Linkbuilding

Link building is a technique used to increase the number of backlinks. A site with many backlinks is often rated with better authority by search engines.

Definition

Link building is the work of getting more inbound external links to a site. Since search engine algorithms interpret presence on the web generated via such backlinks to mean that this page has great authority on the topic in question, they assign great authority to the page. Based on the authority on the topic, Google calculates the position of the page on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Because domain authority is such an important factor, link building should be an important part of your search engine optimization (SEO) off-page optimization .

Importance of link building and backlinks

In the early years, website owners registered their site with a search engine so that it could display the website. Since there are modern search algorithms that crawl and index websites automatically, such registration is no longer mandatory. In order to sort the web pages relevant to a search query, search engines must determine an order. For this Google & Co take many different factors into account – a very important one is the number and quality of the backlinks. But precisely because this link building is so important, dubious ways are always sought in the field of Black Hat SEO to get more links.

How does link building work?

This presents you with the challenge that without effective link building, your website will get lost in the mass of websites.

• To get good backlinks, you have to work hard. But this work is worth it! One good backlink is worth more than ten bad ones. While a good backlink on a website that enjoys a high authority itself is rated well by Google, links in bad neighborhoods worsen your position in search engines enormously.

  For a detailed guide on good and bad backlinks or how to build the perfect backlink, check out our blog post Building Backlinks: The Ultimate Guide to Effective Link Building (2019).

  • You can rely on your content. If you present good content on your website, you can also expect your users to link to your site.
  • Make contacts with other webmasters. You can coordinate with others and exchange links with each other. This way you can search specifically for matching pages that might also be interesting for your target group. This way you can help each other increase your presence and authority and get more reach.
  • Pay attention to your links. You should always keep an eye on your link profile to be able to remove broken links via the Disavow tool.
  • Contact a specialized agency for OffPage optimization

The alternative: content marketing

You only have a few options left to get links. In order that search engines do not evaluate your backlinks negatively, it is now particularly important to score with your content. It is becoming more and more important to convince both crawlers and human users of the added value of your site with good SEO and good content.

There are several ways you can improve your reach. If your content is better than your competitors and you stand out from the crowd, the community is sure to recommend your site to others. By learning about your competitors’ content and knowing what content is relevant to your target audience, you can better serve and communicate those topics.

If you cleverly market your content via social media or even place ads, you can improve your reach in the short term and convince new users to follow you.

Conclusion

With backlinks your site gains presence and authority on the web. If a page has a lot of inbound links from other pages (which are rated with a high authority by Google), it improves its position in the SERP. There are not many unproblematic ways to do good linkbuidling today. Therefore, it is all the more important to score with your content and to convince a user-friendly website. If your users enjoy using your site, they won’t just come back – they’ll recommend your site to others. With backlinks.