Link building is an SEO technique consisting in the creation of external links pointing to the different URLs of your own domain. Thanks to this SEO Off-page technique, the more pages with authority link to your site the greater its relevance.
Does this mean that Google wants only quantity? Evidently not. There must be a correlation between the website content from which the link originates and the content of the landing URL. Placing links for its own sake (black hat techniques) was a widespread practice that Google penalized hard in mid-2012. Therefore, this technique is not exempt from the changes that the algorithm is incorporating every year.
Many interpret these changes as the announced death of the link building. However, although the rules of the game have been changing, the links are still highly valued for the positioning of a website. Therefore, not having a defined good link strategy is an error.
Below, we show you the basic guidelines for making a good link building, which is effective and is not penalized.
1. Anchor text
The anchor text is the words containing the link that goes to your website. To choose them correctly, just apply the logic and think that the purpose of this hyperlink is simply to add information to the reader. This text should summarize the destination URL content in a simple and concise way, including the keyword if possible. A very typical example of not taking this into account is: “For more information, click here.”
2. Where do we start?
A good link building strategy starts by branding, that is, the first links are built thinking only about your brand. To do this, they must land in URLs in which your business model is understood at a glance.
A good link building strategy starts with branding
3. How can we know a website authority?
When choosing the websites where to place the links, the greater the authority of the domain, the better. Today there is no exact metric that reveals the authority of a domain and the best way is to make a combination of all the options we have within reach. However, the fastest and most free is the Mozilla bar, which is installed like any other extension of Google Chrome and gives us the values of the PA (Page Authority) and DA (Domain Authority) according to their own criteria.
4. Which webs to choose?
- Press releases are one of the most effective mechanisms in link building since the media usually have domains with a lot of authority. Also, Google loves that in an informative publication links appear providing information to what is being explained.
- Blogs are another very useful option. The ideal is to publish links in those whose theme is related to your website and appearing subtly, without hardly notice. However, it is difficult to find a blog that allows you to include the links for free.
5. Maintenance: Avoid broken links
Ideally, have all the links you make in a spreadsheet annotated and, from time to time, check to see that none of them has become a broken link.
A 404 error will always be penalised by Google, but it can still be more to if it appears in a URL continually receiving visits thanks to a backlink.
In the end, the link building requires, like any other SEO technique, to start from a well-defined strategy and perform continuous maintenance.
