How to build links for SEO

This guide has taken the best of our knowledge and tried to explain all the intricacies of link building in simple terms so you can easily put the advice in action into action. dynamic.

But before we dive in, here are just a few quick details to get things going:

1. If you have a brand new website, it's best to start things off by building a few dozen basic links.
2. It's helpful to have a prior relationship with the website owner before you request a link from them.
3. People link to interesting and useful websites. So if your site isn't like that, you'll have a hard time building links to it.
4. Links from relevant pages on authority websites have the biggest impact on your rankings on Google (and possibly others).

 

Part 1: Link building basics

You can think of links as votes. When other websites are linking to your site, it tells Google that your site is important in some way. In short, this is essentially Google's PageRank algorithm.

So, the more high-quality backlinks a page has, the higher it tends to rank in Google. And if you want to outrank it with your own site, you'll probably need to get more links than it has.

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Obviously the article has simplified things a bit. Ranking #1 in Google is more nuanced than just getting more links because links aren't the only ranking signal Google uses. However, it is a very strong signal and it has a very direct effect on your search rankings.

So what is link building and how do you do it?

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. Its purpose is to increase the 'authority' of your pages in the eyes of Google so that they rank higher and bring in more search traffic.

Let's dig a little deeper into that.

Part 2: How to build links

Conceptually, most popular link building strategies fall into one of the following four groups:

1. Add link – It is when you visit some website and add your link there manually.
2. Link Requests – This is when you send emails to relevant website owners and ask them to link to you.
3. Buy links – Same as above, but you give them money (or some other form of profit generation).
4. Earning Links – This refers to creating and promoting something so noteworthy that people will naturally link to it.

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You can also hire an experienced link builder (or a link building agency) to do everything for you. And that's what a lot of digital marketers and business owners end up doing because no matter what tactic you choose, link building takes a lot of work.

But even if you decide to outsource your link building, it will be extremely helpful if you have some basic knowledge of how to do it. This way, you can know whether the person you hire will do a good job or not.

So let's take a closer look at each of the four groups above.

1. Add link

This is when you visit a website that doesn't belong to you and manually place your link there.

The most common tactics that fit into this category are:

1. Create social profiles.
2. Submit commercial directory.
3. Review the list of websites.
4. Post to forums, communities, and Q&A sites.

Building links through those tactics is easy to do. And for that exact reason, such links tend to have little to no value in the eyes of Google.

Additionally, these types of links hardly give you any competitive advantage. If you can go to a website and manually place your link there, so can your competitors.

 

Yet, this group of link building tactics should not be completely ignored. In fact, some professional link builders like to start with these types of links when they're working with a brand new website.

They call it building 'foundational links'.

Most online businesses have branded accounts on major social networks, as well as listings on major trade directories and review websites (Yelp, Trustpilot, ProductHunt, Glassdoor, etc.). And all of these pages contain links to their websites.

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Google clearly pays attention to these profile pages. If you look at the 'Knowledge' panel for Ahrefs (screenshot below), you'll notice links to social media profiles listed there. And Ahrefs isn't the one who added them. Google itself identifies Ahrefs' social media profiles and associates them with the Ahrefs brand as part of the Knowledge Graph.

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These types of links are nofollow or very, very weak. That means they barely move when it comes to ranking on Google.

But since the 'nofollow' attribute is now considered a suggestion, it's likely that over time your profile pages will accumulate some quality links of their own and may start to bring in a bit of value. Search engine optimization (SEO) for your website.

For example, Ahrefs' profile page on Twitter has 11,000 backlinks, coming from more than a thousand different websites. So, pretty sure it has some 'weight' in Google's eyes.

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With that said, don't go crazy listing your website on every social network and business directory imaginable. We're talking about just a few dozen of them, where your business is listed as a matter of course. Anything beyond that will be a waste of time.

And the best way to find some quality websites to add your links to is to research your competitors' links. We will discuss this in more detail later in this guide.

2. Request a link

This is when you reach out to other website owners and ask them for a link, what SEOs often call 'link outreach'.

But you can't contact the people at datasciencecentral.com and ask them to link to your page with the cookie recipes, right? You need to choose websites that are somehow related to yours because they are more likely to actually consider your request.

The process of collating a list of relevant websites to approach is called 'link prospecting'. And the more effort you invest in finding the right outreach targets, the higher your success rate will be.

But why would the owners of other websites (even related ones) care about linking to yours?

Ideally, you want them to be so impressed with your resource that they will want to share it naturally with their website visitors (i.e. link to it).

But not every page on your website is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece worthy of thousands of links. So SEO experts have come up with a series of tactics to convince other website owners to add links to their pages.

Here's a brief list of these tactics, along with the general reasoning behind them:

1. Guest Post – Write a great article for their website, which you can link to yourself.
2. Skyscraper Technique – Find an outdated (or inferior) page that many websites are linking to. Create a much better one on your own website. Then show it to all 'affiliates'.
3. Resource page link building – Find pages that list resources similar to yours and ask to be added to them.
4. Broken Link Building – Find a dead page with a lot of links. Create an alternative on your own website and ping all the linkers about it. In short, it's broken link building.
5. Image link building – Find websites that have used your images without proper attribution and ask them for a link.
6. HARO – Contribute 'expert citations' to their articles.
7. Unlinked Mentions – Ask to turn your brand mention into a link.
8. PR – Give them an interesting story to tell.

However, this is a word of warning.

The reasoning behind each of these tactics seems fair and reasonable, but you'd be surprised at how low the success rate is. If you get 5 links out of hundreds of outreach emails, you can be proud of yourself.

 

But there's one simple thing you can do to tip the scales in your favor. It's about building relationships with people in the industry before you need something from them.

If you received a random email today from someone asking for a link, would you bother to respond? But what if that email comes from someone you've previously talked to on Twitter or maybe even met at an in-person event? You'll be more likely to pay attention, right?

Therefore, if you start networking with people in your industry in advance (and maybe even do small incentives for them), you should have no problem reaching out with a request to link into a some time in the future.

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That's how relationships help you get links naturally.

3. Buy links

This is the easiest way to build links. Many website owners will be happy to link to you if you pay them.

But exchanging money (or anything else, really) for links is quite risky. Google considers it manipulation of its algorithm. And it can punish you by excluding your website from search results.

Another risk of buying links comes from wasting your money on bad links that don't even work in the first place.

This article doesn't want to teach you any tactics that could put your business (or your wallet) at risk. So there will be no advice on 'how to buy links the right way' in this guide.

Yet, you should be well aware that many people in the SEO industry buy links to achieve their ranking goals. Once you start researching your competitors' backlinks and reaching out to similar websites, you'll soon know whether they pay for any of your links or not.

4. Earn links

You 'earn' links when other people link to pages on your website without you having to ask them to do so. This won't happen unless you have something truly remarkable that other website owners really want to mention on their websites.

So here are some things that can make the pages on your website worthy of a link:

1. Your company's proprietary data
2. Experimental results (requires significant effort)
3. Unique ideas and strong perspectives (i.e. thought leadership)
4. Industry survey
5. Breaking news

For example, in 2017, Ahrefs used its proprietary data to conduct a unique study to answer one of SEO's most frequently asked questions: 'How long does it take to rank in Google? '

As of today, this blog post has nearly 3,000 backlinks from about 1,700 different websites.

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And even six years later, this research is still finding new links. Here are some linked mentions from earlier this year:

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But you don't necessarily have to create any content. Your business itself or the products and services you offer may be worthy of a link.

A large portion of the links to the ahrefs.com website come from people mentioning products and companies instead of published content. Here are some linked mentions that Ahrefs received just yesterday:

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But people can't associate with things they don't know exist. So no matter how great your page (or product) is, you still need to promote it. And the more people see your resource, the more likely it is that some of them will link to it.

Part 3: Which links impact search rankings?

Different types of links have different impacts on your page rankings in Google. And no one knows for sure how exactly Google measures the value of each individual link.

But there are five general concepts about link evaluation that the SEO community believes to be true.

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1. Powers

It seems intuitive that a link from The New York Times and a link from your friend's small travel blog cannot be considered equal by Google. NYT is a world-renowned authority and your friend's blog is virtually unknown to their friends.

Through years of link building, SEOs have gathered a lot of empirical evidence that links from more famous and authoritative websites have a greater impact on your page's Google rankings.

But how do you measure a website's 'authority'?

According to an industry survey conducted by Aira, the most popular website authority metrics are Domain Rating (DR) by Ahrefs and Domain Authority (DA) by Moz. With internally developed metrics (usually with DR or DA mixed in there) taking third place.

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But in addition to the authority of the entire website, there is also the authority of the actual page that is linking to you. This is calculated by Google with the help of the famous PageRank algorithm.

Simply put, the PageRank algorithm is based on the premise that pages with more backlinks (and better ones) of their own will have stronger 'votes'.

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Ahrefs has its own metrics to measure a page's authority. It is called URL Ratings (UR) and is calculated in a very similar way to the original PageRank.

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And there's one more thing you need to know about authority. If a backlink has the rel='nofollow' attribute attached, it will most likely not vote 'upvoted' for the website it links to.

2. Relevance

If you run a health and fitness blog, links from other websites (and pages) on the same topic will carry more weight in Google's eyes than links from auto or finance websites. main.

Here's an excerpt from Google's 'How Search Works' guide that corroborates this theory:

If other prominent websites on the same topic link to that page, it's a good sign that the information is high quality.

But this doesn't mean you should avoid getting links from websites that aren't on the same topic as yours.

The problem is, no matter what topic your website covers, there will be dozens of topics that are perfectly relevant but not the same.

For example, nutrition is important for health and fitness. So it's completely natural for fitness websites to link to articles about food. And if you want to exercise regularly, you need to make time in your schedule for it, so linking to articles about time management is a no-brainer.

In other words, relevance is a fairly malleable concept. Unless, of course, you try sticking links in places where they clearly don't belong.

3. Anchor text

If you're not familiar with the term, 'Anchor text' is a clickable piece of text that links to another page. In many cases, it briefly describes the content of the linked page.

So it's no surprise that Google uses the words in the link text to better understand the referenced page and which keywords deserve to rank. In fact, Google's original PageRank says this quite clearly:

Google uses a number of techniques to improve search quality including page rank, anchor text, and neighborhood information.

So how to take advantage of Anchor text when building links?

You'd better not do that. The more you try to control how different sites link to you and include all the 'right words' in the anchor text of your backlinks, the more likely Google is to suspect manipulation and penalize you for it. So it's better to let the author of the linking page decide how they want to reference your page.

4. Location

Back in 2010, Bill Slawski made headlines with a Google patent describing the 'Reasonable Surfer Model'. This model explains the possibility that a clicked link can influence the level of authority transferred. And this possibility is mainly determined by the location of the link on the page.

Suppose there is a website consisting of three blocks: Content, sidebar and footer. As a general rule, links within content will receive more clicks because the content block gets the most attention from visitors.

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Another thing that can affect a link's CTR is how high on the page it appears. Readers are more likely to click on links at the beginning of an article than those at the end.

5. Destination

When building links to your website, there are 3 general destinations you can point to:

1. Your home page.
2. Your linkable assets.
3. The actual pages you need to rank well on Google (often called 'money pages').

And quite often, the pages that you need to rank well are also the ones that are the hardest to get links from.

That's because website owners often prefer to link to informational sites where their audience can get free value rather than commercial sites where their audience can recommend some products.

So one of the most common questions in SEO is 'How do I get links to boring pages?'

And the strategy that experienced SEOs often recommend is to get lots of high-quality links to your 'linkable content', then pass some of those 'link authority' to your 'money sites'. ' that you want to rank well on Google.

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Part 4: The best link building strategies

There are many different link building tactics and strategies. Some of them can be very effective, while others are no longer effective today and will most likely just be a waste of your time.

Here's what works really well now:

1. Copy your competitors' backlinks

If someone is linking to your competitors, chances are they're willing to link to you too.

A good way to start this strategy is to research who links to the actual home pages of your competitors' websites. These people are referring to the entire business, not some specific website that you may not have on your own website.

For example, here are a few pages (with decent search traffic) that link to the Ahrefs homepage:

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As you can see, in both cases, Ahrefs is mentioned right next to several other marketing tools, which just proves the point that asking to be mentioned alongside your competitors is a reasonable request.

Once you've completed your homepage links, the next step is to research which pages on your competitors' websites have the most links.

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By looking at the Best by links report for ahrefs.com (above) in Site Explorer, it's easy to see which types of pages bring them the most links:

1. Home – Because many people refer to Ahrefs as a software or a company.
2. Free tools – Keyword Generator and Website Authority Checker are two of the many free tools that Ahrefs has developed. And each of these tools is attracting a lot of backlinks naturally.
3. Blog - Thanks to consistent useful content, many people are now recommending Ahrefs' blog and linking to it.
4. Research – People love data deeply. So the research that Ahrefs publishes tends to get a lot of links.

Try browsing the Best by links report for your competitors and see what types of pages bring them links. Once you determine what works for them, you can create similar (or better) resources on your own website.

Once you've implemented the above tactics, you should set up backlink alerts and receive notifications whenever your competitors get new links. This way you will be able to immediately contact anyone linked to them and try to get yourself added to the same page.

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All in all, your competitors are a gold mine of great link opportunities. And when you dig into their backlinks, you'll soon see some link building models that you can leverage on your own website.

2. Targeted link outreach

Let's say you've done keyword research and have a very specific page that you need to rank well on Google for a certain keyword. And you need to build links to that very specific page.

The best place to start is to look for the top ranking pages for your desired keyword and research where they get links.

Just put your keywords into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and scroll down to the 'SERP Overview' widget. You'll see the top ranking pages along with the number of backlinks (and linking domains) they have.

Let's say you want to rank for 'best productivity app'. Here's how the SERP for this keyword looks like:

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When you click on any number of backlinks, you will be redirected to the list of backlinks of a certain page in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

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Here's what you need to do next:

1. Apply some filters to focus only on 'meaningful backlinks'
2. Manually go through the list of remaining pages, open each page one by one and see if its context allows adding a link to your page
3. Contact the owners of these websites and try to facilitate adding links to your resources on their pages

The next place you need to go to find potential affiliates is among the people who have mentioned your topic on their website. For example, if you need to build links to a productivity app, you want to contact all the websites that have mentioned the word 'productivity' somewhere on their site.

You can try searching for them on Google, but it only gives you a limited number of search engine results. On average there are only a few hundred.

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A much faster way to find thousands of pages covering your topic is Ahrefs' Content Explorer.

For example, if you search for the keyword 'productivity apps', you will get over 120,000 pages mentioning this keyword.

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From there, you may want to apply the following filters to narrow the list of results down to the most meaningful ones:

1. Language: English (or any language you are interested in)
2. Website traffic: from 1,000
3. Domain ranking: from 30
4. Filter results clearly
5. Filter: one page per domain, exclude homepage, exclude subdomains

This way you will get a little over 4,000 pages. It's a more manageable number of linked leads to work with.

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And your plan of action here will be very similar to the previous plan. Review each of these pages and contact the respective website owner if you think there's a chance they'd be willing to link to your page from theirs.

To be fair, your success rate with both of these groups of affiliate leads will probably be quite low.

1. Most people won't bother responding to your emails.
2. Many people will respond just to politely decline your request.
3. Some will ask for money or a link exchange.
4. And only a few will actually link to you.

That's why the article mentioned earlier that you should start building relationships with all these website owners before actually asking them for help.

A good way to do this is to contact them while you're still in the process of creating your page. You can ask for their opinion, quote or even suggest showcasing some of their related works.

And it always helps if something you're doing is of real interest to them.

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In other words, your email outreach will be much more effective if what you're doing is truly worthy of people's attention.

3. Create linkable content

In SEO, we use the term 'linkable content' or 'link bait' to refer to content that is strategically crafted to attract links. Such linkable assets can take many different forms:

1. Industry survey
2. Study
3. Online tools and calculators
4. Awards and rankings
5. Instructions and instructions on how to do it
6. Definitions and Terminology
7. Infographics, GIFographics and 'Map-o-graphics'

The folks at Aira, a digital marketing agency, conduct an annual 'State of Link Building Report' by surveying hundreds of top industry experts. This report brought them backlinks from over 600 different websites:

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And one of these backlinks comes from the ahrefs.com homepage itself (which has a URL Rank of 54):

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So how do you put this link building strategy into action?

First of all, you need to come up with a realistic idea of ​​a page worth linking to.

You can start from a simple brainstorm based on the list of linkable content types mentioned above:

1. Can you survey your industry for something?
2. Can you calculate some meaningful statistics from the data your business has access to?
3. Are there any interesting experiments you could do?
4. Does your industry need some kind of free online tool?
5. Et cetera.

The guys from Authority Hacker recently published a fairly detailed video on YouTube, explaining how they use surveys to create linkable content for their website.

And if you can't come up with any interesting ideas, you can always go back to researching your competitors' websites and find out what kind of linkable content works for them.

Don't forget that even the best linkable content must be promoted to attract links. Because people can't associate with things they don't know exist. So let's quickly talk about content promotion.

4. Promote content

You need to focus your attention on these 3 things:

1. o Advertising – A very easy way to promote your resources to thousands of relevant people but may require a significant budget.
2. Influencer outreach – You can look up all the positive thought leaders in your field and reach out to them whenever you publish something worthy of their attention. If you're lucky, they might share it with their followers.
3. Build a following – You should definitely start building an email list (if you don't have one already), as well as being active on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you publish quality content consistently, more people will start following you, and more of them will likely link to your content.

And don't forget to promote your older content by mentioning it in your newly published content.

As Ryan Holiday says in his book 'Perennial Seller': 'Generating more business is one of the most effective marketing techniques.'

5. Guest post

This link building tactic is actually frowned upon by some SEO experts. Mainly because some people tend to overuse it to the point of spamming it.

However, guest blogging is one of the most popular ways SEOs build links today:

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But how do you get your content published on top industry blogs? You just need to give them a really compelling article idea.

And here's a simple tip on how to come up with content ideas that are hard to resist. Just find a few competitors of the blog you want to write about and use the Content Gap tool to find which topics bring them a lot of traffic but aren't mentioned on the blog you're featuring.

For example, a quick analysis of the Content Gap on Ahrefs blogs compared to their competitors' blogs shows a bunch of great topics they get search traffic from, while we don't.

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If someone makes a compelling pitch that they can write a decent post on any of these topics, we'll have a hard time saying no.

A lesser-known guest posting tactic is to find an underperforming blog post you want to write and ask them to rewrite it from scratch. If you can convince them that you can significantly improve that article and it will rank higher on Google and bring them more search traffic, I'm sure they will have a hard time saying no. Your offer.

How do you find these poorly performing pages? Just open the Top pages report in Site Explorer and use the 'Traffic' filter:

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Part 5: Link building tools

While it's technically possible to build links with just a little intelligence and a Gmail account, there are a number of link building tools that will make the link gathering process much faster and easier.

Here are some free options:

1. by Ahrefs – Shows the top 100 links pointing to any website or URL.
2. – Notifies you whenever a specific word or phrase is mentioned on a newly published page. It's a great way to source relevant affiliate leads.

And here are some premium options:

1. by Ahrefs – Shows you all the links of any website or URL with the option to sort and filter them by many important SEO metrics.
2. by Ahrefs – A unique link search engine that helps you find thousands of relevant websites for your link and guest posting requests. Also helps discover linkable content on any topic from around the web.
3. – Similar to Google Alerts but more flexible with SEO-related filters.
4. / / – Email outreach tool. There are many other tools that allow you to send personalized emails at scale, but these seem to be the most popular in SEO circles.
5. / – So-called 'email lookup service', which helps you find contact details of websites on a large scale.