As explained in lesson one, link building is the term used for acquiring backlinks from other websites to your own. This is the most important factor Google takes into consideration when ranking your website, and there is a lot of misinformation out there.
Do NOT use any kind of automated link building tool or cheap service, without knowing explicitly what you’re doing – No, a 10 minute YouTube tutorial is not going to teach you how to properly work an automated link building program.
Table of Contents
Basics of Links
Using links as a metric to rank websites is what defined Google as the best search engine in the world. Their patented “PageRank” algorithm was revolutionary at the time, and sculpted Google into the powerhouse company they are today.
Though PageRank is no longer used, it’s algorithmic adaptations haven’t come that far either.
Links are still the #1 ranking factor in Google. Essentially, Google identifies pages linking between each other and assigns values for how influential those pages are.
The more influential a page is overall (The more & better quality of links that page has) the better a link from it is.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the term used for describing the keyword used to link between a website.
As an example, I’ll do the following link: The SEO Institute.
The above link’s anchor text is “SEO Institute” and this is what Google picks up on. Generally, you want your anchor text to describe the page you’re linking to, as well as including the keywords you’re trying to rank that page for.
DoFollow & NoFollow
DoFollow just means a standard link like the above example.
NoFollow is a linking attribute that goes in the HTML code of your link, telling Google to crawl the URL but to not pass any of the link “juice” value to the link. Big site’s such as Wikipedia & blogging comment systems like the default WordPress comments do this, to try and combat people manipulating the platform for links.
An example of a NoFollow link would be:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”https://seo.institute”>”The SEO Institute”</a>
Link Velocity
Link velocity is the measurement of how many links your website and page is getting & at what rate per day.
Google can penalize you if your site is receiving hundreds, or thousands of links in a very short amount of time. However it does account for pages that have “gone viral” and received a lot of links in a short amount of time.
This is a big factor in why automated link building is a bad idea in the modern SEO era. As automated tools such as GSA SER & XRumer, make tens of thousands of links per day.
Knowing What Types of Links to Build
Depending on your website & specific pages, can depend massively on what types of links would go where.
You should only ever build blog comment links to your homepage, and you should only ever build Q&A links to the page that answers the question.
Please note that when you go about link building, don’t use cheap gigs.. Good link building will take you a while to get the hang off, and it’s very easy to build links that drive no impact or negatively impact your site. Make sure you know what you’re doing, or at least the person you’re employing knows what they’re doing before ever building a link at your site.
Some Basic Link Building Techniques
I’ll cover a few example techniques to get you started on your link building journey.
Social Profiles
These are the foundation of most new websites. If you haven’t got your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest accounts all setup, then I recommend going out and making sure you have them all covered – It’s also a good idea to share all of your website’s new pages when they go live via social media, as Google tends to crawl & index them, especially tweets.
You can also use a website called KnowEm, which will search and see if your brand name is available across over 100 different social networks.
Citations For Physical Businesses
Citations are used a reference point for Google to validate a Google MyBusiness listing – Making sure you have consistent business listings across the internet is an important part of owning a business.
These listings can also have a dual purpose and also pass on link juice or trust signals (Validating your website to be a more powerful brand) from large websites such as Yelp, Better Business Bureau and Best of The Web. Some will want a paid incentive to list your site, but you can find plenty of high quality places to list your website for totally free.
Guest Posting
This is one of the most common techniques in the SEO world. It’s pretty simple – You find blogs in your industry, contact them to see if they would accept you a post from you on their blog and write and publish a blog, including a link back via the blog itself or your author description – You can see my author bio at the bottom of this page, it links to my agencies website.
End of Chapter One
Thanks for following chapter one, hopefully you’ve got a basic understanding of the fundamental aspects of search engine optimization, and picked up some terminology and techniques along the way.
In Chapter Two, we’ll be exploring building a website from the ground up. You can go to lesson one of that here.
If you’ve already got a website, or aren’t interested in learning how to make a new one.. Then skip straight to Chapter three here, and start learning more about OnPage SEO.
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