in the footer. Placing the link on keywords that are relevant to the nature of the link within the content is the best way.
How to create high-quality links
So now we know what a backlink is and why link building techniques are so important. But how do you create those white hat links that will help boost your site’s SEO? Here are some ideas from the experts.
1. Guest blogging
There are some people who say that guest blogging has been overdone but the reason it remains a great way to get backlinks is because it works.
I hosted a few guest bloggers on The Blogging Blog and it was brilliant to have someone else’s ideas, expertise and even voice on my site. And how did it help the guest blogger? Because there is a link to his website in the post and in his bio – that’s a backlink.
The aim, according to Google, is to ensure that your guest blogging is relevant and high quality, not just done for the sake of getting the backlink.
2. Make your content linkable
By writing content that is high quality, you have a better chance of people naturally linking to your website. The aim is to make yourself and your site into a source for the particular topic by creating informative and easy to read posts that people will use when researching a topic – and therefore are more likely to link to once they have done this.
3. Broken link building
This technique takes a little more time and has variable results but can pay off. Every website can find that over time, the sites they link to aren’t as good as they once were or may have even vanished, resulting in broken links. What you can do is identify these broken links and approach the website owner with your own link as a replacement.
Obviously, the content needs to be similar to the original link and the person might not want to bother but it is a strategy that can work. I recently received a request like this on one of my other blogs and I was happy to make the chance because the new site was better and more updated than the original one.
The follow/no-follow question
One of the big matters for debate around links concerns the matter of follow/no-follow. Most of the time, when you link to another website, the link is do-follow – this simply means that those search engine bots will follow the link to register where it goes. But there are some situations where you should use a no-follow link.
This is simply an addition to the link that stops the search engine bots following a link. It might look like this:
The reason for using this no-follow tag is simple – if you have been paid in some way to create that link, it should be a no-follow. Let’s say you have a guest post about your new service that you have paid someone to create – that link should be a no-follow. Any time you have received a payment, a product or other financial benefit, the link should be no-follow or you can be penalised by Google.
Building links
Link building from your website is just one part of the whole link process – the other is big enough to warrant an article all of its own: internal linking. This is the other half of the process and the next topic I’ll be looking at on SEO Fundamentals.
In the meantime, have you any backlinks to your website? And are the sites you link to good quality? A link audit can be a good thing to do periodically and also install a plugin to spot broken links in case any of those websites are no longer around – that way you only get good stuff from your links!
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