What Is Link Building in SEO: A Professional Guide

Link building matters because it is an advantage in search engine visibility.

Links allow search engines like Google to operate at a high level by recognizing which websites are getting the most recognition and approval within their niche. If a site is getting multiple links coming its way from unique and relevant sources, search engines see this as a distinct sign of quality, and appropriately boost the site’s position in a given search’s results page. 

A new website is competing with millions of other similar brands for visibility and traffic, link building can be the catalyst for making it stand out.

This in turn will benefit the site by increasing its:

• Visibility: Link building is a major factor in search engine rankings, and it can help a given website fly quite high on the results page. 
• Traffic: By having a website showing up higher and higher, more users are driven to it, directly increasing the site’s traffic. 
• Credibility: High quality backlinks from other trusted sources work as a big stamp of approval for users, leading to more trustworthiness not just from the algorithm, but people as well. 
• Brand recognition: Every point finally combines to form the obvious fact that your site and its identity become recognizable.

Links are discovery tools and determiners of quality for search engines.

• Search engines use bots called crawlers which browse the internet in order to build the foundation of their databases that produce query results. 
• These crawlers discover content through links, and use them as bridges in order to traverse through the web and analyze content. 
• If a page is crawled, then it becomes eligible to appear in search results.
• Crawlers have a limited amount of server resources and time to spend on a site.
• Sites with a larger stock of backlinks get priority for these crawlers, leading to more chances at indexing.

Absolutely. 

You can write a blog post that rivals Shakespeare, or create a UI which revolutionizes how people think about graphic design, but still have your efforts come to naught and be met with zero traffic at your door. 

While link building isn’t the only way to maximize visibility, it’s one of the best because of how much search engines like Google rely on their links for information. Furthermore, the authority that rises thanks to link building can put a brand on the map and even make it a household name.

A Success Story That Manifested Thanks to Link Building

An example of a successful link building campaign is MyHours. Partnered with the GoPeak link building agency since 2022, MyHours saw a steady rise in traffic and domain rating through four years, eventually peaking at 242k monthly organic traffic just a few months ago. Thanks to high quality and appropriate link building practices, the site had a traffic growth north of 160%, and in certain queries even surpassed other time tracking software companies in Google SERP. This success coincided with a well thought out and organized SEO and link building strategy, which brought Myhours the help it needed to stand tall in its competitive market. 

A good backlink needs to be relevant to your niche, be of high quality, and come from a website with authority.

Not all links are created equal, so it’s important to know what kinds of links you actually want other sites sending your way. When it comes to making sure a backlink is going to help you or not, there’s factors that exclusively depend on you, and others where you and another party will have to be on the same wavelength.

High Domain Authority

Links that come from more well established and highly trafficked websites will help your site more than dozens of links from smaller unknown websites. Search engines already trust these domains with authority, so receiving a backlink from them is a quick way to get on a search engine’s good side. 

Dofollow vs Nofollow

Dofollow and Nofollow are tags which are placed on a link to decide whether or not the host domain wants to pass authority to the site they’re linking to. If a link has no special tag on it, it’s considered a “dofollow link,” meaning the host website gives a vote of confidence to the domain being linked, which increases their search engine rank. However, once the nofollow tag is placed, the site receiving the backlink gets cut off from those benefits. As such, it’s obvious that you want to try and convince host websites to set your link as dofollow. Still, you can get value out of nofollow links, so don’t be too upset if you can’t secure a dofollow. 

Anchor Text

The anchor text is the visually distinct and clickable text on a hyperlink. Picking the appropriate wording for it is vital for SEO, as it’s via the anchor text that search engines are able to immediately pick up on what the link goes to. A good anchor text is specific and relevant, both to the page it’s linking to and the text it’s in. Most importantly, it needs to be based on a keyword that matches the page it’s linking to.

Relevance

The content being linked must be relevant to the site that’s hosting the link. Search engines note your page as one with high quality if they see that the website linking to you is relevant to your industry. 

Quality

The quality of the content itself is what search engines value most. Above all else, they want users to see people-first content which fulfills their queries. Google, for example, prioritizes demonstrations of E-E-A-T, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Even when answering questions regarding the number of backlinks you need for ranking, quality still stands supreme. At the end of the day, you can conduct as much link building as you like, but if your content isn’t cut out for a search engine’s standards, you can kiss your chances at being seen goodbye. 

Now, you may be wondering how link building is actually conducted. The field has seen plenty of changes within its strategies, with some becoming obsolete and others rising as valuable thanks to advancements in technology. These are just a few of the most common strategies either endorsed officially or used consistently. 

Link Insertions

Link insertion is the process of adding a link pointing towards your website on a blog post or article that’s already been published. The bulk of the work in this process comes from discovering relevant pages which will fit your website, and persuading their editors to add your links.

Link insertion is a top strategy because it provides:

• Immediate authority: By linking to a website that’s already published, you don’t have to wait out the indexing and ranking process, you instead jump ahead to receiving your backlink. 
• Fast implementation: Link insertion strictly refers to links. So, other than the research, the only process that takes much time is the answer of approval from the editor of the page itself. 

Link insertion is a lot easier said than done. However, if you’re willing to keep your eyes peeled in order to find the right pages where you can drop in a link, it’ll be a very quick boost for your own company. 

Guest Posting 

Guest posting is the practice of writing and publishing a piece for another website’s blog in exchange for a backlink from their site. 

If you’re conducting guest posting you should:

• Find the right blog: You want to find a blog that will actually bring value to you by giving you a backlink.
• Pitch your idea: Getting in contact with the editors of the site would only be the first step, as you also have to convince them that your written piece will be valuable enough for them.
• Write quality: This should go without saying, but if your work is being posted on someone else’s page, you need to make sure it does truly satisfy them.
• Insert your links: Finally, add your links to the article you’re writing to complete the process. 

Despite being simple in concept, guest posting (like nearly any other type of link building) demands a lot of effort in order for you to go far. 

Link building is best for companies with websites in need of higher rankings for growth and visibility or in competitive digital markets.

It goes without saying that if your company’s primary clientele is going to find you digitally, then link building can give you a boost. However, there are other attributes of your company that can make link building very appropriate, and maybe even make it a knight in shining armour for a domain’s traffic.

• New Websites: New websites will try their best to stand out amongst the billions of their peers, which can be difficult considering how younger organizations struggle with indexing. So, in order to get ahead of schedule and start growing, link building can jumpstart a young page’s life by making it show up on the results page. 
• Companies in competitive markets: Regardless of the industry, plenty of organizations are fighting neck and neck to garner the interest of their audiences. In this situation, link building can be the slight edge that gives one brand the upper hand over another by elevating it to a higher ranking. 

Nevertheless, even if a company is fairing well in their endeavours, diverting some resources into getting a backlink consultation or running a shorter campaign can bring great dividends.  

The practice of link building won’t die because of AI, quite the contrary, AI helps expand link building. 

Since LLMs and other types of artificial intelligence have become a prevalent part of our lives, SEO professionals and link builders alike have taken note of how to maximize the new opportunities that they bring. When chatbots are asked questions regarding company and organization names, they scour the internet and get most of their information from either listicles and ranking articles, or social media sites like reddit and quora. This changes the trajectory of link building towards finding a newfound value in brand mentions. 

Why AI Prefers Brand Mentions Over Traditional Link Building

AI engines like ChatGPT favor brand mentions over traditional link building because they rely on semantic and contextual understanding rather than link graphs.

What are brand mentions?

Brand mentions are references to a company, its product or service. Brand mentions are valuable since they act as methods of assessment for an organization’s reputation and trustworthiness.

Similar to link building as a whole, you can take a couple of different avenues when trying to receive brand mentions:

• Adding links to unlinked brand mentions: By tracking where your brand, your services or a product are mentioned, you can contact the editor of the page in question and ask them to add a link to your website. 
• Adding brand mentions to comparison/alternative articles: By finding articles which detail comparisons/alternatives between and for websites in your same field, you can contact the editors for those pages and have your company name be added alongside the others. 
• Adding brand mentions to relevant keyword listicles: By discovering keywords pertinent to your site, you can search for listicles with those keywords in mind. If all goes well, you’ll find listicles that can naturally blend your brand’s name, product or service into the page. After finding the page, you’ll contact the editors and persuade them into adding your brand name. 

Brand mentions are difficult to naturally acquire since they’re a direct endorsement of your company, and many websites just aren’t comfortable enough to give you that endorsement without a fair trade of sorts. Given that fact, outsourcing the brand mention process with an agency like GoPeak can make the entire procedure less stressful and far smoother. 

Risks of link building can include penalties and a tarnished reputation if a company decides to use manipulative strategies. Additionally, if resources are not spread out correctly, link building can end up blowing right up in an organization’s face.

There are practices such as using PBN backlinks or link farms which are strictly against Google’s spam policies that can end up penalizing your website and dooming your business. These strategies are known as black hat, and they’re the unethical counterpart of the search engine compliant approach of white hat link building.

However, beyond that, there’s always the issue of the fact that link building is not an exact science. You could work tirelessly for months and make sure to target the right pages with the right keywords only for a change to be announced which puts you back at square one. 

Link building can be an expensive endeavour and a distraction from a brand’s main work. Because of this balancing act, the resources poured into in-house link building can end up being for nothing. It’s why in most situations, outsourcing your link building is the preferable move. Teams of link builders are working tirelessly to analyze every single change in the system and to always come out on top, so if a company is ready to dedicate money and energy into link building, may as well give those duties off to a group that has expertise in the field. 

Link building is a very delicate process that can go wrong very easily. It takes time, effort and requires adaptation. However, the growth that it can bring to a given company is undeniable. The slight edge that a few high quality links can provide eventually cascade into a massive push for a website. It’s a key part of SEO, and with the right people pulling the strings, is a massive tool for success.