Link Building for SEO: What is it All About?
You’ve probably heard this. If you want your website to rank higher on search engines, invest in link building. What is link building and how does it work?
What is Link Building?
Link building is the art of acquiring quality links from authoritative websites in your niche to help increase the visibility of your online business. It’s an important process because search engines like Google and Yahoo use it as a metric for ranking your website.
For clarity, Google pays more weight to the quality of backlinks and not just the quantity of links pointing to your website. This is why black hat tactics like buying links from websites full of spam content don’t work.
What is a Quality Link?
Because search engines love quality links, that’s what you want to get for your website. But what exactly makes up a quality backlink?
- Website Authority
- Web page Authority
- Website relevancy to your niche
- A link’s position in a post
- A link’s anchor text
- Nofollow vs Dofollow Link
- The quality of Content
Based on the points outlined above, you have a good idea of websites you need to target for link building.
You need to target sites with the highest domain authority ratings in your niche. Domain Authority is a score assigned by SEO giant Moz that rates sites from 0-100.
The most authoritative sites have a score of between 80-100. Most established sites rank between 30 and 79 while new sites rank from 0-30. Acquiring links on sites with a DA score of 80+ is difficult. But if successful, it can boost your site’s ranking significantly.
Besides website authority, Google looks at the DA score of individual web pages, whether a link comes from within your niche, whether it’s linked through a relevant anchor text, and its position within a web page.
Google also considers whether a link is a dofollow or a nofollow. A dofollow link authorizes search engines to give some “link juice” to the linked page. Not many websites want to pass their page ranking juice to your website, though. And as a result, they configure their links as nofollow.
How Can you Source Quality Links?
Link building is one of the toughest aspects of SEO, at least according to many website owners. So, how do experts acquire links?
They follow an outreach strategy. They list the top websites in their niche. Next, they send them emails asking for links directly or indirectly. Most people won’t give you a link just because you want one.
As such, website owners use smart ways to acquire links:
- Guest Blogging
- Participating in interviews and surveys
- Paying for Sponsored content
- Providing Testimonials
Need Help with Link Building
Link building is important for your website’s SEO. Yet, it can sometimes feel like an impossible task. It doesn’t have to be that way. At Moon Ranking, we are experts in both On-page and Off-page SEO.
That means we can help optimize the content on your websites, including internal links. Next, we can source quality links for your content to buy more real estate on Google’s first page.
