If you’ve also thought - what is link building why is it important? Then don’t fret, it’s a normal reaction.

To briefly recap; a purposeful SEO strategy tends to be comprised of researching keywords, targeting them through on-page optimisations and then ranking better for them by targeting even more keywords or through acquiring more and more relevant and logical links to your website and pages. 

In the beginning there are lots of things to do on-page to signal to Google and other search engines that you are targeting audiences by associating website content with the same keywords that those same audiences are searching for. After a while however, on-page SEO usually reduces to regularly either expanding existing commercial content into different markets or expanding the informational keywords you currently rank for in your existing market through the use of blog posts or other written content.

While you’re continuing to acquire keywords through writing and publishing more content, there is another way to keep moving up the rankings on the keywords that you already rank for, enter link building. 

A page that is well linked to doesn’t necessarily need to be a part of a website, which covers 1,000s of informational and commercial keywords, in order to rank well for the keywords it does cover it just needs to be linked to by other relevant sites. 

But where to start? Whether you’ve been active for a month or years, the first port of call is going to be a backlink analysis - which means we can use a backlink checker.

How do I check backlinks to my website?

How do I check backlinks to my website? It’s a question most SEOs start out asking. There are many paid tools out there, the more granular and extensive that you need the data to be will dictate the price. 

For those of us starting out however, ahref’s backlink checker is not the worst first option. 

The purpose of us checking our backlinks is to clean the palette that we will use to paint our off page SEO campaign & respective link building strategies. 

If we have irrelevant backlinks in the mix from the start it doesn’t clearly signal, to Google and other search engines, our intention behind creating content and the niche that it serves. 

If the irrelevant backlinks get too numerous, it could incur a Google penalty and harm current rankings. This is why link schemes whether pay-for-backlinks or otherwise are not a good idea. 

Link building Google penalty - what is it?

The risk of using low value, junk, backlinks is that some of the time those backlinks violate Google’s SEO policies (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies#link-spam) and hence may be vulnerable to any and all future Google updates that address spam links or penalised through a link building Google penalty. Google penalties are known to be associated with a drop in search rankings. These undesired links should be removed on the referring website and disavowed in Google’s search console. 

What are the types of link building in off page SEO?

So it begets the question, what types of link building are good, then?

A link from a partner company who shares an audience or a market segment with you is not a link you need to be worried about losing through an update. It is also a link that can bear more fruits than just being another backlink; because your site and theirs are relevant to each other (a backlink) can become the seed for future partnership endeavors. 

We link to first focus on local business directory citations such as yell.com - who coincidentally provide a free business directory citation checker on the following link which, for UK businesses, shows a list of highly trafficked British business directories that a particular British business may appear in. Some of these are paid and others are free to register and appear in. 

There are also social medias to consider but most of them are nofollow backlinks, which do not carry the same weight as normal backlinks. To know whether a backlink is a follow or no follow backlink you can inspect a page in Google chrome and search for nofollow in the HTML code which appears usually as a rel=”nofollow” visible format.

Are Facebook links nofollow?

Are Facebook links nofollow? Almost certainly if you’re a user with a business page. If you’re an official vendor to Facebook or another meta website, the links may not be nofollow backlinks. 

What is outreach link building?

After taking care of business directory citations, my next port of call is usually to hop over on to outreach link building. What is outreach link building? 

Outreach link building I view as an umbrella term - effectively reaching out to other businesses who are already associated with the same things that you are, which makes them relevant. This can be people within the same industry as you, the same specific niche as you or other businesses that come across your ideal customer profile regularly. All of the outreach however is done with the mission of striving for more backlinks to your website and content. 

Think of cold sales outreach, only instead of selling a product or a service; you will have patience and first want to give them something for free; whether that is suggesting a useful and relevant guest article for you to write for their website and their audience. 

Naturally, further opportunities may open up with these link building partners further down the road, which is why it may pay to target those who you already know come across leads that fit your ideal customer profile.

What is hook in link building?

If thinking to oneself - what is hook in link building? You are not alone. 

The hook, as with anything in life, should be appealing because it makes sense and is good. I say should be appealing because many of the things that are appealing in life are not good and also don’t make sense, but are driven by other factors. 

A restaurant’s Sous Chef posting guest articles or guest recipes on lesser-known food blogs could be a good way to give away useful information to a foodie audience who can actually go and try cooking these recipes and post their feedback, and which could certainly merit the few minutes it takes to give that restaurant’s website a backlink. The more truthful and useful the content, the more reasons that the link building partner has to not remove that backlink in the future - although all good things must still come to an end some day.

How can I get more backlinks for free?

Ok, ok, business citations and then outreach link building with a good hook. Some will still ask the question - how can I get more backlinks for free? 

The answer is, which quality of backlinks do you want for free? 

There is always a trade-off in life between reward and resources invested up until the reward is received. The things that come easy and for free typically aren’t that useful or long-lasting. 

Although effort and time is invested, so it isn’t technically free, outreach link building and partnering with businesses for reasons other than link building are financially-free routes to logical and meaningful backlinks.

What are broken links SEO?

“But what are broken links SEO? I have heard that you can get a backlink by replacing content.” This is true. And actually this can be quite useful to administrators of websites. 

No one really wants a broken link on their page. What some SEOs do is search for broken links on relevant webpages to their niche. They then find the original content that the page was linking to, sometimes through archive.org, and then provide a suitable alternative content for the linking website to re-link to.

Can I put a link to another website on my website?

And the bonus question - can I put a link to another website on my website? 

Yes you can - and in the spirit of doing for others that which we would like done for ourselves - we can think about which content we could link to which supports the written content that we publish to our own audiences and link to it where relevant. 

As an example, below you can see links to local business directories that we’re associated with:

If you’re thinking about hiring an agency to consult or execute a purposeful and targeted link building campaign it could be useful to take a look at our SME link building services page or contact us.