Link building: from the basics to step-by-step implementation

Despite the fact that today SEO specialists and Internet marketers have a fairly large range of tools for promoting websites and businesses in general, there are no analogues in terms of efficiency organic traffic. Therefore, a lot of attention is paid to optimizing the resources themselves, complex strategies are developed that can ensure maximum effect, in particular, getting the site to the top of search results. And one of the tools that is actively used by specialists in practice can be called link building. The fact is that search engines in the ranking process necessarily take into account backlinks, that is, those that lead from third-party sites to your site. The more natural, high-quality, diverse they are, the greater the impact they will have on the promotion of the resource to the top of the search results.

We would like to immediately draw your attention to the fact that link building and link purchasing are completely different concepts. The latter generally today refer to “gray” methods of promotion and in their majority can lead to a significant decrease in the position of the site in search results. Here we are talking about creating conditions under which third-party resources would voluntarily place links to your portal on their pages. You can combine different sources of links, be sure to monitor their quality. This is the only way to get an external link mass that will be positively perceived by search bots and will have a good impact on the promotion of the site, and will not send it to the ban.

As part of today's review, we will dwell in detail on the basics of link building, highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. We will talk about how to identify good links and what metrics can be used to do this. We will get acquainted with the types of links, and also provide practical recommendations that will allow you to make a high-quality link. We will describe the main strategies and methods that you can use to build up an external link mass without risk to yourself and where you can place links. We will tell you about the main stages that need to be implemented as part of link building, as well as useful tools. Here are some additional recommendations that will allow you to complete these tasks with the highest quality, professionalism, and speed.

What is the essence of link building?

Link building is based on a strategy that involves posting links on third-party sites that lead to your site and can attract organic relevant traffic. In practice, this looks like this. You, as the owner of a resource or a person specializing in its promotion, want as many users as possible to visit it or you want to increase the recognition of your brand.

To implement this idea, you negotiate with popular blogs, social media accounts, or any other sites to publish your materials containing links to the pages of the site or blog. If the site you choose has good traffic, people will definitely see your material. If they are interested in the information provided, they want to learn more about your company, the products and services provided, then they will follow the link left. As a result, new visitors will start visiting your site. The search engine will see this, as well as the fact that third-party sites link to your resource. Based on this information, it will decide that your portal is high-quality, expert and will increase its rating in the ranking process. At the same time, brand recognition will also increase.

If you put everything on the shelves, it seems that all this can be implemented quite easily and simply. This opinion changes to the opposite as soon as you start doing the relevant work. This will require quite a lot of time, effort, and certain knowledge. In addition, the process is not instantaneous. You will not get the result either today, or tomorrow, or even in a few days. But the external links you place will attract traffic to the site for a long time, systematically moving it to the top of the search results. At the same time, the number of visitors, orders, and income level will increase.

Running a little ahead, we note that the basis of effective link building will be nothing more than the placement of exclusively high-quality content. And this is relevant not only for external sites, but also for your site or any other online presence.

Advantages and disadvantages of link building

Before adopting this or that technology, you need to understand all the nuances well, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. In relation to link building, significant advantages can be called:

• Ensuring a stable and long-term effect. If you manage to form a high-quality and massive external link mass, then in the eyes of search bots your site will look more authoritative, which will automatically contribute to maintaining high positions in the search results.
• Efficient attraction of the target audience. The more people can see the link to your site, follow it, the better and deeper they will be able to get acquainted with the goods and services provided, purchase them and evaluate their quality.
• Significant savings on the promotion budget. Again, we are not talking about purchasing links, which in any case actually involve a purchase. In some cases, you can get external links practically for free. Often there is a mutual agreement on the principle of "I - to you, you - to me". And the freed up funds can be spent on other promotion tools, as an option, the same contextual advertising, bloggers, etc.

What are the disadvantages here? Firstly, this is the lack of an immediate result. To prepare the content itself containing links, to find appropriate sites for external placement, to wait until people start following them, it will take, frankly speaking, a lot of time and human resources. And you will have to wait until the search engine sees all the backlinks and takes them into account when indexing and ranking the site. But practice persistently indicates that all this can more than justify itself in the long run.

Also, the disadvantages of link building include difficulties in implementation. If you choose the wrong strategy that does not correspond to the site or mistakenly throw your publications on spam sites, then your idea will be doomed to failure. In some cases, you can even fall under the filters of search engines, which will lead to the removal of the site from the search results as a whole.

To minimize the likelihood of problems in the process of link building, as well as to ensure maximum efficiency at the end, read our review below.

How to understand that an external link is good?

There are no rules here that clearly prescribe what a good link should be and what can be considered bad. The division is quite conditional and consists in the fact that a quality link will bring people to the site and will benefit it, while a bad one, on the contrary, will harm it. And this is true for absolutely all cases, that is, it does not depend on the total amount of link mass.

So, we consider quality links to be those obtained naturally, which are placed on relevant and authoritative sources. These are the solutions that can provide good targeted traffic to the site. Today, there are unspoken rules according to which the naturalness of links is classified. So, this will include all those solutions that are obtained as a result of:

• mutual exchange of articles with backlinks between different sites;
• launching joint projects with other companies, as an option within the framework of cross-marketing;
• writing content that the author voluntarily and free of charge offers to other sites (the main thing is that no fee is charged here);
• publishing material on thematic forums, in communities;
• preparing guest articles that people will share on their own, taking into account their usefulness, information content.

But still, if you analyze the total mass of backlinks that exist on the network today, it becomes clear: most of of them are still posted for money. It is clear that everyone wants to get a benefit for themselves. And here it is often used as a paid outreach, which involves direct interaction with the site owner in order to discuss the conditions for posting your material on his resource. Another option is specialized exchanges, where intermediary sites are presented, ready to publish your materials for a certain amount. At the same time, the exchange itself earns on the commission for your transaction. It turns out that 3 parties benefit: you, the intermediary site and the exchange.

What kind of links are low-quality? A striking example here is spam mailings. They will be of low quality and lack relevance. This is what can seriously harm search engine optimization. Often, such backlinks come from unreliable platforms. Those who are ready to place absolutely all offers on their site almost for free, but this does not provide traffic. The article itself will most likely be of low quality, and the topic will not coincide at all with the one where this link leads. For example, an article about cryptocurrency, and a link in it leads to an online souvenir store. If a search engine suspects a site of spam, it will treat all portals to which backlinks are posted here with the same disdain and mistrust. That is, it is important to understand that only a high-quality site for placing backlinks can provide you with an increase in organic traffic.

What metrics can be used to assess the quality of backlinks?

Today, there are already tools on the market that will allow you to check the quality of the resources you plan to cooperate with when placing external links. The most common solutions in practice are Ahrefs, Moz. And here you will need to pay attention to the following metrics:

1. Domain Rating (DR). This authority indicator is used on the Ahrefs service. It assumes displaying the reliability of the site on a scale from 0 to 100. Accordingly, the highest authority will be for resources with an indicator of 100. When determining this parameter, not only the quantity, but also the quality of links leading to the domain is taken into account.
2. Domain Authority (DA). Actually, this is the same authority indicator with a scale from 0 to 100, but already used on the Moz service. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that in practice, even for the same domain, DR and DA may differ, which is due to the platform's internal approaches to determining the quality of the link mass.
3. Referring Domains. Takes into account the number of unique domains linking to the same resource. This means that if you post several publications with your links on the same site, the system will not take them all into account. It will only count the first one and that's it. By the way, this parameter is one of the most important today in the process of ranking resources.
4. Linked Domains. This is about the number of domains linking to the same resource. But here it does not matter how many times the link to the site is present. Even if there are 10, 20 of them, they will still all be taken into account.

Getting to know the classification of links

One of the mandatory stages of preparation for complex link building will be a detailed acquaintance with the main classifications of links. This is what will allow you to choose the most suitable solution for yourself. So, links are divided into separate groups depending on the following parameters:

• Method of obtaining: natural and purchased. In the first case, links are placed without payment and at your own discretion. Considering the fact that they reflect the real interests of the site's audience, the result from them will be higher. Purchased links are placed through specialized exchanges. And here the efficiency will be higher if backlinks are included in useful content, and the site itself is chosen as correctly as possible.
• Perception by search crawlers: non-indexed, indexed. If you want search bots to ignore your link, you can prohibit its indexing by specifying the appropriate attribute. In particular, you will need to add the nofollow attribute to the URL. If you do not index the link, it will not have any negative impact on the position of your resource in search results. In addition, they will be able to attract traffic, but only if they are placed on truly authoritative and popular sites. In order for search bots to index your link, you will need to add the dofollow attribute to it or do nothing at all.
• Display method: anchorless and anchor. Anchorless links are presented as a regular URL or words such as “here”, “by link”, “here”, etc. Anchor – these are links hidden in a specific word or keyword that fit into the content as naturally as possible and fully correspond to it. Just one look at the anchor link will be enough to understand where exactly it leads.
• Period of existence: rented and eternal. In the first case, you get a link that will be active for exactly as long as you paid for it. In contrast, eternal links will exist on sites as long as the site exists or until the customer decides to remove them.
• Placement location: contextual, footer, sidebar. The first are written into the text based on its content, the second are placed at the bottom of the page, the third - in the side and main menu. But if we talk about efficiency, the maximum indicator will be observed for contextual links. For footer and sidebar links it will be noticeably lower.
• External solution: text and image links. Text links assume the presence of a word or URL, as an option for the name of the company, product, brand. Links presented in the form of images - these are advertising banners that will remain relevant only for the duration of the advertising campaign, logos, including with a list of partners, graphics. It will be enough to click on them to go to the corresponding resource and find out more information.

Secrets of building good links

For your link building strategy to yield good results in practice and meet expectations, you need to learn how to create good links and choose the right sites to place them. Let's consider both of these points in detail.

Creating quality links

The first thing we want to draw your attention to is the need to prepare high-quality content in general. If such material is at your disposal, then with a high degree of probability third-party services will independently leave backlinks to it. If it turns out that articles are copied, but links to your site are not left, you have the right to contact those responsible for such publications and ask them to put backlinks to the original source. The following recommendations will help minimize the likelihood of problems and improve the quality of links:

1. Prepare relevant anchor content. The anchor that you use instead of the URL address should reveal the essence of your material as accurately as possible. When scanning it by search bots, the link's correspondence to the context of the site to which it leads will be determined.
2. As a platform for posting your publication, choose only reliable resources. Those that have earned a positive reputation. That is, you need a site that has earned the recognition of search engines. They will initially have more weight. We are talking about such a parameter as site trust, that is, the level of trust. It is influenced by various indicators. Alternatively, you can go to the Yandex.Webmaster service and look at the value of the site quality index (SQI). A good indicator is 95% and higher.
3. Constantly monitor your links, maintaining their relevance and freshness. Search engines believe that recently posted links lead to material that will be useful to the user audience and promote the corresponding resource to the top of the search results. This means that work on backlinks cannot be stopped. Regular external publications should become one of the mandatory elements of your promotion strategy.

There is nothing complicated in these recommendations, and they can be implemented with minimal time and effort. Therefore, you should definitely not neglect them.

Where to place backlinks as part of link building

The second aspect of obtaining high-quality and effectively working backlinks is the correct choice of their placement location. And here there are several options:

1. Popular sites. You can publish your materials on sites that have earned authority both among search bots and among the user audience. The only thing is, do not prepare deliberately advertising materials. This should be useful, informative content that corresponds to the specifics of the platform on which it will be posted.
2. Personal business blog. Most likely, you, as a company that strives to develop its online presence, have a blog where educational, interesting materials for the audience are published. Place under each such publication, as an option, social network buttons so that people who have rated your material can share it with their friends.
3. Guest publications. Today, there are enough blogs ready to publish third-party materials if they correspond to the topic and are informative, useful for readers. And if such material contains a link to your resource or account on social networks, it will still be accepted for posting.
4. Social networks. Links to your company's website can be placed in your own accounts in social networks, as well as in business profiles, thematic communities. But it is important not to overdo it here, since social networks index publications that contain external links worse. The most reasonable solution would be to add the corresponding backlink in the first comment to your post. You can also create an article directly inside the social network, which is typical for a number of modern sites, such as VKontakte. If it turns out that the activity in the community you have chosen is quite high, then you can get a good increase in traffic.
5. Interviews with influencers. You can organize joint work with one of the opinion leaders or experts in a certain niche and place the corresponding material on one of your portals. There is a high probability that this person will also post a corresponding publication on their social media pages, website or blog, which will definitely attract the attention of their subscribers and, possibly, your potential clients.

Find out which of these link placement platforms are at your disposal, which ones you can get and how much it will cost you. This way, you will be able to choose the best option for yourself in terms of functionality and price.

Modern strategies for getting backlinks

Considering the fact that link building as a strategy is used quite actively today, this area continues to develop, strategies and methods for getting backlinks are being improved. Today, there are quite a few ways to get backlinks, but the following solutions are the most popular:

• Outreach. Outreach can be called one of the most important technologies in modern link building. It involves direct interaction with the owners of a particular site with a request to place your original publication on it, containing a link to the business resource. Here you can buy this very link, that is, prepare the material yourself or contact the editors of the corresponding site with a request to write a text with a corresponding link. Then, for a certain fee, it is posted on the site. You also have the opportunity to rent links. This strategy involves posting backlinks in already published articles for a certain period of time, as an option from several months to a year and then. Perhaps, your potential partner will benefit from using a link exchange. In this case, they post your material, and you, accordingly, theirs. You can also try to prepare such high-quality, unique and interesting material that any site would want to post absolutely free of charge. Along with texts, this can also be videos, various studies, webinars and other types of content. In any case, it is necessary to choose only authoritative domains.
• Crowd. It is an additional technique aimed at forming an organic link profile specifically for crawlers. In this case, it is assumed that comments, reviews, answers to user questions, and links will be posted on thematic forums. This method is quite effective and, for the most part, completely free, but only if you prepare and publish the material yourself. Here, you just need to choose a platform that is relevant to your audience and create your own discussion thread. But in this case, you need to understand that forums regularly clear their cache. That is, thoughtless posting of comments and spam will not give the desired result. If you create truly useful material, you will be able to keep your link on the platform much longer. Also, do not forget that only informative posts will attract the attention of the audience, and this is exactly what you are counting on.
• Private Blog Network (PBN). In this case, we are talking about the formation of an entire network of Internet resources created specifically for the promotion of one specific site. Most of these will be portals with articles on absolutely any topic, but each of them will contain a link to the promoted resource. The effectiveness of such a solution in practice is quite good, but its implementation is still associated with certain risks. In particular, there is a possibility that search bots will identify such a pattern. And this is fraught with certain sanctions, up to and including blocking.
• Drops. These are specialized services created for selling backlinks. There are already articles on absolutely any topic here. You can take one of them as a basis for yourself and add your link. But we would not recommend using this method due to the fact that search bots consider drops to be spam. This means that you may face certain sanctions, which you would definitely not want.

Our advice: choose only those strategies that do not carry any risks. Otherwise, you may not only get low link building efficiency, but also run into sanctions from search bots, causing serious harm to your business as a whole.

How to implement link building: main stages

To perform all the work related to link building as correctly as possible, without missing a single moment, we recommend following our instructions step by step:

1. Perform a comprehensive analysis of your own website. In particular, it is necessary to evaluate your resource in terms of its quality, domain authority. This will allow you to choose a donor portal with approximately similar indicators. You must understand which region of promotion you are focusing on, who is included in your target audience. Initially, you need to understand who you want to interest in your material and encourage to click on the link.
2. Analyze your closest competitors. You need to understand who your closest business rival is. Analyze all their link profiles and the sites from which the backlinks come. Here, you should pay attention to the number of links themselves, what sites they are posted on, and even what countries of the world they come from. If you see that your competitors' link building strategy is quite effective, you can take their developments as a basis and adapt them to your business.
3. Collect basic data from donor sites. You should initially be sure that you have a good option in front of you. To do this, evaluate the appearance of the site, what material is posted on it, whether it has a clearly defined theme or not. The last point will help you understand whether your target audience is present on the site. Particular attention should also be paid to whether there is spam, off-topic or clearly advertising materials among the publications, and advertising itself in general. After you have selected several options, collect information about the quality of the site in numbers.
4. Check the sites you have selected for spam. It is important to evaluate the traffic here. If the resource is visited by less than 300 unique users monthly, we can conclude that the resource is poorly ranked and unpopular. Also, study the number of incoming links. There should be more of them a priori than outgoing ones. If there are sharp changes in traffic indicators, inorganic growth of the link mass, then there is a high probability that the site is under sanctions from search engines or is cheating its promotion. Poor indexing, namely up to 30-40% is a taboo. A sign of low-quality content will be the presence of materials with a small content of key queries on the donor site.
5. Direct placement of links. We are talking about publishing an article, buying ready-made material or mutual exchange. Here you need to understand first of all what market you plan to work with, because the prices for links in different countries vary greatly from each other. Alternatively, you can write an official letter and send it to several donor sites. As soon as you receive responses, you will be able to evaluate your own benefits and choose the resource that will best meet your needs. You can use email, instant messengers, social networks for communication.

Now you know how to start link building. But it is also very important to monitor its effectiveness. If at some point in time you notice that it has decreased, then perhaps you need to reconsider your strategy and start cooperation with large sites.

Tools that will be useful in the process of link building

Implementing all the work within the framework of link building independently and without using specialized tools will be quite problematic. At the very least, it will require a lot of time and personal effort. But everything can be significantly simplified if you use a number of solutions that the modern market offers. So, as the owner of the resource, you will be able to check the effectiveness of its work thanks to the tools built into Google Search Console, Google Analytics and other similar ones. But with their help it will not be possible to collect information from donor sites. To implement such a task, there is a set of its own software solutions:

• Ahrefs. One of the most important tools for link building. It helps to collect data on the link profile of both your site and donor sites, competitors, analyze key queries. With its help, you can remove spam and low-quality sites from consideration, select resources for placing backlinks with high ratings.
• Serpstat. An analytics tool that you can use to easily and simply study the link profiles of potential donor sites.
• Moz. Will help you determine the quality of the site that you are considering as your donor.
• SimilarWeb. This site offers tools that will help you sort potential donors by various criteria, including traffic indicators, country, etc.

To navigate all those sites that you are considering as donors and choose the most suitable option for yourself, we recommend using several tools at the same time. Thanks to this, you will get an average picture that is as close to reality as possible.

Summing Up

As you can see, in order to implement link building as efficiently and professionally as possible, you need to approach the work as comprehensively as possible. Regardless of what strategy you develop, what sites you choose for promotion, it is important to understand that you are working for the future. One will give good results, although not today. The following will help to significantly increase the efficiency of the work:

• using only high-quality content, in which a link to your site will be embedded;
• a comprehensive approach to checking the quality of the donor site;
• strict adherence to the stages of implementation, step by step;
• control over efficiency;
• using mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service.

We will dwell on the last point in more detail. We are talking about organizing all work with the Internet, as well as with all the services and sites that you will use as part of link building through an intermediary server operating on the technologies of cellular network operators. Thanks to this, you can effectively replace your geolocation and IP-address, thereby gaining access to services blocked in your country at the legislative level. You can also use programs that automate actions, work simultaneously with a large number of accounts in social networks and other platforms, increasing the efficiency of work, covering the maximum target audience. Also, with their help, you can ensure high levels of confidentiality and protection from any unauthorized access.

Follow the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy to get acquainted with this tool in as much detail as possible, its main advantages, functionality, and tariffs. You can also use free testing for 2 hours to evaluate all the advantages of these mobile proxies. If technical difficulties arise in the work, if you need advice and assistance from specialists, the support service works around the clock.

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