What can Link Building do for your SEO?

Let’s get one thing out of the way; link building is extremely beneficial for your SEO. There’s no dispute against that, but what can link building do exactly for your SEO?

If you are a beginner in SEO, learning about link building (especially what makes a high-quality backlink) will significantly impact your website’s performance, given the correlation that high-quality backlinks have with improving your rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So, here we will be showing you everything you need to know about link building and how it can help improve your SEO strategy.

 

Let’s start by defining what Link Building is

Link building is the process of building hyperlinks from other websites to your own. These hyperlinks are known as backlinks since they direct traffic to your site. These backlinks between pages and websites are crawled by search engines algorithm to help determine a site’s authority under a certain niche or for a given search keyword.

Building quality backlinks helps your website be considered by Google when crawling for new or updated content. And the more backlinks your site’s profile has, the more crawl requests for your site will be sent to Google.

Why? When Google crawls websites with links directing towards your site, their crawlers, also called spiders, will organically follow this link back to you. However, a backlink is not only good for improving a site’s crawlability, however, as they also help improve the authority and traffic of your website. This is also known as link juice.

As long they come from high authority websites and are topically relevant, Google sees links as a factor that deems your site a trustworthy resource for your niche.

A referring domain can have high authority, but the topical relevance of a link makes it valuable to your website. For instance, if you manage a financial advisor’s website, having backlinks from Forbes would be much more valuable than a link from a website in another niche entirely.

Internal Link Building

An internal link links one of your pages to another. And since links that contribute to your site’s SEO are not exclusively from external sources, having your site follow a great silo structure through thorough internal linking can help users have a better experience when navigating your site and finding what they need.

 

Why is Internal Linking important for your SEO?

Internal linking is really important for the search engine optimisation of your website since it creates a silo structure to evenly spread all the link juice coming from your referring domains across your pages. A good internal linking structure is a complementary and fundamental side of any link building plan.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s analyse what makes a good link and look at all of the factors that influence how good can a link be.

 

Authority

One of the most important factors that constitute a good link is how authoritative the referring domain issuing a link towards your site is. Authority encompasses how high a website’s SEO metrics are and how much brand exposure within its niche it has.

Like we said before, a backlink from a website such as Forbes will have a higher positive impact on your backlink profile than your standard run of the mill blogger.

 

The importance of Authority in Link Building

The importance of having an authoritative referring domain linking to your site is that it shows Google you are a reputable source as well. When a high authority site links to you, Google reads this as a good link in your backlink profile because it means that a reputable website has put enough faith in your site to link to it.

 

Relevance

The topical relevancy of a link is crucial for an effective and good backlink. A highly relevant backlink confirms to Google that your site, the article linking back to you and the link itself are reputable sources in that industry since you have competitors or experts in your niche happily referring you to their audiences.

There are many mixed opinions when it comes to irrelevant links. Some believe that regardless of how much authority a site linking towards you has, if it isn’t relevant to your niche, it won’t help your website at all.

It’s better to be safe and choose a link building agency with reputable experience that can guarantee both relevance and authority for the backlinks they provide.

 

The importance of Relevance in Link Building

Relevance helps you achieve a consistent and focused backlink profile that benefits you with high-ranking positions for keywords that will drive effective traffic to your site and a higher chance of lead conversions.

Receiving backlinks from other relevant websites makes your profile appear natural and organic for Google, which is a great sign.

 

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness mainly refers to a site that does not falls into spam practices. This type of site might include spammy backlinks, and you should not be building or paying for these kinds of links.

It goes without saying that the site you are receiving a backlink from should definitely be trustworthy.

There are many ways to check a site’s trustworthiness, such as:

• Website traffic
• SSL security
• Biased content
• Website lifespan
• Social media activity

 

The importance of Trustworthiness in Link Building

This is really simple; if Google sees reliable links from reputable sites in your backlink profile, it will reward your site with higher authority. This is also true for the opposite; backlinks from spammy sites will harm your backlink profile and lower the trust Google puts in your website.

A link with moderate traffic and authority will always be ten times better than a link from a dodgy site, and the consequences for your profile will be evident.

 

Link Position

Link position refers to where on a page is a link located. Link placement is a commonly overlooked factor, albeit a really important one about what makes a backlink good.

The best link placements you can get when link building, whether on a guest post or link insertion, are found above the fold, in the upper body of the content. Here, your link has a bigger chance of being seen when users land on a page than somewhere closer to the bottom of the content, or in the footer, as those sections may not even be reached or seen by the user.

 

The importance of Link Position in Link Building

Link position is essential for a backlink to have a higher chance of driving traffic to your site due to increasing visibility for users navigating the referring page and clicking the link through to your website. This can very well be the difference between a good link and a bad link.

 

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text within the hyperlink used to link to another page. You should be able to choose your anchor text when building a backlink, and these are the different types of anchor text available:

• Generic
• Naked URL
• Branded
• Exact-match
• Partial-match
• Images

The best anchor text practice is for your backlink profile to contain a healthy, natural mix of all of the above. Just ensure there are no spikes in using links with optimised anchor text, and you are set.

 

The importance of Anchor Text in Link Building

Anchor text tells Google, and every other search engine, what your website is about; this is the cornerstone of SEO and SERP rankings. Your anchor text strategy is extremely important for link building since it’s read by Google when crawling hyperlinks, and it teaches them what the targeted page is about even before it reaches it.

 

Link Building gives you higher SERP rankings

Link building, when done right, can massively help your site improve its rankings on the Google SERP. First, go with a competitor backlink profile analysis to see what and how many links your competition is building. If they’re ranking on the first page and you are sure your site has better content, then there is no reason why you can’t improve your rankings and even go higher than your competition with an optimised backlink profile.

 

Don’t forget to expand your keyword ranking

To build an organic backlink profile that appears natural in the eyes of Google’s crawlers, after receiving your first batch ofpowerful backlinks, your backlink profile should start expanding its keyword scope and include others that are already included in your content on your page.

Not only will expanding your keyword scope let you begin to rank for them, but it will also improve the chances for your site to show higher in the SERPs.

 

Link Building gives you higher Referral and Organic Traffic

As your ranking starts improving and your site climbs positions on the SERPs due to more and higher quality backlinks, you should also start seeing a traffic influx increase. Traffic is usually the main focus for many websites, but to improve it, you’ll need a powerful backlink strategy to help your site improve its rankings.

Link Building gives you higher Site Metrics and SEO scores

If you are a beginner in SEO, you may need to learn how to understand ranking/site metrics and SEO scores.

Site metrics are third-party metrics created by different SEO tool providers to determine how good a site is; there are many ranking metrics created by different SEO companies, such as:

• PageRank – Google
• Domain Rating – Ahrefs
• URL Rating – Ahrefs
• Domain Authority – Moz
• Page Authority – Moz

 

Closing thoughts on why Link Building matters for your SEO

Undeniably, link building has a lot to offer regarding SEO and your site’s overall optimisation. Without an effective backlink profile and quality backlinks, you are massively limiting the growth and success of your website.

So, if you want to climb the SERPs and start ranking on the first page, it’s time to start link building.

Just take a look at any of the top websites for the keywords relevant to your website, and you’ll find they all have a great number of backlinks. Even for new sites, backlinks are essential since you need some power going to your website to start growing and get the rankings you are hoping for.

Hopefully, this article can give you useful information and get you going in your link building journey. If you don’t have the time or prefer to leave your SEO need in the hands of experts, know we can help you better set up a great link building completely optimised and customised for your site with our ranking blueprint.

Check our case studies and customer review sections if you need to know exactly what we can help you achieve with your site. Or better yet, schedule a free strategy call, and one of our experts will help you get an in-depth look at your site and the services we think can achieve your link building goals.