Backlink Building Essential Guide

Table of contents:

• What is Backlink Building?
  • How Does a Hyperlink Work?
  • Types of Links
  • Why are SEO Links Important?
• How Does SEO Backlink Building Work?
  • Where to Get Your SEO Links from?
  • How Many Links per Day Should You Create?
• Backlink Building- 15 Tips on How to Get Backlinks
  • Obtain Links from Unique and Valuable Sources
  • Apply Anchors
  • Mind the Link Quality
  • Acquire Thematically Related Links
  • Acquire Dofollow Backlinks
  • Choose Strong Pages
  • Create Linkable Content
  • Write Guest Posts
  • Be Active and Comment Highly Ranked Posts
  • List Your Company in Directories
  • Benefit from Influencer Marketing
  • Fix Broken Links
  • Analyze Backlinks of Your Market Rivals
  • Create Infographics
  • Take Part in Webinars, Podcasts, or Interviews
• Backlink Building – The Takeaway

What is Backlink Building?

Backlinks are one of the essential elements that will help your website achieve a high Google search results ranking. They’re often called Off-Site or Off-Page SEO processes, to emphasize that backlink building can happen with virtually no website credentials.

So, what exactly is SEO backlink building?

How Does a Hyperlink Work?

A hyperlink (or link) is an element such as a phrase, a clean URL, or a CTA (Call to Action) that redirects users to a specific location. Once you click the hyperlink, you’re taken to the target website, platform, or document.

Hyperlinks are used to facilitate the navigation process across different websites. We can picture a link as a reference – placed on a website or in any electronic document, which – when clicked – immediately refers the user to another site or to another document.

Although there are clean links in the form of URLs, there are also the so-called anchors associated with another object – a text or an image. Anchors are crucial for backlink building, due to their apparent contribution to website positions in the search results.

Types of Links

There are different types of backlinks, and we can distinguish:

• brand links – links displaying company name, e.g. Delante.co, Delante,
• EMA (exact match anchor text) links – here anchor text simply matches the keyword, e.g. “Link building essential guide”
• mixed – being a combination of brand and EMA links, e.g. “The guide to quality link building, by Delante.co”
• navigation links – referring to a particular location within a website, e.g. “here”
• clean URLs – where the URL text is displayed, e.g. “Visit our website: https://delante.co/”.

Why are SEO Links Important?

Backlinks are important elements affecting the SEO process. They’re a sign showing that a given website which is referred to is respected and valued by other websites, and sources.

Such links inform search engine robots that the website can be trusted, and is a reliable source of information.

The fact that other pages link and refer to a given site informs Google that this particular site should be ranked high in the SERPs. That’s why backlink building is so important in the SEO process.

If there are enough quality backlinks, your website is likely to rank in the top search results. On the other hand, creating poor-quality links can result in Google penalties, which take a toll, usually causing a significant decrease in organic positions in the search results.

How Does SEO Backlink Building Work?

The more quality backlinks from valuable sources you obtain, the better the message sent to Google that your website is a reliable, trustworthy place. Consequently, its authority increases which affects the positions in the ranking.

In order to do backlink building correctly, you need to make sure that generated backlinks come from highly ranked, quality pages.

Where to Get Your SEO Links from?

There are many places on the Internet that could be used for obtaining backlinks.

However, the websites featuring the link should be topic-relevant, matching your company’s profile. Creating a database of valuable domains that can be potentially used for backlink building can significantly streamline the campaign.

At this stage, don’t forget to diversify the sources – getting the links from several different domains will be much better and more effective than obtaining a hundred backlinks from one website.

The most common backlink sources include:

• Your own site networks – it’s one of the best ways to get high-quality SEO backlinks – create a microsite that’s of high quality itself. It can be a blog or a website with valuable entries or articles, where you can publish entries with links to your main page.
• Directories – dedicated SEO websites featuring large numbers in various thematic categories. Having a high PA, such directories are positively reviewed by search engines, including Google. To guarantee the top quality of your SEO backlinks, make sure the directories you use are valuable and the obtained backlinks won’t damage your link profile.
• Blog comments and forum posts – users ask a lot of questions, and you can provide comprehensive answers (with a link) in your area of expertise.
• Expert publications and sponsored articles – when your website is featured by renowned publishers, it has a positive impact on its recognition and can bring you numerous benefits, such as improved range, a wider target group, or higher conversion.
• Social media posts – social media posts with links don’t affect SEO directly but can make your website more trustworthy in the search engine’s eyes.
• Classifieds – short text content, often featuring a photo and… a link, of course! Published on dedicated websites, offering our business products or services to a variety of customers.
• NAP SEO – standing for Name, Address, Phone Number – dedicated websites gathering the following business information: business name/owner’s name, surname, address, and telephone number. NAPs streamline business identification and verification and have a positive impact on local SEO.

How Many Links per Day Should You Create?

There is no golden rule about that.

However, it’s worth staying moderate, especially if you don’t have too many linking domains. A desirable backlink profile should be as extensive as possible, appearing to Google as rather natural.

Therefore, it’s best to increase the number of SEO backlinks gradually, beginning with only a small number of links created. A sudden increase in the number of backlinks will be seen as unnatural, and Google robots may penalize your website for such activities.

Backlink Building – 15 Tips on How to Get Backlinks

1. Obtain Links from Unique and Valuable Sources

Effective SEO relies on high-quality, unique content that is valuable to readers and attracts their attention. Publishing interesting entries on industry blogs or other websites increases your chance of being noticed by users. This way your SEO backlink building process will be happening naturally!

2. Apply Anchors

Properly applied anchors look natural to Google and users. Make sure that you link valuable elements and that the anchor’s content corresponds to the content of the page users will be redirected to.

3. Mind the Link Quality

High-quality SEO links are of great importance to Google.

Its advanced algorithms analyze and filter out pages if they suspect that specific backlinks are unnatural. That’s why creating low-quality links can lead to a Google penalty, and may even result in a significant decrease of your positions in the SERPs.

What should high-quality SEO links look like?

First and foremost, such links should feature reliable information, valuable for users. They should be unique, don’t copy content from other sites, and make sure that everything is spelled correctly.

4. Acquire Thematically Related Links

Effective SEO backlink building is based on gaining the so-called thematic links. Google attaches great importance to the thematic content consistency of both of the referring and referred domain.

That’s why, when creating your SEO backlinks, choose sites thematically pertinent to your business website. For instance, you run a construction company? Don’t create too many links on catering industry sites, as Google will evaluate such activities negatively, and this may also have a bad impact on the PR of your company.

5. Acquire Dofollow Backlinks

Dofollow or nofollow attributes are assigned to each and every link across the web. These values are important for robots crawling websites because when they encounter a dofollow hyperlink, they attribute a part of the value of the page with the link to the website that is being referred to.

This means that the acquisition of dofollow links allows you to take some of the value of the referring domain for your own page!

6. Choose strong Pages

Each website has a certain rate, which reflects how trustworthy it is in Google’s opinion. Creating dofollow links within domains with high parameters will allow you to improve the authority of your website.

One link created on a highly trusted, strong website has much more value than dozens of links from very poor quality pages – the latter can even harm your page.

7. Create Linkable Content

Apart from relying on paid articles and cooperations with other websites, take your time to create unique, quality content. This way, others will want to link it.

Try to approach subjects from a different perspective, write guides, “how-to” articles, create content that is easy to read. Use infographics, bullet points, and other visual elements that make the text more transparent. Great content is an essential part of the SEO backlink building process!

8. Write Guest Posts

Creating guest blogs on other industry websites is a great opportunity to introduce your page and offer to a wider group of recipients. Moreover, you can place an SEO backlink directly in the content. Thanks to it, you can control which subpages, or website elements are linked.

Think about catchy blog post ideas that will appeal to users. Write a brief and convince people that they’ll find answers to their questions in the text. Guest posts are a very important part of the backlink building process, so you should take your time with creating the content and choosing websites to post on.

9. Be Active and Comment Highly Ranked Posts

By commenting on entries published on websites ranked high in the search results, you can attract users and convince them that it’s worth entering your page. Apart from that, the comment section is a great place for leaving SEO links to your page.

10. List Your Company in Directories

Make sure that your website (together with a link leading to it) is linked in trustworthy directories. You should also create a Google My Business listing that will improve your backlink profile and positions in the search results.

11. Benefit from Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is gaining increasing popularity. It can significantly improve your brand recognition and an influencer recommending your products or services will share a link to your website.

If your budget isn’t particularly impressive, choose micro-influencers, who are frequently willing to enter barter cooperations. Make sure that they mention your brand, its offer, and website.

12. Fix Broken Links

Look for valuable, informative websites related to the industry you operate in and check whether their external links work correctly.

Identify hyperlinks that generate 404 errors, find similar content on your page, and write to the site owner to present them an alternative piece of content that could be linked instead of the page that doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s a win-win situation – you get SEO backlinks from quality sources, and these sources have working links.

13. Analyze Backlinks of Your Market Rivals

Analyzing the backlinks of your market rivals is one of the simplest and quickest recipes for finding quality websites that you can potentially use in your SEO backlink building process.

Moreover, if a given page has linked to a number of your competitors, the chances are that it’ll also link to your site, provided that you offer appropriate content.

Of course, you don’t have to check the links manually. For this purpose, you can use special tools and functionalities such as the Backlink Gap offered by SEMrush. Thanks to it, the entire process takes only a few minutes and you can quickly discover helpful places where you can acquire links.

Apart from supporting the link building process, backlink gap analysis can help you bridge the gap between you and your market rivals, as these backlinks may be the reason why you’re ranked lower in the search results.

14. Create Infographics

Infographics are a great piece of content that attracts users’ attention and make it possible to easily comprehend information. Apart from that, infographics are an ideal place for backlinks to your website.

Users who aren’t fond of long blocks of text love infographics, and the idea of getting all the important data in one chart, image, or graphic.

If you create transparent, quality infographics, other content creators will use them in their texts, and they’ll provide a link to the original source, thus increasing your brand recognition and supporting your backlink building efforts.

Don’t worry! You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to create appealing infographics. It’s all about your imagination, and the data you present. Also, you can use simple online tools like Canva, which will help you create a visually-pleasing infographic!

15. Take Part in Webinars, Podcasts, or Interviews

Be active in the industry!

Take part in webinars, podcasts, interviews, create testimonials, and make sure that there are lots of places where your company is being talked about.

It’s a great way to obtain quality backlinks, attract the interest of those who haven’t been familiar with your brand before, and convince them that your products or services are something they’ve been looking for.

If you don’t get too many proposals to be a guest during such events, don’t get discouraged. Remember that you can always take the bull by the horns, and message hosts and different organizers to inform them that you’d like to participate in such happenings.

Backlink Building – The Takeaway

Backlink building is an essential part of the SEO process. If you want to reach the top 10 search results, you need an appropriate strategy.

Make your links natural, unique, and relevant for users; they should come from highly trusted domains, which will in turn position your website to appear trustworthy, and reliable. Remember that creativity in backlink building pays off!

Valuable and strong links are not easy to get. That’s why an effective SEO backlink building strategy takes considerable creativity and time. Luckily we have tons of experience! Don’t miss your chance to boost your Google ranking with quality backlinks, contact us today!