Backlinks - also known as inbound links - are incoming links to a website or web page. The quantity and ԛuаntitу of ѕuсh inbоund linkѕ affect directly your rankings in search engines. There are twо main tуреѕ оf backlinks; one-way bасklinkѕ and rесiрrосаl backlinks. The оnе way bасklinkѕ are far much more important than reciprocal backlinks.
Link Building - is the process of acquiring backlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (or simply a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.
The nature, number, and quality of your backlinks massively contribute to your search engine organic rankings. This is one reason why many webmasters and internet marketers take the topic of link building very seriously.
Type #1 - Natural Editorial Links:
These links are considered among the best types of links you can get as they are editorially given by other bloggers and websites. To acquire those links, you need to give the reader a good reason to do so and make bloggers aware of that reason. The content of your website must always be relevant, useful, original, engaging and even creative. Your content must include images, infographics, videos, and even audio podcasts when the industry allows. Ultimately your high-quality content determines how much is your chance of getting those natural editorial links.
Type #2 - Links Acquired Through Manual Outreach:
These links are popular and highly recommended. It involves outreaching and contacting the bloggers and websites in your industry asking them to link to you. As with most types of links, you need to give them a good reason and high-quality content. Your website must be professional, relevant to their industry, and your content needs to be clear, useful, specific and simply top-notch.
Type #3 - Self-Created, Non-Editorial Links:
Self-created links fall in the area of gray and black hat marketing depending on their type. Many of them are not recommended and you need to be very careful when considering them as they attempt to trick the search engine into considering your content as relevant and useful. The Penguin algorithm updates that rolled out in 2012 and beyond, rendered those links as useless and sometimes harmful depending on how they are built.
As these links are not editorially given, they have less impact on your marketing and rankings than other types of links. The most common ones are listed below:
Ultimately, you need to focus on editorial links and on the digital marketing strategies that allow you to acquire them. Be careful when considering the non-editorial ones and seek professional help when you are in doubt.
A perfect backlink must have the following features:
Note: Google's PageRank (PR) is not a useful metric anymore as Google stopped updating it with no future interest in maintaining it since the 5th of December 2013. You should stop checking it and avoid any website that is still considering it as a metric.
Strategy #1 - Content-based Link Building:
Content-based Link Building involves creating amazing engaging high-quality content for you to share, rank, and get links to.
Examples include a combination of the following:
Strategy #2- Guest Blogging:
Guest blogging is the process of contacting other bloggers and influencers to ask them if they would publish an article or a piece of content that you write on their website. It is a good technique but search engines do not credit webmasters that try to abuse it or apply it with low-quality content or over-optimized anchor text. Use it properly, intelligently and carefully.
Strategy #3 - Ego Bait:
Ego bait is a piece of content that ignites the egos of bloggers and webmasters that are featured within this content. The point is that by including them, they might feel inclined to link back to your piece of content or even share it with their list of fans. This technique involves researching, writing, and outreaching in the right way.
Strategy #4 - Broken Link Building:
Broken link building is the process of finding and informing webmasters about the broken links on their site while providing them with a better alternative for them to link to.
The stages are as follows:
Although the specifics can vary, the basic process looks like this:
Strategy #5 - Link Reclamation:
It is the process of fixing or reclaiming the links that once pointed to your website. That includes the following:
More inspiring techniques can also be found at https://backlinko.com/link-building-strategies
A Link bait is a content on your website that other websites link to because they found it useful or important. It is good to note that link baiting is all centered around the idea of building great engaging and compelling content for your website.
Tiered Link Building is a strategy that involves building backlinks in tiers or layers to increase the power of those links that points directly to your website. Usually, gray hat marketers create two to three tiers or four in some rare cases. Tiered link building can be extremely dangerous and harmful if it is misused or done the wrong way.
3 Useful Tips:
Note: Check the next section for more details about this strategy.
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a group of blogs on aged domains and hosted on different servers with different IPs. These blogs are created to simulate natural quality backlinks to the owner’s money site.
Setting up the right PBN require resources, deep knowledge, and high-quality content. For this reason, we have dedicated a whole section for it in this guide. Please note though that the effectiveness of this method has greatly decreased several years back. It is harder to set up, more expensive, and less effective. We highly recommend following white hat proven to work strategies instead.
Tiered Link Building is a gay hat technique in link building. It can be easily misused which can lead to terrible results.
Note: Between each tier, there must be a natural wave of social signals for best possible results.
At all times, your tier #1 and tier #2 backlinks must be original, unique and hold real value.
Private Blog Network (PBN) is a technique derived from the concept of "Marketing By Acquisition". It is the process of buying websites or domain names and converting them to properties that relate to your niche. Thereafter, those websites can be served as marketing tools for your main website.
This also exists in real businesses, when one company acquire another company to strengthen its position in the market and improve its sales. In the following paragraphs, we will highlight the main steps for building your own private blog network.
Please note that our team does not recommend this method as it risky, expensive to set up, and less effective than how it used to be. It is good to be aware of it. Note that the white hat strategies are the best choice to pick for your business.
There are many tools, services, brokers and websites up there to find, bid and buy expired domains from. GoDaddy provides various options for domain auctions but you need to analyze every domain very well before bidding on it.
Finding the right domain can be a tedious task among millions of available domains. However, if you follow the tips below, you will be able to sort them properly.
Note 1: The "Citation Flow" and "Trust Flow" are two metrics used by Majestic-12 Ltd.
Note 2: The "Domain Authority (DA)" and "Page Authority (PA)" are two metrics used by Moz, Inc.
Note 3: The "Domain Rank (DR)" is a metric used by Ahrefs Pte. Ltd.
After acquiring your domain names, you need to host them on different Class-A IPs. The best way to do that is by hosting websites under different hosting companies that operate their services in different countries. SEO dedicated hosting services are not safe anymore so be careful when registering in any of them.
For building your backlinks, try following the guide below for best results:
Keeping your link building profile natural is mandatory when building backlinks. A common mistake among many marketers around is that they use certain percentages when deciding on their anchor text. A better more natural way would be to pick the right anchor text for every specific type of link you are building. A detailed guide is listed below:
[ New update for 2017 and onward ]
Expired domains have now less effect in PBNs than the previous years especially when you completely change the original niche of your purchased expired domain. The best you can do in respect to that is to find highly relevant expired domains that used to feature content related to your current niche.
Note 1: It is a good practice to target different pages depending on the type of backlink that you are building. You can link to your home page, product pages, service pages, and your blog posts. For example, branded and naked URL type of keywords should logically lead to home pages rather than product/service pages or blog posts. Long tail keywords and niche related keywords are more logically to be leading to product/service pages or blog posts rather than home pages. There is no precise rule that covers that, but the idea here is to keep them natural and user-friendly as much as possible.
Note 2: Always add good value when building backlinks. Write unique useful articles and keep your readers and visitors in mind above all. When your visitors are satisfied, your conversion rate will increase along with your authority level.
Starting from December 2014 and onward, Google started paying more attention to metrics like bounce rates, user interaction, social signals and other related user-based behaviors. That is extremely important to keep in mind when building backlinks. Google became more intelligent than before at analyzing user behaviors and measuring popularity and bounce rates.
To strengthen your backlinks, you need now to improve your visitor's experience by providing high-quality engaging content and interacting with your fans on social media networks. It is also advised to get social links to your existing backlinks as that helps your rankings and current authority levels.
If you are running a business and simply don't have the time or the right team for marketing, then you can outsource the process to our experts to handle all the marketing tasks for you.
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