Substance and Style

If you’re trying to improve your search engine ranking, a link building strategy is essential. Google (and other search engines) see links to your website as endorsements. If those endorsements come from reliable sites, there’s a good chance that your site is valuable to the people searching the internet. Therefore, if everything else between two sites is equal, the site with a stronger backlink profile will be ranked higher.

That said, all links to your site are not created equally. Simply having a lot of links won’t get you anywhere. There are a lot of factors that go into deciding whether a link is good, bad, or indifferent. Good ones improve your rankings, bad ones are penalized by search engines, and indifferent ones matter very little to your overall position. If another site is linking to you, you may have little or no control over these factors. Here are some things the algorithm considers:

1. The nature of the link. The best kinds of links happen (or appear to happen) naturally and straightforwardly: you provide valuable content and someone else links to it because it offers value to their audience.

2. The relevance of the source. In most cases, search engines favor links that come from related or relevant sites because they prove you are respected by your peers and experts in your field. The best of these links come from pages that rank high for the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
   
   Some sources may not be relevant to your niche, but will be neutral when it comes to your rankings (and potentially beneficial to your local search) because they are still natural places for these links to occur (Chambers of Commerce or other associations your organization belongs to, for example).

3. The quality of the source. If the site linking to your site is credible, authoritative, and has high rankings of its own, it will be much more impressive to search engines. That said, you shouldn’t only seek links from top rankers. Strive for a balance of high and medium authority backlink sources. Google doesn’t expect every site that links to you to rank number one.

4. The relationship attribute. In html, the relationship (‘rel’) attribute describes the relationship between a linked source and the original document. Some ‘rel’ attributes instruct search engines not to pass on the authority of the site posting the link, which defies the purpose of link building.
   
   Rel=“nofollow” specifically tells a search engine that the author does not wish to pass on authority. Rel=“sponsored” signals the search engine that the link is paid for, and rel=“ugc” signifies user-generated content (links placed by outside users, such as in comment sections).
   
   Although all of these links look the same on the page as any other link, search engines can tell the difference and won’t look favorably on them. To find out if links to your site have these attributes, view the source code for the page and find the link to your site.
   
   The format will be similar to these:
   <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a&gt;
   <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”sponsored”>Anchor Text</a&gt;
   <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”ugc”>Anchor Text</a&gt;
   
   To see the source code of a page, right click on the page and choose View Source or Page Source (Safari on Mac, Firefox on Mac, Edge/Explorer on PC, Opera on PC), hit Control+U (Firefox for PC, Chrome for PC, Opera for PC), or hit Option+Command+U (Chrome for Mac).

5. Link placement on the page. Google looks more favorably on links that are editorial and appear in the main body of a webpage. Links that are in footers or sidebars are considered afterthoughts or spam. They won’t help your rankings. 

6. Anchor text. Anchor text is the text that appears in the link. Descriptive anchor text is considered more valuable than generic anchor text (“Read Our Annual Report” rather than “Click Here,” for example). Sites should aim to use descriptive anchor text anyway, for the sake of accessibility. However, if anchor text is an exact match for the linked page’s keywords, it can be a problem. Too many exact keyword matches can trigger penalties. Sites that link to your site should use variety in their anchor text formats.

Here are some ways to build backlinks that will actually help your SEO efforts:

1. Earn them. Quality content really is the Occam’s Razor of SEO. There are tons of tricks to rank higher, but the bottom line is that search engines exist to give the searchers what they want or need. If you produce content that deserves to rank and deserves to be linked to, it will be. If you don’t, no amount of outreach or promotion will get you results. Create content that is valuable, authoritative, and well-researched. Use appealing content types: videos, visuals, extensive guides, etc. Find the content that is already ranking for your keywords, improve upon it, and then promote that content. 

2. Ask for them. It’s hard to get links from people who don’t know you exist. Introduce yourself and your content to people who are likely to be interested. These should be people whose target audience can legitimately benefit from what you’re offering. Sites that include resource guides, comprehensive lists, or reviews of products or services similar to yours are good candidates. Use hunter.io to try to find an actual email address; emails to general organization-wide addresses or that come in through contact forms are likely to be ignored. Recognize that the person you’re approaching is busy; keep your request concise and specifically explain how your content benefits their site’s users.
   Additional tip: Don’t forget to ask for a link from anyone who references your site or your business. 

3. Be someone else’s expert. Use Connectively to find reporters and other content creators who are looking for sources for their stories. When you find people searching for an expert in your niche, contact them and become the source for their story. You can also approach influencers, content creators, and more traditional media outlets that cover stories in your field of expertise.

4. Edge out the link competition. This can feel a little unseemly, but it is considered fair practice and it makes a lot of sense. There are two main ways this works:
   
   1) You can approach sites that have broken backlinks to your competitors and request that they link to your site instead. This strategy usually works because they are already linking to similar content, and it saves them the time they would spend tracking down the updated URLs. They know that too many broken links will affect their search rankings as well.
   
   2) Do a backlink gap analysis to find sites that are linking to your competitors. Approach those sites with content that is better and ask them to link to you instead or in addition.
   
   You can use Semrush’s Backlink Gap Analysis and Backlink Analytics Tool to get started with these methods. 

5. Employ traditional PR. Even in the digital age, traditional PR works wonders when it’s done right. Share press releases and announcements with relevant media outlets and ask them to share your content and link to your site. Most will do it, especially if they are local and/or they share a target audience with you. 

6. Guest Post. Guest posting has become controversial lately because too many people are doing it in too spammy a fashion. It won’t help your rankings (and it may hurt them) if your guest post is not on a relevant site. For example, if you’re an expert in women’s health and you guest post on a pregnancy blog with your information linked, that makes sense and will be considered a valuable backlink. But if you pay to post on someone’s site or post on a website that only exists for the purpose of collecting guest posts and linking outside sources, you won’t be doing yourself any favors. If you decide to guest post, it should be on a credible site that has content related to your niche or area of expertise. 

Final Advice: Avoid “Black Hat” SEO for lnikbuilding or any other SEO endeavor. Any underhanded tricks you use to earn backlinks or boost your rankings are unlikely to outsmart Google, and your attempts will be penalized. In 2012, Google rolled out Google Penguin, an algorithm specifically designed to look for spammy, low-quality backlinks and penalize sites that have too many. Since then, content has really been king; Google doesn’t want to reward sites that don’t have quality content. Their priority is preserving their reputation for serving up the most useful and relevant pages on the internet.