How to do link building for SEO

Link building is one of the higher ranking factors in SEO to help improve the prominence of your website in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but it takes time and effort to do it effectively. By creating high-quality content and getting backlinks into this from high DA and relevant external websites you can dramatically improve your website’s SEO and drive more traffic to your site.

What is a link?

When a website or any online page, social media, email or system links to another web-based location they do so using hypertext links or simply hyperlinks, often seen as blue text underlined.  To link from a Google search page to any of the results listed for example you would be clicking a link of this kind

What is SEO link building?

Simply put, link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites that link through to your website.  This could be simply the link from Google or Bing to your website when a person searches for your product or service, or it may be a news article on someone’s blog or a social media channel that includes a link to your website. These links from other places are referred to as “backlinks”. Search engines like Google and Bing consider backlinks as an important factor in determining the relevance and authority of a website. The more relevant and good quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more likely your site will rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Why is SEO link-building important?

Link building is essential for improving your website’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and driving more traffic to your site. Here are a few reasons why:

• Higher search engine rankings: Backlinks are a key factor in search engine algorithms. Websites with more quality backlinks tend to rank higher in SERPs.
• Increased referral traffic: Backlinks from other websites can drive traffic to your site. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the more referral traffic you’re likely to get.
• Improved brand authority: When your website is linked to by other reputable websites, it can improve your brand’s authority and credibility.
• Improved Domain Authority: This is a metric calculated based on a number of factors, a large part of which is the number and quality of your backlinks

How to do SEO link building

Create high-quality content

The first step to getting quality backlinks is to create high-quality content that people want to link to. Your content should be informative, engaging, and well-researched. When you create great content, people are more likely to share and link to it, often without you even having to ask.

Social media

Social media can be a great fast way to get more backlinks to your content. As social media channels tend to have a high domain authority themselves, simply share your content on social media platforms with your existing followers, but also tag relevant companies or influencers who may be interested in sharing or linking to your content.

Local citations

Having your business name, address and phone number (this is commonly referred to as NAP) correctly listed along with your web address on websites for local business directories, as well as national ones such as Google Business Profile (the listing you see on the right side of your Google search results and on maps), Bing Places and Yell.com can not only help your business be found online along with details about your specific products and services but gives valuable extra hyperlinks into your website.  There are many such directories globally, though those with high domain authority, with the most traffic, and those related to your industry or advertising locally to your actual business location can help the most with local search visibility.

Youtube videos

The biggest search engine in the world is Google and they are used for around 90% of all online search queries, therefore you want links to your website from as much real estate that Google owns as possible.  We mentioned Google Business Profile above but another valuable assett they have which is easy to link to your website is YouTube.  Your business may or may not be video related, but an intro video, a product or service video is cheap (free) and easy to produce, it doesn’t have to be movie quality and uploading this to a free Youtube channel can help your SEO in a number of ways:

• You can publish the video on your website
• It helps your customers understand what it is you do or sell
• You can include a detailed description of your YouTube video and crucially include a link in this description back to your website
• The video can include subtitles that help customers further and also company keywords that Google can read to understand what it’s about

Further to this, Your YouTube channel itself once set up can also act as a citation as you can load company details and your web address into the

Find relevant websites

Find relevant websites that may be interested in linking to your content. Look for websites that are in your niche or industry and have high domain authority. You can use paid tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find relevant websites, and either these or free tools such as Website SEO Checker to check the DA of a website before you consider them to link from. If you have industry-related magazines that have an online presence, these can be a great way to get both paid and free content published, often with a backlink to your website built in.

Reach out to websites

Once you’ve identified relevant websites, reach out to them and ask if they would be interested in linking to your content. When reaching out, be sure to personalise your message and explain why your content would be a valuable resource for their readers. If these websites publish a lot of content they can be quite grateful for the opportunity to fill a gap in a page with your content, but be sure to write the content as an informative piece and not simply as an advert for your products or services to be more likely to get it published.

Guest posting

Another way to get quality backlinks is to guest post on other websites. Guest posting involves writing a blog post for another website and including a link back to your website in the author bio or link within the post itself. Look for websites that accept guest posts and that are relevant to your niche.

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) posting

There are several websites where professional journalists look for fresh news or informative content to fill the pages of their newspapers, magazines or online publications, and these can be a great way to get your business known as an industry leader as these can potentially be published in the national or international press.  These may or may not include backlinks, but the exposure in this kind of press is invaluable either way.

Check your competitor’s backlinks

Tools like SEMrush have tools for comparing your backlink profile to that of your competitor websites, and this can be a gold mine not just in terms of finding new potential backlink sources for your own website, but can often help you uncover how your competitors are outranking you in the SERPs.

Broken link building

Broken link building is another effective strategy for getting backlinks. This involves finding broken links on other websites and reaching out to the website owner to suggest replacing the broken link with a link to your content. Tools like Ahrefs or Broken Link Checker can help you find broken links.