Link Building – Why And How (And Should You)?

This article is a short introduction to link building for SEO (search engine optimisation).

We will have a look at why you might want to do it, some ways you can go about it, and whether you should be doing link building at all.

Google Was Built On The Value Of Incoming Links

As you know, Google is the dominant search engine, and when people talk about optimising a website for search they usually mean optimising it for Google.

Google started in the late 1990s, and the thing that enabled them to produce better results for online searches than any other service was the way they used links between websites.

Google looked at each incoming link as a “vote” for the page it linked to. More votes indicated a better resource, and so the page would be listed (ranked) higher in the search results.

Not all votes (links) were equal though. Links coming in from a highly regarded website indicated that your website was a quality resource – or else why would this highly regarded website link to it?

The founders of Google identified this measure of quality based on what happens with academic research articles. The more “citations” your article received (i.e. people referring to it in their articles), the more highly regarded your work was.

The name Google gave this measure of the quality of web pages was PageRank. People often think the name relates to the ranking of pages, but it’s actually named after Larry Page, one of the two Google founders.

If you want to read more about how Google got started, and how it became the dominant search engine, you should read The Search by John Battelle (not an affiliate link).

Link Building: Why To Do It

Google currently uses all sorts of ranking factors to decide how to organise their search engine results pages (SERPS).

Although they don’t actually tell how exactly how they do it, they provide some helpful information on what they think is important. You can read how they rank their results in this article on the Google website.

In the article Google article mentioned above, the information on links can be found under Quality of Content.

Google says it looks to see if “other prominent websites link or refer to the content”. They go on to say that “this has often proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted”.

Note that they look to see if “prominent websites” link to yours. They are much less interested in any old website linking to you.

So for Google to rank your content highly, they aren’t just looking at how relevant your content is to the search query entered by the person searching. They want to know how highly regarded your content is, and the best way to do that is to see who (i.e. what websites) is linking to it.

It’s important to note that when Google is using incoming links to assess the quality of your page, they aren’t really looking at what the content actually is. They are only looking at the number and quality of citations on other websites, regardless of what the content actually says.

Making sure your content is relevant to searches that are actually being carried out by people is a separate issue. Developing your website content is often referred to as on-page SEO, whereas optimising inbound links is part of off-page SEO.

SEO Tools Assess Inbound Links

Several of the available SEO tools use inbound links to assess how difficult it might be for your website to rank for a particular keyword. Here are some examples:

Moz and Semrush call it Domain Authority (and Page Authority at the page level).

Majestic have two link-related measures that are really helpful: Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Trust Flow looks at the quality of incoming links, while Citation Flow looks at the quantity of links coming in, without looking at their quality.

Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating (and URL Rating at the page level). When you use Ahrefs to research how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword they estimate how many incoming links you would need to rank. When you look at incoming links in the Ahrefs tool you can see the quality of those links in terms of Domain Rating.

You Need Backlinks

Inbound links are often referred to as backlinks, and it’s clear that your website needs them.

Without links, you could produce the greatest content but it could be very hard to find in online searches, even very relevant ones.

Your content could obtain a high ranking in the search engines (okay, in Google), but this can bring its own problems. You might hope that people would link to your content since it’s so great.

However, SEO tools like Ahrefs let other website owners see what is ranking for particular searches. These tools also let them see the domain authority of your website, and how many links it has.

If you are ranking for a search without much website authority, other website owners with higher authority might produce similar content, which will probably outrank you easily. So now there’s even less chance that people will find your content (or link to it).

Many people say that if you produce good content then the links will follow. These links are usually called organic links.

As we can see above, waiting for organic links might not work out. So how do you go about building links to your website?

Link Building: How To Do It

So how do you go about building links to your website?

Well, the answer is that you need to do some sort of outreach, and there are different ways to do this.

We’ll just provide a couple of examples here and come back to it later with a more comprehensive article on how to do link building.

How Not To Build Links

The thing you shouldn’t do is just send out random emails to website owners asking them to link to your website. This is usually done by finding contact emails on websites and sending a standard link request message.

The standard message shows that the sender knows nothing about the website they are requesting a link from. And they don’t even provide a reason why the website owner might want to give them a link.

Thankfully, this seems to happen a bit less than it used to, but the outcome is always the same. The email is ignored, deleted, and the sender often blocked.

You don’t want to be that person. So here’s what you should do…

Produce a Linkable Asset

A linkable asset is something on your website that’s worth linking to.

This is important because website owners need a reason to link to your website. You need to think about what’s in it for them.

Website owners will link to another website because improves their content, making it more helpful, and making them look good.

If the link doesn’t do this for their website then why would they want to provide a link?

So, what types of resource could you add to your website that people might want to link to? Here are a couple of examples.

Statistics

Statistical articles are really popular. For example, statistics relating to some aspect of the industry you are operating in.

Compiling statistics takes a little bit of work, which is why website owners often don’t bother doing it.

Your text should be supported by statistics in tables or graphics, or even better, as an infographic. Make it something that will be appealing, not only to visitors to your website, but to website owners who might link to it.

If you provide a really helpful statistical resource, then people who don’t want to produce the statistics and write specifically about it themselves might link to it when they are writing more generally about the topic.

There is a lot of information online about producing linkable assets. One that I quite like on the Ahrefs website outlines 6 linkable assets types, which you may find helpful (see, they have produced a linkable asset).

Targeted Outreach

You can also be proactive here in obtaining links to your content. You could look for websites that produce content relating to the statistical information you have produced and suggest that they link to your information.

You could also look for articles online about the topic you produced the statistics for and suggest that a link to your content would be beneficial to their readers.

This is quite different to the spammy bulk emails mentioned earlier. In this case the website owner knows that you have looked at their website and understand their content.

You have also explained what’s in it for them: the will be linking to some content that will help the visitors to their website (and make them look good).

Help A Reporter Out

You may have heard people talking about HARO, which stand for help a reporter out. Here is a little definition of HARO from the website that facilitates this.

HARO connects journalists seeking expertise to include in their content with sources who have that expertise.

helpareporter.com

The idea is that reporters are looking for sources of information for their online articles. If you are able to provide valuable information that the reporter uses in their article then they will provide a link to your website.

You may not think you are enough of an expert to do this, but you might be surprised. All you need is some insight into an aspect of your industry that a reporter could use, so it’s worth a go.

The HARO website has recently moved to a new location at Connectively, from the original one, which was at helpareporter.com. If you are reading this after early 2024 the original website may no longer be available.

Link Building: Should You Do It?

So inbound links to your website (backlinks) are obviously very valuable. They increase the authority (or rating) of your website and increase the ranking of your website content in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

However, Google has some things to say about the use of links to manipulate (as they see it) the search results. They think that in an ideal world the best content would obtain the best backlinks and everything would develop organically and there would be no manipulation.

But website owners want to maximise the performance of their website, and obtaining lots of high-quality links is one of the best ways to do this.

So what will Google allow, and what what won’t they?

Google used to say that link building was against their terms of service, but they seem to have cheered up about now.

There is an article on the Google website called Spam policies for Google web search, and there is a specific section of the article on Link spam.

Google says that, “any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam”.

The main reason that you would want a link to your website is to improve its ranking in search results. This could be seen as attempting to manipulate rankings, so anything other than links being obtained organically would seem to be link spam.

Obviously this is ridiculous. Letting website owners know about content they may want to link to could hardly be considered link spam. But try telling that to Google.l

You just need to be mindful of what Google identifies as link spam and try to avoid causing problems for your website.