Link building is an integral part of SEO that helps companies reach wider audiences. By contacting various websites, people, and organizations, you can feature a backlink to your services or site on a relevant source. Read more about link building services, their most important aspects, and how to integrate them into your daily marketing strategy.
Link Building Services in a Nutshell
Link building services are a part of off-page SEO. This part of search engine optimization is done “behind the scenes,” where you can’t see obvious changes to a website. Though someone can’t spot a new addition of a link to a specific blog, Google surely can, and it usually appreciates them. Essentially, off-page optimization makes websites less “spammy,” emphasizing the importance of such SEO practices.
Link building is the practice of increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a website by creating high-quality content that naturally attracts links, submitting websites to directories, or guest posting on other sites with a backlink to your own. It has one purpose at its core – to satisfy Google’s metrics and standards without causing havoc on a website or page. It also helps attract more visitors to your site and increase traffic.
Does an SEO Agency Include a Link Building Service In Its Services?
Hiring an SEO agency like Made Online means getting complete search engine optimization services, both on-page and off-page. While they explain how search engine optimization works, from higher content quality and image optimization to URL structures and page load speeds, they might not get into the details of link-building.
Why not? Because the phrase firstly speaks for itself – you build links for a site’s relevance – and second, because customers may not notice any changes happening. However, integrating this tactic into an optimization strategy has several benefits:
- Link building plays a pivotal role in boosting your website’s visibility and search engine ranking,
- When high-quality, relevant websites link to your site, search engines register your content as valuable and authoritative. From this, you can get more search engine results pages (SERPs) and organic traffic,
- A well-executed link-building strategy can enhance your website’s credibility and authority in your industry or niche. Links from reputable sources can establish your site as trustworthy, attracting new customers and appealing to search engines.
- When your content is linked on other sites, there’s a possibility of reaching new visitors who may not find your page otherwise, increasing your brand awareness and visibility,
- The experts who deal with link building often have established relationships with website owners and publishers, identifying the most beneficial linking opportunities.
As you can see, integrating link building into your SEO marketing services can be an effective way to manage off-page optimization, though time efficiency isn’t always guaranteed. Organic SEO takes time but provides steadier long-term results.
Practical Example With a Fictional Business
Imagine you have a bakery called “Sweet Treats.” You need a website to promote the bakery online, but creating the website alone is not enough. Sure, you’re now on Google’s radar, but if someone types in Sweet Treats bakery, it might take a while to find you. This is where SEO steps in.
SEO is to a website what a shop sign is to a brick-and-mortar location. An unmarked store will mean little, but an appealing sign with the store’s name on it will help people know what they’re looking at. SEO does that on the internet, and link building as part of optimization is like posting signs that the bakery exists and is open for business.
Now imagine a popular food blogger visiting your bakery and loving your products; they might write about them on their blog and include a link to your website. The blogger tells their readers, “Hey, check out Sweet Treats for amazing food!” and this builds a bridge, aka a backlink, to you; a sign that you’re here, and open.
When Google sees that reputable sites are linking to your website, its algorithm thinks, “Sweet Treats must be good if others are recommending it.” Because of that, it’s likelier to show your website higher up in the search results when someone googles bakeries in the area.
Are Email Outreach and Link Building the Same Thing?
A link builder might also refer to themselves as an outreach specialist, meaning they do email outreach. Though these terms are often synonymous, they don’t always depend on each other for success – meaning that link building isn’t only limited to outreach and outreach isn’t only about backlinking.
If this is confusing, let’s pause. You already know what link building is – the process of backlinking to your website on other, higher authority websites – so let’s define email outreach.
Outreach refers to contacting individuals or organizations via email with various goals in mind, from promoting content and offering collaboration to establishing business relationships. This approach can be highly personalized, as it’s sometimes necessary to establish direct communication with potential clients, influencers, or partners. This, too, can have getting a backlink to your site or business as the final goal.
So, if you own the “Sweet Treats” bakery and reach out to an influencer to come try your food, you can reach a mutually beneficial agreement. This will help you get traffic from their social media and allow the influencer to promote new things. Although outreach doesn’t always go as smoothly as described and often depends on the demands of the other side, there can be a compromise.
Is Link Building White Hat or Black Hat SEO?
White hat is an above-board SEO strategy that follows search engine guidelines and isn’t deceptive. White hat is meant to provide value through high-quality content, ethical link-building, and overall user experience enhancement; this approach is sustainable and less risky.
Black hat SEO is based on manipulative tactics that violate search engine guidelines. These include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks, to name a few. Black hat might provide short-term gains in rankings, but it’s incredibly risky and can lead to penalties or even bans from search engines.
Link building can be both; the biggest difference is how a link builder approaches it. If they’re looking for fast results, they could succumb to the pressure and start adding links to their sites in comments on various blogs, or begin stuffing their content with keywords, leading to keyword cannibalization and potential penalties.
Link Types and Link Building Strategies
For those unfamiliar with link-building terms, keywords like ‘do-follow,’ ‘white hat,’ and ‘domain authority’ will mean nothing. However, they are crucial for the success of the process, as well as a link builder’s day-to-day operations.
Understanding them can help learn what a link builder does, because, according to Conductor, 41% of SEO experts consider it the most difficult part of search engine optimization. Anyone looking for SEO agency expertise should understand what they’re buying.
Do-Follow Links vs. No-Follow Links
There are two types of links in the SEO realm – do-follow and no-follow. The former are more desirable because they’re simple; when a website features a link to your site, the search engine will allow you to visit it through that link. Hence the name, do-follow.
Sometimes, a site can add no-follow links to its articles and pages. They may not want to allow others to advertise on their platform, need to combat spam, or only feature highly specific links. No-follow links typically have the tag rel=”nofollow” which signals to search engines to not follow that link (again, it’s in the name).
Guest Posting
Guest posting entails publishing an article on another website. Long articles are an especially good way to gain exposure and establish authority in your industry; they also include a backlink to your site. This method is highly valuable and, more importantly, ethical, emphasizing why content is important.
Guest posting is the perfect link-building strategy that can be achieved by beginners and professionals alike. If you’re wondering: “How will I know which site to post on?” don’t worry. The vetting process of a site is short but necessary; this is where all the link-building tools play a role. With their help (especially website traffic and domain authority), you’ll see which sites are worth looking into.
The most important part about guest posting is finding relevant sites with good metrics. If you wish to promote “Sweet Treats” via backlinking, you won’t submit a guest post to a site with a tech or traveling niche. But also, if the site is niche-related, but has a very low domain authority or traffic, you’ll be wasting valuable time and money.
Link Insertion
Link insertion, or “niche editing” entails finding relevant, high-quality, and aged content and adding a backlink to your website to it. So, it’s similar to guest posting, but here, you don’t need to write your own article and add a link wherever you see fit. This method avoids the creation of long-form content.
Now, this may be a bit trickier than just writing a guest post that works for you. Why? Because finding relevant and high-quality content for backlinking can often feel like finding a needle in a haystack. It would have to be a niche-relevant site with a relevant blog post and an anchor that suits your business (or blog post).
This is why link insertion can sometimes be considered unethical, but, as we already said, a lot depends on your approach. If you resort to keyword stuffing for quick results and negotiate deals that only benefit you short term, you’ll feel it later on.
What Are the Best Link-Building Tools, and How Do They Measure Success?
Keeping up with the latest marketing trends matters for businesses that wish to stay competitive. Using local SEO, site metric observations, social media, and link-building tools can help companies in the digital marketing landscape to stay relevant and on top of their game.
When we consider the reasons businesses lose clients, they usually include failing to adapt to new strategies or not effectively measuring the success of their marketing efforts. That’s why the right link-building tools can be integral in providing direction and understanding within digital marketing.
Ahrefs, the Website for All SEO Needs
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO software suite designed for marketing professionals. Its main features include tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, and site audits.
Ahrefs analyzes a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, and overall SEO health. It also offers functionalities for conducting keyword research for various search engines like Google, YouTube, and Amazon.
Here are all the Ahrefs services and metrics:
- Link building,
- Keyword research,
- Competitor analysis,
- Rank tracking,
- Site audits,
- Content explorer,
- URL rating (UR),
- Anchors,
- Referring domain,
- Ahrefs rank,
- Traffic potential,
- Keyword difficulty.
One metric on this list, developed by Ahrefs, is crucial for backlinking, and that is domain rating (DR for short). It measures the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. By observing the quantity and quality of external backlinks, DR defines whether a site is more or less relevant. What it doesn’t define is the site’s ability to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs), although higher backlink volumes can play a part in search engine ranking.
Domain Authority Checkers Like Moz
Domain authority (DA for short) is another concept developed by a marketing software company, but this time, it’s Moz. Moz determined domain authority as crucial to a website, tracking its ranking strength and the overall ability to rank highly on search engines over time. DA predicts a website’s ability to rank on search engines on a 100-point scale.
Sites that measure a domain authority 1-30 are sites with poor search engine results; those around 30-50 can be relevant if your DR is lower than theirs; sites around 50-70 have a healthy and relevant DR. These are the sites you should be chasing the most when looking to backlink. Anything over 70 is highly authoritative, but for that reason, it also costs a lot to feature.
Moz uses as many as 40 different factors to determine a site’s DA, and all are relevant for SEO. Here are some of those metrics:
- The quality and quantity of incoming and outgoing links,
- The domain age,
- The spam score,
- Social media flags and signals,
- Website traffic,
- Linking to the root domain.
You should know your site’s domain authority before verifying others. You can know this using Moz, the site that developed the concept. If you’re not inclined to Moz, there are free tools like the Website SEO Checker.
CRM Apps Like Streak Keep Your Emails Organized and Sorted
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to software that can be integrated into email apps for faster tracking of all your clients and general email outreach. This is great for anyone dealing with emails daily.
CRM apps are smart; they can automatically put emails into different piles based on the sender and subject. It’s like having someone who reads the subject line of each email and puts it in the right folder for you.
Additionally, CRMs can:
- Help remember conversations with customers,
- Enable collaboration with team members,
- Have templates for common types of emails,
- Remind you to follow up on important messages and correspondences,
- Integrate with other tools used for business, like calendars or task lists.
The most famous CRM apps include some big names like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM. For free, you can also use Streak, which only integrates with Gmail but does it exceptionally well and is helpful enough for small-scale business tracking.
A Good Marketing Agency Won’t Reveal Its Secrets, But It Will Provide Results With Complete SEO Services
Agencies that provide complete SEO services, such as Made Online, focus on delivering results rather than revealing their strategies. The real proof of their expertise lies in improved rankings, increased traffic, and heightened online visibility they bring to your business. With them, your site will never get a 404 error.
You should hire a digital marketing agency to see the impact on your business’s online presence. With Made Online, you’re choosing a partner that prioritizes results and helps your website reach its target audience and stand out from the competition. Let them handle all the complexities of SEO, including link-building, while enjoying the success of your business.