Link building is a process by which internal links are created on one’s own website or other, external websites link to one’s own internet presence.
Link building is an important step for search engine optimisation of a website, which is part of off-page optimisation. It involves structured link building that increases the traffic generated by external, relevant websites.
To carry out professional link building, it is advisable to use the services of a professional agency, such as Heymedia Partners. But why can website operators nowadays no longer do without structured link building? The following article explains.
Link building – one of the most important ranking factors
The process of link building can be extremely difficult and time-consuming, as not every backlink or link is of constant quality. However, link building plays a fundamental role in online marketing today for success on the Internet.
Incoming links that lead from other websites to one’s own website are of great importance to Google. Both the number and the quality of the backlinks generated by link building are one of the most important ranking factors for the major search engines.
Google and Co. consider a website to be of higher quality and more relevant the more different websites with a similar thematic focus refer to it.
The backlinks
A backlink is a reference that leads from external websites to your own online presence in the form of a hyperlink. If an external page refers to one’s own, this expresses that it is relevant to the respective topic. For example, the respective reference can be mentioned because it serves as a source of the information presented or provides interesting further information on the respective topic.
Backlinks can certainly also be understood as a way of evaluating a website. The position in the search results is thus positively influenced by many evaluations. Thus, backlinks are an essential tool for marketing and PR of one’s own website in the search engines.
The difference between NoFollow and DoFollow links
Basically, a distinction can be made between two types of links. Normally, a link is always a DoFollow link. However, the large number of different spam techniques in the context of search engine optimisation has led to the NoFollow tag being used more and more frequently in recent years.
With the help of this tag, website operators can ensure that the reference to another website is sent by a link, but that no PageRank or Link Juice emanates from it. This means that no value is assigned to the link by Google – it therefore has no influence on the ranking in the search results.
NoFollow links are often used automatically in blog comments or forums. As a general rule, it is advisable that your own link profile also contains some NoFollow links.
The role of link quality
A link is an important signal for Google that speaks for the relevance and popularity of a website.
If many different websites link to one’s own presence, Google deduces that it must be an extremely popular website. However, it does play a role from which websites the backlinks originate. The value of the links is considerably higher if it is a recognised website instead of a rather unknown internet presence. The thematic website content of the page sending the links should also be taken into account. Visibility in search engines can hardly be increased by links that come from irrelevant websites – they can even have the opposite effect.
In the past, the quality and quantity of backlinks were translated into the PR, the PageRank. The higher the PageRank value, the stronger the respective signal that it was a relevant website. Today, however, several indicators are used to evaluate the link profile of a website. These include, for example, the citation flow or the trust flow.
This is what a good link profile looks like
A good link profile is characterised by the fact that it grows naturally and the number of organic backlinks varies.
To meet this requirement, it is advisable to carry out link building regularly. Thus, links should be created continuously in a natural time frame. It would be unnatural if a lot of links were built in a short time and then followed by weeks and months in which no link building was carried out at all. Such unnatural link building is even punished by the search engines in the form of a lower ranking.
It is therefore essential to design a professional and well thought-out link building strategy. A good link profile contains high-quality backlinks, both from smaller and larger websites, different anchor texts and a balanced ratio of NoFollow and DoFollow links.