Ultimate Guide To Link Building And Backlink Strategies In 2022

What is Link Building?

Link building is the practice of gaining links to your site from the web. These links are called backlinks. And these backlinks are much more important than one can imagine.

Gaining backlinks from high-quality relevant sites passes the authority of the website giving links to your site.

And it also signals to Google that your website is known throughout the industry and can be trusted. That helps you rank higher in SERPs.

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Why Does Link Building Important For SEO?

Let’s consider you created an amazing piece of content but your website is too fresh and hasn’t gained much authority yet.

Now how would you tell Google that you are trustworthy? By gaining links from other high-quality websites in your industry.

Backlinks provide valuable proof that your website can be trusted. Backlinks generation is the top off-page SEO factor.

And as web pages that have more backlinks generally rank higher in search results, it’s quite important to

1. Create quality content that people love to link to,
2. Use a backlink strategy to bring in more backlinks.

Since Google link building takes effort and time. It’s better to start sooner rather than being late and getting left behind by your competitors.

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How Does Google Link Building Work?

You would have understood by now that link building is earning backlinks from different websites around the internet. 

But a crucial element that can’t be missed is the websites giving you links must be credible and high-quality websites.

Having thousands of backlinks from an untrustworthy spammy website will do more harm than good.

There are many ways in a link building strategy that are used to gain backlinks, such as

• Guest blogging
• Manual Outreach
• Social media promotion
• And following competitors’ backlinks

We’ll talk about them more specifically further in the article.

But first, understand that link building isn’t all about backlinks. The very first thing needed to be done is to create high-quality content.

Link building comes at the later stages when you need strategies to rank higher in SERPs. Link building strategies can help you a ton at that stage. But without great content, the process wouldn’t even start.

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Types of Links

One must know different types of links before moving forward to plan link building strategies.

Following are the most important ones that you just know.

Nofollow vs. Follow Links

Nofollow links are the links that stay on your website but do not want Google to crawl that site through your page. 

Nofollow links are suggested to use in these 2 cases:

• When you link to a site but do not want to promote it,
• When the link is profitable.

Google suggests using the nofollow attribute to a link if a link is paid or sponsored.

Nofollow links do not pass the authority of the page to the linking page. Though a brand mention and referral traffic can still be gained through them.

Whereas Follow or dofollow links, are regular backlinks that make Google crawl the opposite page of the link. They do pass the authority of the page to the linking site.

The follow link should be used in further cases:

• When you want to pass the authority to the linking website
• Help search engines better grasp what the content is about.

User-generated links

User-generated links are generally the links that users have published/linked/posted on a website by themselves with the intent of promoting their website. They are better to be left in the list of link building strategies and tactics. 

As they are not the ideal way and Google has penalized some of the websites in the past due to this. They are considered lower in quality and do not pass any authority to the linking site.

A few examples of user-generated links include

• Unchecked blog comments
• Users’ profile pages
• Linked infographics and widgets
• Advertisements, etc.

Links from these sources do not offer much harm but it’s better to not waste time on them. As they do not pass any authority and have fewer chances of bringing the traffic.

Natural links

Natural link building can be stated as the safest link building technique.

These links occur naturally when a reader or writer/owner of any other blog links to your site without being asked. Here you don’t have to ask anyone for a backlink.

Most of the natural links are clearly not paid or sponsored links as they are added to the content to offer better value to the reader.

Also, they are a great indicator that your content offers value and is trustworthy. Natural links are among the best and most effective methods to promote your blog/website.

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What Are High-Quality Backlinks?

Backlinks are an amazing thing, agreed! But there are always two sides to a coin. Backlinks are not always good and that depends on the way of their generation. 

A while ago, black hat SEOs used to create backlinks through link farms, comment spams and PBNs. They created a huge backlink profile through these tactics and succeeded in manipulating the rankings. 

But then Google got smarter and started penalizing them. And now even if your site gains too many backlinks in a short period of time you could gain a penalty due to “unnatural” link building.

To say simply, quality matters as much as quantity does here.

But then how to determine whether a link would be of high quality or not? Here are the elements that you would want from the link:

Authoritative

If the site has an authoritative link profile then the link would gain you many votes of confidence. Also, if the website attracts a lot of traffic and ranks well on the search results, then it can be said authoritative. Additionally,  .gov and .edu site extensions carry more weight alongside industry-leading sites.

Relevancy

This is really important, the referring page must be on a similar topic. If your web development service page is getting a backlink from a blog on “how to play football”, it wouldn’t seem to be of any use.

Unique

If the website referring to you does not offer a link to your competitors then you have an extra card under your sleeve. But even if it does, it’s still good but at table stakes.

Natural

The link shouldn’t be sponsored. The anchor text should not look spammy or branded. And also, if the referring page has a good number of natural links on it.

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6 Link Building Strategies To Attract Traffic and DA

Well, we’ve learned quite enough about what is link building, Why are backlinks important, And how to identify high-quality links. 

Now let’s see how you can build backlinks and drive some heavy traffic and domain authority. 

Following are the 6 proven techniques that SEOs are using in their 2022 Google link building strategies.

#1 Write shareworthy content

Creating great content is the very first step and most useful tactic to build backlinks. 

Because the internet is filled with web pages and around 90% of them get less to no traffic. And if a web page is not getting traffic why would anyone link to it?

That’s the reason every marketer suggests creating content that is shareable if you want to build a heavy backlink profile. 

Now the next question is how to do that?

Of course, you should follow the basics. But apart from that, you must know what type of content attracts the most backlinks?

As per the Senior marketing manager of product awareness of HubSpot, the top three types of content that attract the most backlinks are:

• Professional interviews and though-leadership pieces
• Ultimate guides
• Stories backed by original data

#2 Building Broken Links

This tactic might seem a little sneaky. But the best part of this strategy is you push out your competitor to make a place for yourself.

The tactic is believed to be a little old but is still used by more than 50% of marketers.

What you have to do here is, you will target a competitor’s site and check their website to find any broken content links. You can use any broken link checker tool to do that. 

And once you have found that you will have to run a backlink checker tool. To check all the backlinks that broken link has.

Then you will write a high-quality piece of content to replace that original link’s content. And then contact all the websites that were linking to that broken link to replace that link with yours.

#3 Guest Posts

Guest posting I believe is the most popular and used backlink strategy.

Around 75% of the SEOs use guest posting as their leading link building strategy. 

This is because guest posting offers you more benefits than just a link. It also helps in increasing your website’s trustworthiness on a niche subject.

Plus, you get exposed to a new set of audiences where you can show the value of your brand and lead them to your site.

And the best thing is, as content creation is not much of an easy task and requires time. It’s easier to convince a website owner or SEO to add your backlink when you offer quality content for free.

#4 Chasing brand mentions

If you chase around the internet for the brand or product mentions. You might find some unlinked mentions and reach them to gain a backlink.

It is a common strategy and is used by most SEOs. As it is quite easy to do if you use the right tools.

For paid tools, Buzzsumo and Ahrefs Content Explorer are great choices. You can easily search for your brand or product mentions.

As for the free tool, you can use Google Alerts. Google alerts check content publishing each day and can be used to get an alert every time it sees a phrase that you request. You can enter your brand and product name and wait to get an alert.

Once you have found the unlinked mentions, all you have to do is contact them and ask them to add a link to your site.

#5 Influencer outreach

Through influencers, you can not only generate a backlink but can also market to a fresh audience. Plus, influencers also help you gain some trust points by promoting you to their followers.

Around 40% of the SEOs use this tactic in their link building strategy. You don’t need to have celebrity level marketers to market your product. Smaller following influencers are coming out as more effective as they have more engagement rate.

You can simply talk to the influencers of your niche and offer them free products or money. And in return have a backlink on their website or social media pages with a little promotion. 

#6 Link exchange

Link exchange is one of the most straightforward link building techniques. 28% of the SEOs do perform this tactic in order to gain backlinks. 

All you have to do is find complimentary websites with a similar audience to yours but with a different service.

For example, you are a digital marketing tools distributor and offer SEO and other tools. You can reach out to digital marketing agencies or educational blogs of the same niche.

Now you just have to write to them that you offer a backlink to them in return for the same.

So, you know how to generate backlinks, next step of the process is measuring the success. How can you do that? Let’s see.

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How To Measure Success In Backlink Generation?

The main success of link building depends on the objective of your business. But before setting up objectives you must know the metrics that participate in the process.

Just counting the number of links ain’t that much of a great idea as this type of evaluation makes you lose sight of the quality of the links. 

And as Google keeps updating its ranking factors to offer the best to users, it’s pretty clear that quality will pay you more than quantity.

So, here are the metrics that you should consider while measuring the success of your link building success. And while comparing your backlink profile with that of competitor’s.

Authority score: Authority score is basically the measure of the overall quality of a website and hence its links. 

If a site has a high authority score, a link from that site will be more beneficial than that of a low authority score. You can use tools to check the authority score of a website, Semrush and Ahrefs offer such a feature.

Follow to Nofollow links ratio: Once you have gained a considerable number of backlinks, you’ll see a mix of follow and nofollow links in them. And it’s completely normal. 

But what you have to focus on is that number of the follow links should be more. As follow links pass the authority of that site and help your page rank higher.

Relevance: Relevance is an im[portant factor too. If you’re having backlinks from a site that has low to no relation to your niche, it will be of no use. 

Unique referring domains: Having a set of backlinks from different high-quality domains is better than having a huge number of backlinks from just one. As it shows more promise to Google that your site is known and trusted around the industry.

These were the basic metrics that you must consider. Other elements to consider are brand exposure, links, referral traffic, conversion rate and more. These focus more on the aspects that reflect your business performance directly.

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The Bottom Line

Just as with any other element of SEO, there’s a need for consistency here too. 

Link building might seem a little more tiring than time-consuming than others. But it is worth it. Backlinks are among the top 3 factors that you must consider if you want to rank high and build authority.

The plus point is if you keep up the consistent work and build a strong backlink profile. You won’t have to work as much in Google link building.

Whereas then you can focus on creating quality content that others link their content to by themselves.

I know link building is not an easy process but neither ranking on top is.

So, if you feel stuck or ain’t able to figure out a perfect link building strategy for your business. Contact us! And we will be more than happy to help you out.

You can mail us your queries at [email protected]. We will revert back ASAP.

Also, Thank You For Reading For Along. It means a lot to us.