The link building basics
It is not possible to get high rankings on Google, Bing/Yahoo or other major search engines without good links. Google will only list your website in their search results if they find at least one other website that links to your site.
The more other websites link to your website, the higher your search engine rankings will be. The idea behind this concept is simple: if many other websites link to your website then your website must be important.
In addition to the sheer number of links, the quality of the links is also important.
In this chapter you’ll learn:
- how links influence the success of your website
- .how links to other websites can affect your search engine rankings
- how to decide if a link is a quality link or not
- which links don’t work with search engines
How links influence the success of your website
There are two main types of links:
- links from other websites to your website ( backlinks)
- links from your website to other websites (outbound links)
Both can influence the success of your website.
How backlinks influence the success of your website
Backlinks influence your website in many ways:
- All major search engines use backlinks to rank websites. If your site has many good backlinks then you’ll have high rankings on the search engines.
- Other websites send you new visitors through the links. If you have just 500 links pointing to your site and each site sends you in average only 3 visitors per day, then you’ll get 1,500 targeted visitors per day.
- Exchanging reciprocal links with other sites will build a great link directory. Your visitors will bookmark your site and visit your site again and again because you can offer them a valuable resource: your link directory.
The links to your website should be high-quality links. Details about the quality of links can be found in the chapter High-quality links and low quality links 92.
How outbound links influence your search engine rankings
While most webmasters are aware that backlinks are important to the success of a website, many site owners don’t know that outgoing links also have an impact on their websites.
1. The positive side of outbound links
Links to other websites show your website visitors that your website can be trusted. You wouldn’t send visitors to other pages if they could find negative information about your products or services on other sites.
Links add value to your website; they show your visitors that you have nothing to hide and that you have confidence in your site. The websites to which you link help your website visitors to put your website into a larger context. If you link to high-quality sites with useful content, web surfers will associate your website with these high-quality sites.
If you don’t have outgoing links or if you hide your links, then you send your visitors back to search engines. If you offer your website visitors links, you can send leaving visitors to other websites that can send you their visitors in return. Carefully chosen links to outside resources can improve the experience of visitors who visit your website.
Don’t be afraid that you drive people away by offering links on your website. You either have interesting content on your website or you have not. People eventually will leave your website, no matter how interesting your website is. Even you don’t visit your own website all the time.
2. The negative side of outbound links
Links to other websites can also have a negative effect. If you link to websites that are obviously spammers then search engines might ban your website from their search results.
Just use common sense, if a website looks shady or if the techniques on that website look to good to be true (for example: “Get 500 links per day with our automated system”) then don’t link to that website.
High-quality links and low-quality links
As soon as it was clear that backlinks are extremely important to get high rankings on Google, webmasters tried to manipulate the number of links that pointed to their websites.
Webmasters created automated linking schemes to artificially increase the number of back links.
For that reason, search engines improved the way they evaluated links. Nowadays, it’s not enough to have many back links. The quality of the links is also important.
Some links will help you to increase your search engine rankings, others don’t.
High-quality inbound links
High-quality backlinks are links that will help you to get higher search engine rankings and targeted visitors. If you have 20 good backlinks then you’ll get better rankings than with 100 bad backlinks.
So what makes a high-quality backlink? There are several points that can make a link better than other links:
The link should use the keyword in the anchor text
If you want to get high rankings for a search term like “buy brown shoes” then the links to your website should contain that text. The text that is used to link to your site (the “anchor text”) influences the words for which your website will get high rankings.
Make sure that the texts that are used to link to your website contain words for which you want to get high rankings on search engines.
Read more: SEO Optimization Tips 2022
Last performance
While it’s okay to get links to your home page it is better to get links to the page that is most relevant to the chosen anchor text. If the anchor text is “buy brown shoes” then you should make sure that the link goes to a page that deals with brown shoes. If the anchor text matches the content of the linked pages then it’s more likely that your web page is really relevant to that term and it’s more likely that you’ll get high rankings for that search term.
