Link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks (usually called links) to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results.
Here are some ways to build links:
- Adding links: If you can go to a website that doesn’t belong to you and manually place your link there, that’s called “adding” a link. The most common tactics that fit into this category are: business directory submissions, social profile creation, blog commenting, posting to forums, communities, and Q&A sites, creating job search listings.
- Asking for links: Asking for links is when you actively contact a website and ask them to link to yours. You can ask them to link to your homepage, a product page, a blog post, or something else.
- Buying links: Buying links is the process of paying another website to place a link to your site. This is against Google’s guidelines and can result in a penalty.
- Earning links: Earning links is the process of creating high-quality content that other websites want to link to. This is the most effective way to build links, but it’s also the most difficult.
Here are some ways to know if your website has high-quality links:
- Natural: Backlinks should be natural and where the website owner chooses to link to your site because it provides value to their readers and NOT because you paid them to do so or tried to manipulate them in another way. This natural approach is an example of ‘earning’ a backlink.
- Reputable: In addition to being natural, backlinks should be reputable. This means that the website linking to your site should be trustworthy and have a good reputation
- Relevant: Backlinks should be relevant to your website’s content. This means that the website linking to your site should be in the same niche or industry as your website.
You can use a website authority checker to check the “authority” of any domain. This can help you benchmark against your competitors. If your website “authority” is higher than that of your competitors, then your site is stronger than theirs in terms of “link popularity”.