HOW TO WORK ON YOUR LINK BUILDING IN SEO ?

Building an effective link building strategy is the best way to work on the authority of a website to improve its SEO.

As you know, an effective SEO strategy is based on 3 main pillars: working on the content of the website, improving the technical performance and developing its authority.

In this article, we will review all the elements that will allow you to set up an effective link building strategy to work on your natural referencing.

What is link building and why is it important in SEO?
Link building in SEO is the fact of carrying out actions to obtain backlinks.

What is a backlink in SEO ?
A backlink is simply a link from a third party site that points to one of the pages of your site.

Backlinks are important elements to build and develop the authority of your domain (i.e. your website as a whole) for search engines.

The more quality backlinks you have leading to your website, the more Google will consider it as a quality and trusted website.

Why backlinks are important in SEO ?
Before Google’s algorithm became as comprehensive as it is today, the quality of a page was judged solely by its content.

Google then launched its PageRank algorithm which has profoundly changed the way the search engine identifies and ranks web pages.

This evolution added an external dimension to the analysis of the quality of a content. Google now gives an important weight to the number of external links pointing to the pages.

With the Google Penguin update, the analysis is more refined. It is no longer enough to have mass backlinks, but they must be of quality.

This evolution appeared to counter the strategies consisting in artificially creating backlinks by buying or integrating links in mass on sites of low quality.

Finally, for Google a backlink acts in the same way as a recommendation you could get from a third party to legitimize your expertise on a subject.

In SEO, if one of your pages dealing with a specific topic gets a lot of quality backlinks, it will have additional chances to rank ahead of competing pages with fewer or lower quality backlinks.

The issue of obtaining backlinks is therefore an essential component of an effective SEO strategy!

How to identify a quality backlink?
It is crucial to understand what a good link is before launching a link building strategy. Let’s go through the different components of a quality link.

⚙️ #1 – A quality backlink comes from a page with a strong authority itself.
This first point makes hyper sense when you take the recommendation analogy.

You trust a recommendation from someone with authority in a field more than you trust a review from a stranger (at least I hope).

Google works the same way.

For him, if the page and by extension the site it is part of have themselves a strong authority, then the “power” of backlinks issued is more important.

It is often more interesting to get a single backlink from a site with very high authority than a multitude of backlinks from sites with low authority.

You can easily check the authority of a site (often referred to as domain authority) or a page with online tools like Ahrefs.

You can know the authority score of the url, the domain and the number of backlinks of a page
For Google, quality always matters over quantity when it comes to backlinks.

Worse, you could suffer SEO penalties by getting a lot of backlinks from sites identified by Google as “toxic”. That is to say sites with very low authority, with poor content, poorly optimized technically, not secure …

#2 – A quality backlink comes from a site dealing with a similar theme
The relevance of the third party site to your theme is an important element to qualify a backlink.

That is to say that even if you get a link from a site with high authority, Google could reduce the ” SEO power ” of this backlink.

It’s important to understand that Google will look at what’s happening on the two linked pages to judge whether a backlink is correct or not.

Let’s take an example:

Site A of a vintage guitar manufacturer links to a guitar string supplier site B and to an online music lesson site C.

Here the backlinks obtained by sites B and C are relevant because they are in a related theme.

Let’s analyze this second example:

The site A of an accounting firm links to a site B of a tractor manufacturer and a site C of PC game streaming.

A priori the themes of sites B and C are very different from those of site A. The backlinks obtained will therefore have a low impact on their authority score.

It is therefore crucial to work on your link building strategy around referent sites in similar or related fields.

#3 – A quality backlink is strategically positioned in a page
In your opinion, which backlink will be better perceived by Google: the link placed in one of the first paragraphs of an article or the one placed at the end of the page just above the footer?

You will have understood, when it comes to backlink, everything is important. And the position of this one does not escape it.

Generally speaking, a backlink placed in the body text of a page will have much more value than one that is located in a menu, a footer or in source at the bottom of the page.

This is due to the fact that Google will give more weight to links that are contextualized. That is, links that are included in blocks of text that will give context to it.

Let’s go back to our example of the vintage guitar manufacturer.

If he includes a backlink to the guitar string manufacturer in a block of text on a page where he praises the quality of the strings of his instruments, then this backlink is well contextualized.

On the other hand, if he makes this backlink on a technical description page listing all the suppliers of materials used for the manufacture of his guitars without more context, then the backlink will have much less impact.

Google’s algorithm is sharp enough to understand the difference between an editorial link that serves the subject, to a link placed without real purpose.

#4 – A quality backlink has a good anchor text
The anchor text of a link you talk about?

In fact it is the text that “frames” a link in a block of text.

Good anchor text contextualizes the link. “Click here” or “learn more” are not quality anchor texts. They don’t provide any information to Google to help it qualify the link.

For example, all the links on this page are contextualized by their anchor text. I have integrated links on pieces of text consistent with the page they lead to.

Google will analyze the anchor text, the content of page A and page B. If everything is consistent, the link will be considered as quality.

Beyond the anchor text, Google will also analyze the words and phrases around the link. Here again, the more coherent the link is, the more qualitative it will be.

#5 – A quality backlink has a Dofollow attribute and not Nofollow
There are 2 main link attributes: rel=”nofollow” and rel=”dofollow”.

A nofollow attribute indicates to Google that you do not want it to consult this link. Conversely, the dofollow attribute encourages it to follow it.

In reality, the nofollow attribute will not always prevent Google from consulting the page in question. But from an SEO point of view, the nofollow attribute on a backlink greatly reduces the chances that this link brings you benefits in terms of authority.

Should I buy backlinks?
We should start by saying that buying links is clearly a violation of Google’s guidelines.

From there, you have a good idea of the answer to this question. But I’ll explain why it’s a bad idea.

Why is buying links a bad idea?
First, you should know that buying links is still an extremely common practice.

Why? Because even with the evolutions of the algorithm, Google still has a lot of trouble to accurately detect a paid link from a naturally earned link. Another obvious reason is the difficulty to get these backlinks naturally. It takes a lot of effort whereas buying links brings faster results.

On the other hand, keep in mind that buying links involves negative effects:

By cheating with Google, you expose yourself to significant risks in case of penalties. The game is not necessarily worth the candle.
Generally, paid links are on low-quality sites and on less coherent themes than in the case of links earned naturally.
If a site offers to pay for backlinks, there is a good chance that your competitors have had the same proposal.
If you still want to buy links for reasons other than SEO, remember to ask for the addition of the attribute rel= “nofollow” or rel= “sponsored” to avoid a negative impact on your SEO.