Link Building – How, What, Do, Donts

People often ask: do outbound links improve SEO? Do nofollow links help rankings? Are nofollow links good for SEO?

Does linking to other sites help SEO are links still important for SEO? Do affiliate links hurt SEO? Do broken links affect SEO?

Here I will try to answer on some of these questions.

Does Linking to Other Sites Help SEO?

Does linking to other sites help SEO? The answer is yes if a major part of your SEO goal is to learn your customers more about the benefits of your product or service.

It’s important, however, that you remain certain that the sites you’re linking to are reputable and high-quality, and that they have keywords that are related to yours.

Overall, linking to authoritative sites helps demonstrate that you’re a subject matter expert and you know why what you have to offer is worthy of purchase. It’s easy to link to other sites;

you don’t need to ask the owners for permission to place a link to their websites as long as you’re not infringing on anybody’s copyrights or planning on sending them spam.

Do Outbound Links Improve SEO?

That depends on how you approach it. To gain the most benefit from outbound links, make sure they help your customers.

Do outbound links help SEO? How do outbound links improve SEO?  The objective is for the search-engine bots to index your site with the specific keywords that best relate to your site’s content.

This increases your website’s ability to be seen in the search results when users put in those keywords to find what they’re looking for.

Linking to other sites also helps your SEO because your site can be indexed with other high-ranking websites that have keywords related to yours.

It’s easy to determine if you’re linking to a high-ranking website; do a search for your site’s keywords and see where your targeted website is placed on the search-engine result page.

How Does Link Building Help Your Website?

do nofollow links help rankings? If you’re thinking about using the internet’s search engines to grow your business, you may be wondering how does link building help SEO contribute to driving traffic to your website.

When there are links to your business on other sites, it does more than just provide greater exposure and connect potential customers to your business when they click on those links. It also helps your website’s ranking in the search results when the search-engine bots scan the internet and find your links on other sites.

The bots will determine if your link is appropriate for certain keywords and phrases and then adjust your ranking accordingly. When search engine users type in your keywords, they’ll find your website ranked higher on the page results.

Does Link Building Increase Traffic from Google Search to Your Website?

You can increase traffic to your website if you know how to build links for SEO that effectively describe what your business does. To get the best results, use long-tail keyword phrases such as “restaurants with free kid meals” or “tools for home vegetable gardens” to describe your service or product.

That’s better than just “restaurants” or “garden tools” and it will help people find what they’re looking for when they start typing what they want into a search engine.

That’s part of the SEO equation and it’s called an organic search, but having engaging and appealing content on another website that links back to yours using your keyword phrases is a part of link building.

It’s also a strategy that can bring a significant amount of increased traffic to your site.

How Do Link Exchanges Work?

What a link exchange is in SEO? If you’d like to know what a link exchange is in SEO, it’s simple. You post a link that leads to your website on someone else’s site and they post a link to their site on yours. A link exchange works like a quid pro quo SEO approach to link building.
To get the most out of this, you need to get your links on sites that are both active and high-quality; these are the sites that get the larger amounts of traffic.

Search engine algorithms can detect if your links and keywords connect with relevant and high-ranking websites.

When your links show up on these sites, you’ll get a higher ranking on the search engine’s results page for your own site.

What Are the Basic Steps for Link Building?

If you’re not sure of how link building is done for SEO, here are the basics. Keyword phrases are first developed that target the website’s hoped-for audience.

The keywords should describe what those visitors would be looking for. Longer and more detailed phrases are typically required; an example would be “machinery for packaging small items.” That’s a good description of what a business customer might be looking for.

The next step is to add quality content to the web page that will engage visitors who land there.

The content should contain the keywords. Finally, find other quality websites that are related to the content on your page and ask the other websites’ owners if you can have your links placed there.

What Are Broken Links?

Do broken links affect SEO? If you don’t know what broken links are in SEO, the first thing you should learn about them is that they can work against you. When a link on your website brings up a 404 page — which states the page no longer exists — it reflects rather poorly on your site.
It can cause a visitor to become frustrated and click off. Bad user experiences hurt your business and derail site objectives. The inverse applies also; if a link heading back to your website from another site brings up a 404 error page, it looks like your site has been abandoned or very poorly maintained.

When the search-engine bots spot broken links to broken page it can cause them to either stop rating your site or lower your ranking.

Do Reciprocal Links Improve SEO?

What are reciprocal links in SEO? Also referred to as link exchanges, their distinguishing important ranking factors is that there is an agreed-upon arrangement between website owners to place links on each other’s sites.

Another way to use reciprocal links is to own different websites that all feature your products or services. You can then create reciprocal links that connect across your own websites. Your content can then also be better organised;

this can make it easier for your site visitors to learn about different aspects of your products or services. It’s also a good way to gain favour with the web crawler bots that are assessing your site to determine your page rankings.

What Does Deep Linking Do in Link Building?

What deep linking with internal links does for SEO? The issue of what deep linking does for SEO relates to what a visitor does after they arrive on a website’s home page or landing page. Deep linking is what helps turn a visitor into a customer.
It means there are links on your home or landing page that lead to other internal pages. The basic premise is that the visitor is becoming more engaged and going deeper into your website toward a page that converts them into a customer.

That could be, for example, a product page or a shopping cart page. Organising site content through deep-linking also makes for a better user experience and can raise your site ranking.

What Are Dofollow Links in Link Building?

The role played by dofollow links in SEO is that of a path to a website that was placed on another site and which helps establish the second site as a source of authoritative or useful information.

An example would be a news report that points to a site as the information source or a way to learn more about a topic. The owner of one website embeds a hyperlink in the text referring to the subject covered in greater detail on the other website.

Dofollow links are typically placed on a site without any reciprocal arrangement and are used to establish credibility for subject matter. They also help raise the ranking of a page when web crawler bots come across dofollow links leading there.

Do Outbound Links Help Establish Website Relevancy?

If your goal is to establish your website as a source of relevant material for a specific subject or field, it will be to your benefit to know what outbound external links are in SEO.

An outbound link typically leads out of your site and into another website that has already been established as an authoritative source for your subject material.

The outbound link, in the form of an underlined anchor text phrase, demonstrates that the information on your site can be backed up by a reputable source.

Clicking on that anchor text brings your visitor to that other reference-based site.

Finding websites that are high-ranking and rich with resourceful material provides your visitors with more information while also connecting your website to a particular area of expertise.

Are Nofollow Links Helpful?

How does link building help SEO? Are nofollow links good for SEO? Do nofollow links help rankings? Are nofollow links good for SEO? The only reason you would use these is if you want the web crawler bots to bypass those links in a website.

The anchor text for a nofollow appears the same as a dofollow link on the web page, but there’s an additional attribute added to the HTML code that tells the page-ranking bots to disregard the link.

Because the crawlers bypass the link, it won’t register or be counted as a link related to your search engine keywords. One reason you might choose to use a nofollow link is if you’re linking to a website you don’t trust completely.

Can Broken Links Cause Harm?

Rather than asking “Do broken links affect SEO?” it’s better to invest time and effort into looking for them. This should be done on a regular basis, and when discovered, broken links need to be fixed.

A broken link leading to a 404 “Page not found” message is more than just an embarrassment; it can be interpreted by the search-engine bots as a sign of an abandoned or neglected website.

This can then result in the bots no longer searching through your website and your pages won’t be factored into their page-ranking algorithms.

Your site can lose its ability to be properly indexed. Finding and fixing broken links should be a priority if you’re hoping to make effective use of SEO.

Link Building – Are Links Still Important?

Are links still important for SEO? Keyword stuffing, spam and black hat tricks are spreading across the internet; are links still important for SEO?

They most definitely are if your goal is to increase traffic to your website and also be part of the community of reputable, professional and trustworthy websites.

The sites you link to and the types of sites that contain links leading back to your site can help determine your standing in the internet world.

Placing outgoing links to top-tier websites on your web pages helps to establish an association with important sites and can help place you in a noteworthy internet community.

It will also have a positive effect on how the search engines index and rank your web pages.

What Are Some Reasons To Use Nofollow Links?

Do nofollow links help SEO or do they hinder your efforts to grow your website traffic? They won’t be counted by the search-engine bots, so they can’t be expected to improve your page-ranking scores.

They can be useful, however, if you would rather not have the bots associate your site with one that may prove to be untrustworthy.

There is also no reason for a search-engine bot to follow a link that goes to a site, such as a forum, that requires a sign-in procedure; it won’t get in.

If you’re using paid links or affiliate marketing to promote your site, service or products, you may also wish to consider using nofollow links so you can differentiate between your paid and organic search results.

Do Affiliate Links Help or Harm Your SEO?

They’re a great way to increase your online sales, but do affiliate program links hurt SEO marketing efforts?

Connecting with major internet retailers such as Amazon, Shopify or Barnes & Noble can help generate additional revenue and provide increased brand-name exposure, but the web-crawler bots may also think your site is teeming with spam.

This may cause your site to lose some rank in the search-page results. There is a way, however, that you can minimize the down-ranking effect.

Using affiliate links with the nofollow attribute added to your site’s anchor text HTML will tell the crawlers not to follow, rank or index those links to affiliate site.

When you do this, there’s a lesser chance of causing harm to your ranking or SEO marketing campaign.

What is link building in SEO?

Link building is an essential component of SEO, but it is often overlooked by beginners. If you aren’t familiar with link building in SEO, here’s what you need to know.

Defining Link Building

Link building refers to a variety of techniques that websites use to encourage other websites to link back to them. Search engines index the internet by using crawler bots to traverse websites. These crawler bots automatically follow every hyperlink that they come across. Crawlers won’t just explore a website; they will also travel to other websites that it links to.

There are a number of link building techniques out there, but most SEO specialists would agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of SEO to get right. Not only is link building difficult, but link building techniques often take some time to pay off. There are no shortcuts with link building. It is something that requires sustained attention.

Why Links Matter

The websites that you link to and which link back to you are an important consideration for search engines when determining your SEO score. As Google explains, webmasters are able to improve their rankings in search engine results pages by increasing the number of high-quality and authoritative websites that are linking back to them. Not all links are created equal. A link from a well-established website that Google recognises as being authoritative will count for a lot more than a link from the comment section of a blog.

It is also the case that links to your website from disreputable websites can end up harming your SEO. There are steps that you can take to mitigate this damage to your reputation. This is part of the reason why it is important to regularly monitor your backlinks. There are a number of free tools that make it easy for you to see which websites are linking back to yours. You can tell Google to ignore any backlinks from websites that you do not trust.

How To Build Links

There are two approaches that you can take to build backlinks to your website. You can generate backlinks organically, or you can pay other blogs and websites to link to you. In general, it is better to generate backlinks organically. There is nothing wrong with using paid marketing to give yourself an initial boost, but you should have an organic link building strategy that you can use in the long-term.

Creating high-quality content that other websites are likely to want to link back to is the single most effective means of generating backlinks, but it is also the most difficult. Obviously, you need your content to be noticed by a lot of people if you want to have a shot at being cited by a major news website or similar high authority source.

Link building is a vital part of SEO – it isn’t something that any website or business can afford to overlook. If you don’t know where to start with analyzing your backlinks or pursuing a link building strategy, you need an SEO expert. I have overseen the development of organic SEO for a variety of companies, and I can help you too. Contact me today to discuss your SEO needs.

What Are Natural & Unnatural Links?

Backlinks are an important part of the SEO landscape and websites that want to be noticed need a link building strategy. However, not all links are equal, and understanding how Google treats different types of links is important for developing a winning strategy.

Natural Links

If Google had its way, natural links would be the only type of link on the internet. Google is open about the fact that it considers natural links to be the most important objective of SEO. Everything that a website does to improve its visibility should ultimately be to generate natural backlinks. Once a website starts generating a regular stream of backlinks from around the internet, a huge part of its SEO work will happen automatically.

When someone reads and likes your content, and subsequently decides to link back to it from their own website, you have generated a natural link. Natural links are organic links, they are unsolicited, and their primary purpose is to provide value to an audience, not to inflate your SEO score. A common example of a natural Link is a citation within an article. This is a link to another website that has additional information or content that will be of interest to a reader.

Unnatural Links

Unnatural links are more common than natural links. Unnatural links are also the links that are largely driving the world of SEO today. As you might have guessed, an artificial link is any link that has been purchased or solicited with the explicit intention of raising a page’s SEO score and its subsequent position in the search engine results rankings.

Google is understandably vague about some of the rules surrounding unnatural links. Technically, any link that Google deems to exist for no reason other than to alter a website’s PageRank or their ranking in results pages can be considered part of a link scheme – and could ultimately see webmasters penalised by Google. However, as anyone with experience of SEO knows, unnatural links that meet this description are commonplace in the world of SEO, and clearly, Google accepts that unnatural links do still have a place in SEO.

What Does This Mean For Webmasters?

Google’s algorithms are constantly growing more sophisticated. The search engine today is much more adept at identifying artificial content than it once was. There was a time when you could simply turn out hyperlinks to a particular web page and massively boost its page ranking. Today, Google gives considerably more weight to sources that it deems to be trustworthy.

Securing a backlink from a highly authoritative source is always going to be valuable, whether that link is generated naturally or unnaturally. If you can generate natural links from high authoritative sources through simply producing high-quality content, this is always going to be preferable to paying for unnatural links.

You don’t need to fear unnatural links; most websites and businesses are dependent on unnatural links for their SEO to some extent. However, generating links organically has a number of benefits beyond the boost to your SEO. If you are regularly earning natural backlinks from other websites, it will make your website more authoritative in Google’s eyes.

What Do Search Engines Say About Link Building?

Link building is about more than just generating links. For link building to be effective, you need to understand the factors that go into determining the quality of a link. Luckily, we can turn to search engines themselves for answers.

The Source Matters

If there is one essential lesson that every single person working with SEO should know, it is that quality matters. There was a time, a long time ago, when you could just spam links to your website and improve your Google ranking. But that hasn’t been possible for pretty much the entirety of this century. The quantity of links to your website isn’t important. Google knows that anyone with a little motivation and money can solicit as many backlinks to their website as they want.

Because of this, Google now considers EAT – expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. This is the trifecta of good content, and sources that consistently produce content with these qualities are much more valuable targets for link building. A link from the right source can carry enormous weight for your website, potentially propelling a page of yours to the front page almost instantaneously.

Focus your link building efforts on reputable and authoritative websites. Placing outbound links to these websites can alert them to your existence. If you can attract their interest, it could be the beginning of a very rewarding relationship.

The Content Matters

At this point, Google knows every trick in the book. For example, they understand that generating links and clicks doesn’t necessarily mean that you have good content. Good content will naturally earn both of those rewards, but they can also, at least in the short term, be bought. Google has a number of tricks up its sleeve for deciding which category your content falls into.

Fortunately, Google has been pretty clear about what constitutes good content. Above all else, they want you to write for other people, not for search engine bots. Google lays out guidelines for formatting, etc. which ensures that content can be read and interpreted relatively quickly. Remember to use paragraphs and to break up your copy with images as appropriate.

Fix Broken Links

Over time, most websites will go through some kind of facelift or redesign. When these occur, it can lead to alterations to the underlying architecture and structure of a website. This, in turn, inevitably means that links get broken. Even if you are vigilant, a couple always seems to slip through the cracks.

Google is not a fan of broken links, nor are the other major search engine operators. You should check your website for broken links on a reasonably regular basis, so you can fix them as soon as they are identified.

If you are new to the SEO game, it can be an intimidating undertaking. Fortunately, Google has made extensive documentation available that lays things out for you. What we have listed above are some of the most important aspects to link building according to Google, but the list is by no means exhaustive.

Which Links Affect A Website’s Ranking In Google SERPs?

The company that you keep through mutual linking is an important indicator of the nature of your website. Links to and from other websites are used to build a link profile of your website, and this profile impacts your position in SERPs. Here are some of the types of links that impact your ranking the most.

Natural Links

Natural links are Google’s favourite type of link. A natural link is one that is generated simply because someone wants to share your content. Natural links carry far more weight than artificial links because they are a much more reliable indicator that the content being linked to is legitimate. Of course, just because someone links naturally to content, it does not in and of itself mean that the content is reliable or high-quality. But natural links are a better indicator than links that are unnatural and only exist for SEO.

A website that generates natural links consistently will benefit from a constantly high SEO score. As always, the key to generating natural links is to continue to produce high-quality content that people want to share.

High Authority Links

Google takes into consideration the source of a link when it is determining its value. Links to your content from sources that are deemed to be the highest authority will carry more weight than links from obscure or dubious sources. Once again, the most reliable way of making high-quality sources want to link back to you is to become a high authority source yourself. If you are consistently producing high-quality content, then when you will find that other producers of quality content will seek you out.

It is worth focusing your time and resources on securing links from high authority sources before you go chasing after less valuable bounties. High authority sources can propel you to the top of SERPs faster than just about anything else.

Internal And External Links

Both internal and external links can have an impact on your position in search engine results pages, both directly and indirectly. External links that go from your website to other websites and from other websites to yours are the most important links as far as your position in the page rankings is concerned.

Your position in the rankings will also be impacted by your SEO more broadly. The ease with which users can navigate your website will be a crucial factor in determining your SEO score. Internal links are an important tool for easy navigation. Internal links will also ensure that the content on your website continues to be accessed and remains fresh, keeping link rot at bay.

Most types of links can impact your position in SERPs to some degree. In fact, the only links that have absolutely no discernible impact at all are no-follow links. Beyond that, every type of link on your website and every external website linking to it will contribute to your overall link profile. You should be selective about who you solicit links from and give priority to high-quality sources.

What Is The Best Way To Build Links?

Link building is a core component of SEO. Anyone who uses the internet understands why links are important, but how exactly do you get other websites to start linking back to yours? Let’s take a look at the best link building techniques to get started with.

Ask People For Backlinks

The easiest way of generating backlinks to your website is to simply ask. If you know any other website owners who will be amenable to helping you out, it is always worth asking them. What do you have to lose?

It is also worth asking other websites about mutual backlinking. Be careful, simply having a link in itself isn’t going to boost your SEO. In fact, a link in the wrong context can harm SEO. But if there is room for you and another website to produce organic content for one another, then this provides you with a pretext for backlinking to one another.

Foster Valuable Relationships

There are two kinds of links, natural and unnatural. Unnatural links are links that you pay for or solicit; they are created primarily for the purposes of SEO. Natural links, on the other hand, are links that other people make to your website because they want to direct people to your content. As far as Google and other search engines are concerned, these natural links are the best indication that your content is high-quality and your website authoritative.

Of course, things are more complicated than this and who is linking to you is important. In the long-term, it pays to have friends that represent sources with high authority. High-authority websites provide the most valuable backlinks; a link from the right source can be worth more than a great many links from lesser sources.

Add A Blog To Your Website

Adding a blog to your website is a smart move for your SEO for a number of different reasons, link building is just one of them. A blog is a simple way of adding value to any website. For example, adding a blog to an e-commerce website will give users a reason to visit, even if they don’t want to buy anything immediately.

If you keep producing useful and high-quality content for your blog, it is perfectly possible to establish an audience for your blog that is independent of the website it is attached to. Achieving this puts you in an excellent position for SEO and for link building in particular. Remember, other websites can see who is linking to them. By adding outbound links to high-quality sources, you can get their attention.

Don’t Forget Your Internal Links

So far, we have only covered links to and from other websites, but what about your own content? Internal linking is just as important as your external links from an SEO perspective. Internal links are also important for providing your users with the best experience possible, as they aid navigation in an important way.

Link building is a cornerstone of any comprehensive SEO strategy. You can boost your link building in the short term by hiring the right person, but a long-term link building strategy involves generating a steady stream of natural organic links. As an SEO specialist with experience generating organic SEO for a number of companies, I can help you to devise just such a strategy. If you want a killer SEO long-term strategy, schedule a call with me today, and let’s make it happen.

Why Vary Anchor Text When Building Links?

Building links can be a delicate process. You need to be building the right kinds of links with the right partners. It’s important that you keep your anchor texts varied; here’s why.

Use Stop Words To Keep It Natural

A natural link is the best kind of link; it is the kind of link that search engines love. As the name suggests, a natural link is a link that is created naturally by someone who wants to share the content of a web page with other people. An unnatural link, on the other hand, is a link that has been solicited in some way. Unnatural links are created purely for the purposes of SEO.

Obviously, unnatural links are a common part of many SEO campaigns. However, because search engine algorithms have become so adept at detecting and dismissing or downgrading unnatural links, they must now be disguised as natural links to be effective. In order for links to be beneficial to your SEO, the content surrounding them needs to be of reasonable quality.

A common SEO mistake is to use an unnatural anchor in order to be ‘keyword-efficient’. For example, an SEO business in London might want to target ‘SEO London’. But the keyword ‘SEO London’ looks unnatural in a sentence. Many people don’t realise that Google ignores stop words, words such as ‘in’, ‘and’, ‘for’, ‘the’, ‘with’, and others. Most 1-3 letter words are considered stop words and will be ignored by search engines. This means you can use them however you like, without impacting your SEO.

Creating A Natural Link Profile

If every link to your website is pointing to the same page, even if that page is your homepage, it is immediately suspicious and makes your whole link profile look unnatural. In order to appear organic, you need to have anchor text of a variety of types in addition to varied landing pages. If you do have lots of links to a particular page, try to vary the format of links. For example, by removing the ‘https://’ part, or omitting everything except the suffix, as in ‘example.com’.

Remember, you want to maintain a natural link profile. That also means that the anchor text you use needs to be accurate. Believe it or not, some SEO amateurs looking for loopholes think that they can pair up any anchor text with any landing page and get their website to start showing up for commonly searched but irrelevant terms. Suffice to say, this will quickly be detected – if it works at all. The point is, varying your anchor text is good, but make sure that you keep it relevant to the landing page.

You Can Utilise Surrounding Keywords

Another good reason to vary the anchor text that you use is that it enables you to take advantage of surrounding keywords. The words around anchor text are important, albeit not as important as the anchor itself. Google is increasingly interested in the context of text and, therefore, makes use of the words surrounding an anchor in order to categorise it better.

In short, varying your anchor text is a good move for your SEO. Remember that you want to keep your link profile looking natural. You need varied anchors to do that.

What Is An Internal Link?

An internal link is any link on a website that takes users to another page on the same website. We have all encountered plenty of internal links when browsing the internet, even if you aren’t aware of it. For example, the links that visitors use to find their way around a website are internal links. As long as the page that you land on is a part of the same domain as the page where you found the link, it is an internal link.

What Are Internal Links Used For?

In addition to aiding website navigation, internal links can serve a number of other purposes on a website. For example, linking back to past content can augment what is on the page. If you include a brief summary of something that you have previously covered in detail, then you can use backlinking to point users to the original content. Just as you might cite sources from other websites, referring back to previous work that you have published is also a viable strategy.

Preventing Link Rot

Linking back to previous content also helps to prevent link decay, sometimes known as link rot. This is a process that occurs naturally as content ages and is forgotten about. As the number of users visiting a page decreases with time, so too does the value of the page in Google’s eyes. A link that points a high authority source when it is first established could be pointing to a long-forgotten page in a few years. However, by publishing new content that links back to your old content, you can maintain enough traffic to old pages to keep them relevant in the eyes of Google.

Helping Google To Crawl

Google’s crawler bots map out the internet by visiting websites and following any links that they find. It doesn’t matter whether these links are pointing to an external website or to another page on your own website, Google will follow them unless you tell it not to. This crawling process isn’t just about indexing websites, however. It also enables Google to understand the relationship between different pages on your website. Using natural and logical internal links enables Google to assess these relationships more accurately.

Improve The Value Of Content

The link value is an important metric but one that Google keeps hidden. Essentially, every website has a link value score which is divided amongst all the pages on the website with the most valuable pages taking a higher portion of the overall score. Pages that are linked to directly from high-value pages will be considered high value themselves. For most websites, the homepage will be the most valuable page, and any pages linked directly from it will also score highly.

Internal links are an important component of proper website navigation. Remember that ease of navigation is a factor that Google considers when assigning your website an SEO score. If your website is in dire need of some internal links, but you have no idea how to make them work for you, contact me today for assistance.

What Is Link Building?

Link building refers to a number of different techniques that webmasters can use in order to encourage other websites to link back to their own. Every other high-authority website that links back to your own will give your SEO a significant boost. If your website can become a commonly cited source for these websites, you will receive an ongoing boost to your SEO.

Inbound And Outbound

There are two types of links on the internet, inbound and outbound links. As their names suggest, inbound links refer to links from other websites to yours, whereas outbound links are links from your website to someone else’s. A well-rounded SEO strategy will include a link-building component that considers both inbound and outbound links.

Naturally, you have much more control over the outbound links that you add to other websites. But even if you only link to very high-quality sources, outbound links alone aren’t going to get your SEO very high. However, outbound links to high-authority sources can make them aware of your website and ultimately give them cause to link back to you.

Why Links Matter

Links between websites are one of the most important metrics that Google has for determining the architecture of the internet. Analysing traffic and links between websites lets Google identify networks that are artificially inflating the status of their own content, as well as the networks of high-quality websites that are a consistent source of accurate information for other websites.

Every link to a website is taken as a vote of confidence by Google. In other words, lots of different websites are all linking back to a single source. This generally indicates that the source is high-quality and trustworthy.

You Are What You EAT

Not all links are created equal. While inserting outbound links and encouraging inbound links from other websites is important, you shouldn’t just chase links at any cost. You want to prioritise links from sources that they have EAT qualities.

This means that the sources have:

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trust

Don’t worry, it isn’t just sites like Wikipedia and major news publications that fit this brief, and you shouldn’t take this as an indication that you should only target big and well-established websites.

However, you do need to be vigilant of disreputable websites. Having the wrong website linking back to you, even if you have no outbound links to them, can damage your SEO.

How To Check Your Link Profile

There is a range of tools available online that enable you to view your website’s link profile. Your link profile is a record of all the inbound and outbound links that you have and the other domains that they connect you with. You should review your link profile regularly to check the status of your link building efforts and to ensure that you aren’t being dragged down by low-quality websites.

Link building is an essential component of any SEO strategy. If you don’t know where to begin with your link building, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Contact me today, and I can help you to understand your link profile and show you how to use it to build more links.