We know that having a relevant site, with unique content, a good number of backlinks received, being shared on social networks, and with good domain authority is essential for good positioning in Google search. Uniting these factors with good link building is a key action to conquering the first positions.
After all, what is Link Building?
Link building is summed up in getting backlinks (links on other sites leading to your site naturally or not).
In the past, in the early stages of SEO, it was a widely used tactic that generated many positive results for whoever did it, but most of the time negative results for the user experience. The reason for this is that in the past a site that had just been created could get dozens of very low-quality links and still be in the top search positions for a very important term.
This was done simply: links were created in comment spaces with perfect anchors, links in the footer of dozens of sites, in the sitewide (sidebar of the site where there are usually links for categories or for social networks) of various sites and so on. This created a very large network of links between hundreds of sites and the Google algorithm was easily fooled by these strategies.
Imagine that a few years ago I could have a site with the address “ www.balondefutbol.com” and then create hundreds of links with the anchor text “soccer ball” pointing to my site, without Google penalizing me and even rewarding me for having the terms "soccer ball" in the root of my domain. It could even guarantee the first position.
This was done by various sites and for generally not very good reasons. A common case was that of "money sites", whose objective was to generate money at any cost. It could be for advertising banners on the Internet, in which the greater the number of visitors, the more you could charge, and even offered a product at an attractive price, but to take your personal data and sell it later.
This technique was also used by sites that did not have bad intentions, but the user experience with the search was not very well most of the time. The content may not have the necessary depth or, even as a serious company, they struggled to be in the top positions for several words with a high number of searches and little relation to your business.
Currently, that type of strategy is classified as black hat SEO.
Should I work with Link Building?
The answer is: yes!
It's not because Google says we should earn our links naturally and not use link-building that we can't create a safe link-building strategy .
Backlinks received are still one of the most important factors in organic ranking, but the way you get those backlinks has evolved along with Google's changes.
To get the best results with link-building work, we must avoid excessive backlinks with perfect anchors, as in the example of the soccer ball. It is even advisable not to create this type of anchor since Google is smart enough to understand that this link has more of a purpose to manipulate the algorithm than to help the user. Remember that the user experience is the main priority sought by Google.
In this post you will see how links can be created: when citing an important article a brand anchor was used, for quotes and important parts that require more details, and words from the text itself were used naturally. Google's algorithm is currently capable of understanding the very correlation of the words around the link.
Putting this into examples:
"The RD Station company specializes in digital marketing of results and has offices in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico "
By reading this information, the bot manages to interpret that RD Station works with digital marketing and is in 3 countries, thus helping to rank an important word for the company: "digital marketing".
Now, altering the position of the link as SEO professionals were used to in the past, we would have:
“ RD Station company specializes in digital results marketing with offices in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico ”
That completely changes the scenario in the eyes of the bot, it shows that we are trying to use the link in an unnatural way to manipulate the algorithm in a way that is not recommended by Google. Of course, having a very small proportion of these links will not cause any problems, but if done exaggeratedly, they can cause a spam penalty and harm a long-term strategy.
In addition to positioning the link and creating those links naturally, it is important to maintain the contextualization of the link. In general, it does not make sense that you have a site about engineering and get a link on a blog or portal specialized in fashion.
It is not natural, unless, for example, your company is responsible for the project of the house of some fashion blogger and she shared that experience, which completely changes the reason for that link (and from the context of the text it would be clear naturalness).
Citing the example of link positioning, it can be noted that we chose to have the link in the name of the company "RD Station", as more natural and important. This is part of a big change in current link building: brands have gained more and more strength in the Google algorithm. It is even highly recommended that the majority of links that the domain receives be with the brand anchor, more than with any other term.
Today, with the evolution of Google, it is safe to say that even the links with the "nofollow" tag (an indication to Google to "not follow" the page and not pass authority) also provide value, as well as the brand's own citation in a text without a link, as long as the context is appropriate.
Care when working with Link Building
Working with link building requires care and dedication and there are few agencies or people who really understand the matter. There are hundreds of professionals who claim to do that job safely. For this reason, before hiring them, ask for a demonstration of the links they built, ask how the blogs or sites were chosen to create the backlink and how to monitor and control those results.
Additionally, check if the charge will be monthly or per link created. It is common for this to impact not only prices but also quality. If the agency chooses to charge for links, the more they do, the more they will earn, but they are not always guaranteed to be high-quality or contextual links.
Those that charge monthly are more likely to deliver, almost always, a smaller number of links, but with more quality and context for your business. Obviously, there are exceptions for both cases, but a more detailed search is worth it. All of that will make a difference.
Question if the agency does other types of link building outside of the traditional Guest Post. That is already a huge differential and you can further accelerate results with that strategy.
Another care is to understand how the agency approach getting the links. Some companies come into contact in the following way:
“Hi so-and-so, I am contacting you on behalf of RD Station and I would like to write a guest post on your blog with a link to the company.”
Of course, it can be more or less smooth, but this is a way of damaging the company's reputation with bloggers and media vehicles. They anticipate guaranteeing that this does not happen.
If you choose to do it internally, be sure to create safety guidelines for the people who will fill that role, looking for articles and examples to create those links safely.
A very important tip: do not create links only with perfect anchors, as we mentioned before. That can be detrimental to your site if Google is suspicious that you are trying to manipulate its algorithm.
Example url: www.cualquersitio.com/balon-de-futbol
- Perfect Anchor – “Soccer Ball” – Use very little.
- Partial Anchor – “Buy Soccer Ball Online” – Use with care.
- Brand anchor – “Any Site” – ALWAYS use.
- Random anchor – “this site”, “at this link”, “here” – Use little.
- URL Anchor – www.cualquersitio.com/balon-de-futbol – Use frequently.
Always try to balance the types of anchors in your site's backlink profile, as the perfect anchor should always have a lower percentage than the other types. This distribution passes the impression of a profile of natural and conquered backlinks over time.
Link building is really difficult to do with high quality, since it requires a lot of time from professionals to get in touch, write the content correctly and place the links naturally in the text.
Likewise, it is necessary to have the experience to analyze that text and in which blog or portal it will be published, measure the results, and be aware of the proportion of anchors that are being used, whether they look natural or not.
Along with those careful anchors, never use the same content more than once on different sites. That's bad in the eyes of Google, as it leads to duplicate content and the chances of your site being punished for spamming are much higher.
Include links to quality sites. Verify if it does not practice any form of link exchange or does some type of spam if it has enough shares on social networks and if the context of the site is related to that of your business. All this influences the evaluation and choice of starting a relationship with that blog or not.
Putting Link Building into Practice
Now that you know what link building is, how it was done and where it is evolving, we are going to show you how to put it into practice. To begin with, it is necessary to have a notion of how to do keyword research. We have a blog post that will help you better understand the process: Keyword research and SEO: how to choose the best keywords
The idea is to first evaluate which are the priority terms and which have the greatest potential to generate business for your company. Afterward, it is evaluated which page is ideal for the site to be well positioned for that term and then looks for links for that page and also for the domain as a whole.
Once the terms and pages have been identified, the next step is to select the correct type of portal or blog where you want to create that link. For that, we can follow some simple steps that help a lot at the time of the election.
You can do Google searches for your business topic and separate some results, ask for referrals to acquaintances, and even use tools like Similar Sites to find sites similar to yours.
With a list of sites, blogs, and portals in hand:
- Evaluate if the one indicated in the list has the same context for your business.
- Check the relevance of that site, that is, if it has unique and quality content, if it does not have many advertising banners, and what is the strength of the domain (use Open Site Explorer for the domain).
- See if there are guest posts in the publication history, and if it frequently cites articles from other sites or shares infographics, for example. Each of these cases can be an opportunity for your business.
- Use tools like MajesticSEO (paid option, there is no free tool for that) to see if they have more links pointing to or leaving your site. This is important because if the site had more links pointing to it than the other way around, it is proof that it offers good content and that many people want to share it.
- Check the number of social shares (numbers of fans and followers on social networks) that means that the site has influence and people really follow the news of the site.
These are the first steps to choosing a portal or blog as a priority to try a link. Always avoid cold approaches to such sites. The paths that we indicate below are the ones that tend to work best currently.
9 tips de Link Building
After learning what link building is, finding the right words, analyzing the competition, and finding the opportunities, we are going to get to work.
In this part, we will give you 9 link-building tips that can be applied from now on.
1 – Guest Posting
As its name says, it is to publish on a blog of another person or company as a guest. This tactic was and is still widely used by different professionals and agencies.
At first, it was a fever of emails being sent with generic texts asking for a guest post or being even more direct, asking for a link to the blog. After a few years, Google understood this dynamic and frequently fights against this type of spam.
However, it is still possible to make that practice work today. Instead of emailing the entire community you found, the focus is on finding quality sites and building those relationships little by little.
Enter the blog, leave comments, interact with the public of that blog, follow the blog and the author on Twitter, RT important tweets, follow the Facebook account, and follow the posts closely. Offline events are also optimal for that approach.
If you have the ability that can help in any way, offer to help without asking for anything in return.
Over time and when the relationship has improved, you can suggest writing a post about some opinions that are related to the blog. Place some links within that post, including the one you need (taking care with the anchor text, being natural as we pointed out above), and wait for the editor's review.
Remember to write unique and high-quality content, interesting to your audience and non-commercial promoting your company.
If your post is published, do not stop maintaining the relationship with the author, continue interacting and see the possibility of even publishing a link from him on your blog. Some kind of strategic alliance, professional contact, or business can be born with the simple idea of a guest post.
One important thing is to NEVER offer money in exchange for a link. This is highly damaging and 100% against Google policies. Genuine relationships that seek to generate value actually work because they are good for everyone: the user, Google, your company, and the other site.
2- Co-Marketing
Here at the RD Station blog we already talked about Co-Marketing in What is Co-Marketing and how to use it to amplify your results .
This is a perfect strategy. Getting links with Co-Marketing is not exactly against Google's policies. They are simply two companies working together to distribute rich material, like a webinar or an eBook.
At RD Station we have carried out several Co-Marketing and they have worked well for all parties involved.
Some examples of Co-Marketing are:
- “Content Marketing for Results: Aligning Content to the Sales Funnel” – eBook with Rock Content
- “How to sell more on Linkedin” – eBook with Linkedin.
- “Digital Marketing for the sale of Online Courses” – eBook with Redbox
All these materials were published on their respective sites and likewise replicated by other blogs in the same niche, generating natural backlinks.
3 – Infographics
Infographics work great for generating backlinks. How do these work to generate backlinks? After creating the infographic, leave an embed code at the end and send the infographic post to subscribers of your feed or newsletter. This will be disseminated naturally if it is of good quality and with relevant information.
If you already have a relationship with a site that can benefit from it, a mailing indicating the content may be worth it.
But creating infographics can be expensive, right? The truth is, no. There are some sites for creating free infographics. Create and test the audience that will interact with this type of post.
The most famous of them is Infogr. am .
4 – Social Media
You may be thinking “But Google says that social media has no impact on organic search”. That is not entirely true. First, there are correlation tests that indicate that social networks make a difference for SEO and your site as a whole.
Matt Cutts himself (Google's Anti-Spam Chief) has already said that links on Twitter, for example, count as a link like any other. Just as it is to imagine that alike must have a significant weight for the ranking of your pages.
Now, even if those links do not have a very large direct impact (correlation tests do not necessarily indicate the cause), there is at least an indirect impact.
Imagine that you make high-quality content, with depth and valuable information. That generated hundreds or even thousands of shares, people accessing your site and interacting with the post in the comments. It would be great, right?
Well, that is the impact of Social Media, millions of people talking about the same issue, dozens or hundreds of blogs creating backlinks for your article, shared everywhere, Facebook, Twitter among others.
And what about your page metrics? The bounce rate decreased, it gained authority for the topic in question, it gains backlinks that help in the strength of the domain and not only of the page, and by the time you realize it, other pages of your site will be gaining strength and positions in the rankings of Google.
To demonstrate this point, we'll use a study by Quick Sprout's Neil Patel.
Here is a screenshot from BuzzSumo showing the most shared articles from the Search Engine Land site.
BuzzSumo screenshot
- The first has 15,172 shares.
- The second has 10,318 shares.
- The third has 8,868 shares.
Now, how do those Social Shares turn into backlinks?
The first article has 18,310 backlinks from 461 different domains.
The second has 5,017 backlinks from 461 different domains.
The third has 2,626 backlinks from 385 different domains.
Examples of majestic SEO backlinks
We are talking about articles that have backlinks from different places but are for the same domain. Imagine the value that those items alone didn't bring to the entire domain.
There is indeed a correlation between the number of social shares and the number of backlinks gained by each of these articles.
And quoting Neil Patel “Many SEO analysts say that you should earn your links naturally. I really agree, but that doesn't mean that people are going to find great content out of thin air, you should be there actively promoting it.”
Sponsor your posts on Facebook, spread them on Twitter and wherever it makes the most sense. Be active in distributing that content.
5 – Grow naturally and with high-quality content
Here at RD Station, we are regular practitioners of Inbound Marketing and we have several posts on the subject: it is our entire company philosophy and how we guide our content and our day-to-day.
Our philosophy is to attract people to use our software or services without actively trailing behind them, but by having them come to us with their problems and difficulties through our content and knowledge.
It's not easy to get to that point, it takes time and a lot of effort, but it's well worth it. Today our growth is based on our articles and on the people who are interested in what we do here, without putting pressure on a service that they may not need or be interested in.
This led us to conquer many backlinks naturally. Our greatest link-building asset is quality content that people actually care about sharing.
Good content that explains this dynamic well is the one presented in Moz's Whiteboard Friday: Building a Marketing Flywheel .
In short, he says that all the efforts we have at the start of a business to really start turning and running are only worth it. He even gives some examples of how this is applied in digital marketing .
6 – Press office
If your company can hire or maintain a press office, it is time to use it for link-building work.
The press offices always have contact with the largest portals and blogs in the target market, and they also know how to fit the company into the most appropriate formats for each channel like no other.
As we mentioned, the strength of the brand has been an increasingly important factor, and the appearance in large vehicles, even without the link, can help a lot.
Use this strategy for the launch of important products, news relevant to your market niche, events, etc.
The cost may be somewhat high, but its return is proportional or even higher.
7 – Broken links
Broken links are links to pages that have been removed or have undergone a change, altering the original link. How about using broken links from other sites to generate links to your pages?
You're going to help another site fix a problem and maintain a positive user experience. Look for some sites that can generate links - competitors do not count, of course. Some options to do it:
- For sites that already generate links for competitors, use Open Site Explorer ;
- For similar sites that are already linking to you, use Open Site Explorer again to identify who is already linking and search Google for “related:linkdelsitio.com” to see similar sites;
- Sites that produce content within your area.
To assess whether a site has broken links, you can use tools like the Dead Link Checker or the Check My Links Chrome plugin .
Check if there is a broken link that can be replaced by yours, with content related to the subject. The next step is to contact the person in charge, giving notice of the error and suggesting the correction with your own link.
And if you still do not have content on the subject, there is a great opportunity there. Produce something of quality and offer it to the page editor, presenting the problem and, at the same time, the solution.
8 – Mentions of the brand
Do you already monitor what is said about your brand on the internet? If you haven't already, set up Google Alerts to receive an email whenever something about your business is posted. Include some variations of the name, such as no spaces, for example.
Upon receiving an alert, check to see if the mention already links to your site. If this is not the case, contact the person responsible for the publication and ask for the link.
In case you have complete content on a certain subject, you can also create alerts for when the subject is mentioned on the internet. This can be a great opportunity to receive a link.
We, for example, monitor the term “ Digital Marketing ”. When we identify a publication that cited that keyword and did not include our link, we evaluate whether the site contains external links. In case it applies, we try to get the link in the mention.
9 – Skyscraper
Skyscraper is the English word for a very tall building. This means that you are going to look at the production of a larger scale of content better than that of all your competitors and receive links from the main pages of the market, looking for the first position.
Here the path combines some of the techniques that we mentioned before. Start by finding some content from your company that is already generating quality backlinks and in good quantity. Then make it even bigger, better, and awesome! Something that really generates value for those who want to read it.
This must be bigger, better, and more awesome, too, than the competing content. Study in detail who is in the first position and see how you can offer more information and help readers more. Always keep in mind that we need to help people and companies solve their problems.
Once all this is done, which we know is not simple, it is time to go for links. Use a tool like arches to identify the top sites that competing content links to. Get in touch with the administrators by email, inviting them to get to know your content and showing that it will be more interesting for their readers, because, as we said, it is bigger, better, and more incredible.
Conclusion
Now that you've come this far you must be thinking, “Okay, I read and learned about link building, but in the end, is it worth it or not?” The answer is: it's totally worth it.
Even giving work and with a relatively high cost of time, it is an excellent strategy to accelerate your results with SEO and further increase your sales and organic visits.
Link building is evolving every day and we must always be attentive to Google updates, punishments, and new ideas to get those links.
If you want to know more tips to improve the SEO of your website, learn more in our eBook: 28 actions to improve your SEO
