Link Building: What is it and what matters the most

Link building plays a vital role within a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign. It helps to drive organic traffic to your website or a specific page via search engines. Link building works best when there is a robust SEO foundation in place. For example, if your website or the page you’re using link building to rank for is SEO optimised with excellent content.

There are a variety of ways that link building happens. Advancements in search engines and the evolution of SEO has caused a shift in focus towards the quality and relevance of content. What matters the most has arguably changed. Below we will explore what matters the most when link building to ensure you’re getting the most out of your SEO campaigns.

What Is Link Building?

The World Wide Web is made up of links. There are web pages known as hypertext and links known as a hyperlink. Links are the very make-up of the internet we know today. 

Link building is a way of appeasing the illusive searching engine ‘bots’ that scour the web, using links to do so. 

These bots crawl everything from the links on landing pages on your website and links between entire websites. Essentially, link building is the process of placing hyperlinks on other websites that link back to your own. 

Link building has evolved massively over the years, and it’s still one of the biggest SEO tactics brands use. It’s important to note that link building is not a one-stop-shop. A long-term, well-constructed link building campaign is essential for brands that wish to make an impact on their rankings. 

If you were wondering how important links are, an official Q&A with Google revealed that backlinks are the most crucial factor for ranking along with great content.

Domain Authority

Domain authority (DA) was developed by Moz, although the original concept was created in 1999 by a man named Jon Kleinberg. Moz has used this concept to develop a metric based on a secret calculation of what ranking signals they think are needed to rank in Google. It essentially predicts how likely a website will rank in search engine result pages. Websites are scored from one to 100. It goes without saying, the higher the DA, the better. 

Why is DA such a crucial factor for your link building strategy? Building links using websites with a low DA isn’t going to appease the Google bots. In fact, if you were to have a backlink profile full of links placed on websites with a poor DA, you may be penalised. Rather than going up in the rankings, your website or the page you’re trying to rank for could drop further down. 

It’s easy to find out what the DA of a website is. Try this tool to see what the DA of your website is, your competitors, or websites that you want to place a link on. It’s fine to have a few backlinks on websites with a low DA. An effective link building strategy will place links on websites with a range of DA’s, from low to high.

Content Quality

Great quality content is invaluable to link building. The aim of link building is for people to click on the backlink that will take them to the specific page you’re trying to rank for. If the quality of the content is poor, the chances of people sticking around to read far enough to click on your link are slim. 

Content needs to be factual, relevant, and interesting. Many argue that the quality of the content is even more important than the quality of the link. The length of the content also plays a factor. For SEO purposes, content should always be more than 300 words long. 

The longer, the better. Google favours longer content and ranks it higher. 

Link Placement Within Content

Link placement within the content is very important. It’s a well-known fact that readers are more likely to click on a link if it is placed near the beginning of an article. The further down the page the link is, the less likely readers are to engage with it. Whether the link is a keyword or a URL, it should be placed towards the top of a post. It’s important, however, to avoid having a link placed in the opening paragraph. 

Links should also be set to follow. Follow links are essential. They help to boost the page ranking of the linked-to websites. This then helps them to rank higher in search engine result pages.

A Reputable Link Building Service

Using a reputable link building service is essential. So what are you waiting for? Find a link building solution that works and start seeing those long desired results like the one offered by iNETVENTURES is a great way of ensuring your link building campaign is successful. They will ensure great content quality and high DA placements. However, the higher the DA, the more costly the service. 

Websites with a higher domain tend to come with a large fee for posting. Using a reputable link building service will also mean you have a tailored link building campaign that produces results. 

Link building is a staple SEO technique that anyone wishing to rank should be using. A strong link building campaign will increase Google rankings and increase sales.