Links are very important to the life of a website and different characteristics of link are brought together to improve the links on a website.

The factors are link building, broken link and even link buying, and they will be discussed extensively in the article.

• What is Link Building and Why is it Important?
• How can link building benefit my business?
• What Should you Know About Broken Links?
• How do you Outreach a Link Building?
• What are the Ethical Ways to Buy Links?

What is Link Building and Why is it Important?

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.

Read Also: Leveraging your Audience Specific Interests to Boost Website Brand

There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.

If we are to really understand the importance of link building, it’s important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how the search engines see links, and what they can interpret from them.

1. Start of link tag: Called an anchor tag (hence the “a”), this opens the link tag and tells search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.
2. Link referral location: The “href” stands for “hyperlink referral,” and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn’t always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download. Occasionally, you’ll see something other than a URL, beginning with a # sign. These are local links, which take you to a different section of the page you’re already on.
3. Visible/anchor text of link: This is the little bit of text that users see on the page, and on which they need to click if they want to open the link. The text is usually formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with blue color and/or underlining, signaling to users that it is a clickable link.
4. Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link tag to the search engines.

What links mean for search engines

There are two fundamental ways that the search engines use links:

1. To discover new web pages
2. To help determine how well a page should rank in their results

Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they feel a page is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords (Google created a short video to explain that process).

When they are deciding this, the search engines do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.

Links as a ranking factor are what allowed Google to start to dominate the search engine market back in the late 1990s. One of Google’s founders, Larry Page, invented PageRank, which Google used to measure the quality of a page based in part on the number of links pointing to it.

This metric was then used as part of the overall ranking algorithm and became a strong signal because it was a very good way of determining the quality of a page.

It was so effective because it was based upon the idea that a link could be seen as a vote of confidence about a page, i.e., it wouldn’t get links if it didn’t deserve to. The theory is that when someone links to another website, they are effectively saying it is a good resource. Otherwise, they wouldn’t link to it, much in the same way that you wouldn’t send a friend to a bad restaurant.

However, SEOs soon discovered how to manipulate PageRank and search results for chosen keywords. Google started actively trying to find ways to discover websites that were manipulating search results, and began rolling out regular updates that were specifically aimed at filtering out websites that didn’t deserve to rank.

This has also led to Google starting to discount a number of link building techniques that were previously deemed fine, for example, submitting your website to web directories and getting a link in return.

This was a technique that Google actually recommended at one point, but it became abused and overused by SEOs, so Google stopped passing as much value from that sort of link.

More recently, Google has actively penalized the rankings of websites that have attempted such overuse of these techniques—often referred to as over-optimization—in their link building. Google’s regular Penguin updates are one such example. Knowing which link building techniques to avoid and stay within Google’s guidelines is an important subject that we’ll discuss later in this guide.

How can link building benefit my business?

As we’ve discussed, links are a very important signal that the search engines use to determine rankings. So, we know that increasing the number of high-quality links pointing at your website can significantly increase your chances of ranking well.

There are other benefits to link building, though, that may be less immediately obvious yet still worthy of consideration.

Building relationships

Link building can often involve outreach to other relevant websites and blogs in your industry. This outreach frequently relates to the promotion of something that you’ve just created, such as a piece of content or an infographic.

A common goal of outreach is to get a link, but there is much more to it than just this: Outreach can help you build long-term relationships with key influencers in your industry, and these relationships can mean that your business becomes highly regarded and trusted. This in itself is valuable, even if we forget link building for a moment, because we are creating genuine evangelists and advocates for our business.

Sending referral traffic

We’ve talked about the impact of links on your rankings, but what about the impact of links on referral traffic? A good link from a highly-visited website can lead to an increase in traffic, too. If it is a relevant website, chances are that the traffic is also relevant and may lead to an increase in sales, as well. Again, in this situation the value of a link isn’t just about SEO—it’s about customers.

A great example of this in action was this guest post written by Michael Ellsberg on Tim Ferriss’ blog. He also wrote a case study on Forbes explaining just how valuable this guest post was to him. “There’s a big difference between being exposed to a large audience,” he says, “and being exposed to a comparatively smaller (but still large) audience which is ridiculously passionate.”

In other words, the avid followers of a single blog were far more likely to take the advice of the blogger than (for example) viewers were to pay attention to the anchor on CNN, even if the latter group outnumbered the former.

Brand building

Good link building can help build your brand and establish you as an authority in your niche. There are some link building techniques, such as content creation, which can show people the expertise of your company, and this can go a long way toward building your brand.

For example, if you create a piece of content based upon industry data and publish it, you have a chance of becoming well known for it in your industry. When you do outreach and try to get links to the content, you are showing your expertise and asking other people in your industry to help spread the word and show others the same.

An important note on link building vs link “earning”

Or, the importance of having webpages worth linking to.

Before building links, you need something of value to build links to. Often it’s the homepage of your website. More often than not, though, you build links to specialized resources such as a blog post, tool, research study or graphic.

Sometimes these assets exist long before you begin your link building campaign. Other times, you create these resources specifically with the goal of building links in mind.

This introduces the concepts of link earning and “deserving to rank.” All link building campaigns must start with something worth linking to. It’s very difficult to build links to low-value webpages, but when you begin with something truly valuable that people find useful or share-worthy, link building is a much easier endeavor.

What Should you Know About Broken Links?

Broken links are links that don’t work. Some of the reasons why links don’t work include:

• A website is no longer available
• A webpage was moved without a redirect being added
• The URL structure of a website was changed

If you click a broken link, you’ll see a 404 page error or similar message explaining the webpage is not available.

Broken links on your website can be harmful in two ways:

• They make for a bad user experience – When users click on links and reach dead-end 404 errors, they get frustrated and may never return.
• They devalue your SEO efforts – Broken links restrict the flow of link equity throughout your site, which impacts rankings negatively.

To avoid these potential pitfalls, you should periodically check for broken links on your entire website. If you’re wondering how to do this, you’re not alone. The good news is we’ve done this work before and we’ve documented everything in a step-by-step, easy-to-follow process, which we hope you find helpful. 

Step 1: Find broken links

There are a number of tools you can use to identify broken links, many of them free.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great free tool for tracking website performance, and it’s also helpful for easily finding broken links. First, log into your Google Analytics account and click on the Behavior tab. Then select “Site Content” and then “All Pages.”

Make sure to set the evaluation period for the amount of time you want to look at. If you check for broken links monthly, set the period for the month since your last check.

Step 2: Create a report and track your changes

After identifying your broken links, create an Excel spreadsheet to track link redirect processes. Name it something like “Broken Link Redirect Report.” In Google Analytics, you can export the report you just created by clicking Export – CSV for Excel on the top of the page, and downloading the file.

For our purposes, we only need the data on broken links, page views and unique page views, so copy and paste these data columns into the Excel spreadsheet you have created.

You can export data from Xenu too; click on File, then Export to Tab Separated File, and then open that text file with Excel.

Next, organize the main data from Google Analytics and Xenu into separate sections on your Excel spreadsheet.

Step 3: Analyze data and decide which pages should be redirected

After all the preparation, we come to the important stage. Both Google Analytics and Xenu give us a list of links that may be broken. But before actually redirecting them, you should first analyze the pages and the reasons they may not be working properly.

From the Google Analytics section of the short sample above, we can see that not all broken links are created equal. Some links are actually visited quite often while others are not. Many instances of broken links or visits to a stray URL occur only once.

These URLs may be a product of human error or someone mistyping an incorrect URL into the address bar and may not be worth fixing, like links #7 and #8. However, broken links with multiple visits are probably worth the time and effort to fix as they show a trend (even if it is one of human error).

Also, for some links, we can easily figure out the correct URL and fill in the data in the spreadsheet; for other links, we can put a tentative URL there and highlight it with a different color; and for the rest of the links, we can redirect to the domain homepage. In conclusion, we will only redirect the links with many visits and those with an underlying error-causing rule.

The Xenu report has the advantage of not displaying URLs that were recorded in your analytics because of a typing error. All the links shown in Xenu are actually existing links that live on the site. But these URLs may still contain character errors.

For example, links #4 and #5 are caused the by the same problem: “#” is replaced by “%2523.” When we identify these instances, we need to determine the cause and fix the same problem across all instances.

This step will be complete once you’ve located the links that need to be redirected and  documented them all in your Broken Link Redirect Report.

Step 4: Redirect in CMS

Finally, it’s time to actually redirect the broken links in your content management system (CMS). I will use WordStream’s Drupal CMS as an example.

Go to Administration – Site building – URL redirects. Click “Add redirect”. Fill in the “From” and “To” blanks by copying and pasting from the final Broken Link Redirect Report. Pay attention to the link format during the process. Select “301 Moved Permanently” in the drop-down Redirect Type menu. Click “Create new redirect”.

Repeat the above process to redirect all the broken links and update the Broken Link Redirect Report.

Mission accomplished! Now you can have even more pride for your website because ALL your links work, making both users and the search engines happy.

How do you Outreach a Link Building?

For most people, link building outreach is undoubtedly the hardest part of the link building process. Unfortunately, it’s also the most important part.

Sure, there are virtuosos. Those who just seem to nail it from the beginning. Every email gets a reply and every reply is positive. They’re not the norm.

Most suffer rejection and unanswered emails until they learn the ropes. The problem is, though, not everyone is interested in learning the ropes. Instead of crafting friendly messages, they want to cram as much template-based blunt force trauma into an hour of outreach as they can.

Link Building Outreach Etiquette

Focus on the following with every email you send:

• Be Polite – Don’t make demands. Don’t be presumptuous. Don’t insult anyone. Think of yourself as a guest in their home.
• Be Professional – If you think it’s TMI, it’s TMI. Remember the last fun conversation you had with your boss, your grandmother or your child’s teacher? Have fun and be yourself, but carry yourself in that same way.
• Don’t Talk Down – People are smart. Webmasters are smart. Don’t talk down to them or condescend, even when you think you know more than they do.
• Don’t Beg or be Forceful – Just don’t do it. You can’t strong-arm anyone over the internet. At least not until Apple releases the iPunch in 2018.
• Keep it Short – Say what you need to say and get out. Respect their time. Save your lengthy correspondence or love letters for someone else.
• Talk About Them – Don’t just talk about yourself. Find a popular post on their site and tell them why you liked it. Find one you like. Don’t lie.
• Don’t Be a Creep – This is self-explanatory. Don’t be a creep or a stalker.
• Accept Rejection Gracefully – You’re going to hear “no” sometimes. It is the webmaster’s right to reject you. It’s their site, after all. Accept it and move on.

Practical Applications for Link Building Outreach

Every website is different, every business is different, and every industry is different– but this should give you a good starting point.

Broken Links and Site Issues – No one likes having a broken website. Finding broken links and site issues is one of the easiest ways you can help a webmaster. It’s not hard, either.

You can use this Chrome Extension or run their site through a tool like URL Profiler. You can check for broken links, SEO errors, code errors or just anything that looks out of place. Not every site has errors, though, so sometimes you must move onto something more creative.

Logo or Banner Redesign –  We got this idea from Jon Cooper’s link building strategies post several years ago, and it works like a charm. If your target site is great but needs to update its logo or even a banner, offer one up. If you’re a designer or have an in-house designer, go to town. If not, you can always try finding a designer on Fiverr.

“Let Me Know” – Many blog posts have a “let me know” or “if anyone knows” question in them. Essentially, the content creator couldn’t find an answer to their question and is looking for audience input. Offer them a good answer. You can always do a Google search for ‘(keyword) “let me know”’ or something similar if you can’t find any such opportunities from eyeballing a website.

Answer Questions – Similarly, many blog posts end with a question to the reader. This encourages comments. Answer the question through a comment, a tweet or even an email. If you answer in an email, it might spark a conversation.

Feedback and Conversation – Webmasters and bloggers are often creative people, and creative people love feedback on their work. Sometimes, they want that more than any code or broken link fix you could ever provide.

If you have feedback, make sure it’s genuine and make sure it can lead into a conversation. Tell them why a certain piece of work is good and what it meant to you. Kind words are sometimes the best kind of help.

Social Shares – This one is easy. If you like something they wrote, share it on Twitter or Facebook. You’re helping them promote their content. It’s a great lead-in to a conversation, too. “Hey, (Webmaster), I just want to let you know that I enjoyed your blog post about (blog post title) and tweeted it out to my followers the other day. Keep up the great work”. Wait until they reply and then you can let them know about your resource or ask for their feedback.

Lend an Image – If you notice a target site has a severe lack of images or uses bad stock photos, offer to give them a few of your own. If you take photos of your product, projects or service regularly, offer some images. If a blogger doesn’t have many images, offer them a few images from your own stock photo account or find great free stock photos for them.

Hacked Link Building – This one requires more work, but if you follow through, you’ll have a very grateful webmaster on your hand. Giuseppe Pastore wrote all about it here, but it entails finding sites inadvertently linking to hacked or spammy sites.

Add to a “How-To” Post – How-to posts are super popular and for good reason. When prospecting for relevant links in your niche, you’ll naturally know something about the webmaster’s subject. If you can think of an item they left off of their how-to or list post, write up an addition and send it over.

So, now you know the secret, and you know how to apply it. You’ll come up with your own ideas too, I’m sure.

What are the Ethical Ways to Buy Links?

Google hates paid links and that’s unchangeable, given that they are keeping the search game fair to return quality-driven results to Google users worldwide. Buying links is a direct violation to Google’s webmaster guidelines – particularly manipulative links that intend to pass Pagerank and improve search rankings through unnatural anchor texts usage.

However, there are still other risk-free link buying techniques that are patterned to indirectly acquire links through the same form of incentives – cash.

Sponsored Reviews or Interviews

Using this approach to your own link building campaign can positively generate high quality contextual links as well as possible leads, since this method is focused on producing external content that are strictly about the products/services that your website is offering.

One strategic key to increase the success rate of these requests is to first build relationships with your targeted bloggers by engaging them through series of interactions (following their blog, leaving remarkable comments, emails, social networking, etc…) before sending the actual request for review.

Sending requests to bloggers to do an interview of you or your client can also build quality in-content links and can also help develop your site’s brand.

It is proven to be a powerful avenue in promoting your products or services since the content’s focal point is your business and its industry, where you usually have control over the links that will be used in the content. Laying the right incentives in play – such as free samples or direct payments – can deeply enhance the chances of having your proposition approved.

In choosing bloggers for your campaign:

• The blog should have good amount of traffic (measurable through Alexa traffic rank or Compete.com).
• Offers quality content relevant to your industry.
• Have a strong brand and loyal followers or subscribers.
• Good Pagerank (3 or above) and domain authority

Buy Links from Top Bloggers

Invite influential bloggers in your industry to publish content on your site, under their names, to tremendously improve the site’s linkability. The approach for this method works pretty much the same as the abovementioned method, though the only difference is that the paid content will be posted on your site.

Requesting for this kind of deal may cost you $100 or more for each article, but its returns are presumably advantageous.  How can it benefit your site?

• Quality content added to your site, from industry experts, which is very much capable of attracting natural referential links.
• Puts emphasis to your site/brand’s importance, as popular bloggers are contributing to it.
• Generates viral effect/traffic and also capable of absorbing the guest bloggers’ followers, given that they’ll be sharing their contributed content through their own networks, and this can in turn increase the chances of acquiring more natural links directing to that content.
• The high quality guest content will most likely stay on the web for a long time, as long as your site is live actually, which means it can continuously bring organic traffic to your site as it naturally gains its own search rankings.
• Allows you to build relationships with influential bloggers in your field, which can eventually lead to building more relationships with other big players in your niche.

Now, thinking about it, what could be the possible effects of having Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Todd Malicoat and Aaron Wall send over a guest post here on my blog, all in a week’s work, interesting, though it sure that it’s going to be real expensive.

Organize and Sponsor Contests

Contests are in no doubt to be one of the most effective methods in getting the attention of people in your industry, particularly if there are high returns waiting for those who will participate.

It’s easy to bait contextual links through each stage of this method, since organizers and sponsors are usually cited from the promotion outreach/process of the contest, to the actual contest itself as well as the phase in which the winners of the contests are announced.

Participants are mostly required to link out to sponsors (usually part of the contest’s criteria), through blogging, social sharing and their contest entry.

Tips to organizing your own blogging contest:

• Set out criteria on how winners will be chosen (could be the amount of traffic accumulated by the entry if the guest blog is posted in your site, links acquired, user comments, social shares, quality of information, etc…)
• The theme of the contest should be highly entertaining and interesting to make the most out of the traffic that you’ll be getting.
• Specify the mechanics of the contest (possibly how you will benefit from the contest – by allowing participants to promote the contest as well as their entry).
• Offer valuable prizes as it’s one of the reasons why bloggers will participate, besides the link, brand exposure and traffic.
• Find other entities in your industry who’ll be interested to sponsor your contest and explain to them how they will benefit from it.

In finding blog contests to sponsor:

• Contact both popular and upcoming quality blogs in your sphere and try to ask them if they’ll be interested to host or organize a contest that you’ll be sponsoring.
• It’s best to choose blogs that have their unique identity in the industry, socially active, receives a good amount of traffic, have high Pagerank (not necessarily), and have high domain authority.

A blogging contest is always a win/win/win situation, as it helps the sponsors acquire natural and high-quality links, hosting blog receives high-quality content to be published on their site and generate organic traffic, and participants are able to absorb link juice, traffic and improve brand awareness through the exposure that they’ll be getting from the hosting blog.

Buy Social Ads

With the roaring effects that social media are now capable of doing to increase a content/site’s linkability as well as visibility through search – since search algorithms are now using social signals as a ranking factor – obviously indicates that this method of modern marketing shouldn’t be ignored.

Dealing with social signals can practically lift linking opportunities if done appropriately, in which you have to address the signals to the right targets from the right channels.

Read Also: Analytical Insights on how to Maximize Website Revenue Stream

Though it’s imperative to present a highly linkable material to make the most out of the viral traffic that you will be getting from these channels (not your homepage, if it’s not that interesting). Below are some of the ways where you can easily target linkers in your industry:

• Use Sponsored Tweets or BuySellAds to promote your linkable content via authority and influential Twitter users in your niche. The authority of the user plays a big role in garnering higher search ranking positions, and their influence will help get your content in front of a larger audience as their followers retweet and spread the link over their networks. You can use Klout to measure a user’s authority/influence over the web, which can help you decide in choosing your candidates.
• Advertising your linkbait content through Facebook Ads, wherein you have full control of which class of people should the ad will be displaying.
• Using StumbleUpon’s Ads to get your linkable content in front of their 8 million users (probably hundreds of thousands that are really into your niche).

Invest in External Projects

Expand the reach of your business’ online presence as well as internal stream of profits through external business investments. Logically, these investments would result to links, at first, but seeing its long term returns can get your business more profitable along the process. Here are some ideas on how you can acquire links through online investments.

• Investing on Freelancers. Offer business proposals to talented freelance web designers, developers or writers, where you can fund the operation of the business (building free or paid themes, plugins or widgets, applications, software, products or services related to your industry). This model of link marketing will make you land an about page co-founder link to your site. You can as well generate links from the output of these projects.
• Invest on creating your own conference. Conferences naturally attract links, and organizing a small one locally will not take too much time from you, especially if you can find people to take over its operations.
• Establish your own blog awards. I personally think that this online business model is a lucrative and a very linkable one, seeing as individuals and businesses are paying just to win or be nominated on any online award giving bodies. You can choose to collaborate with other companies or bloggers to make this approach go viral.
• Cultivate bloggers. Encourage and fund your staff in setting up their own blogs to generate more contextual links.
• Purchase websites. Buy websites that are topically relevant to yours and you can choose to use these sites to contextually link to your site’s important pages or to 301 redirect the entire site to your domain to acquire all its incoming links. It’s important to first see the link profile of any prospected site before acquiring it. You also have the option of hiring external bloggers to continuously operate and own the blog.

Lastly

Link building can be a laborious process, and it’s estimated to take eight hours on average to secure one substantial link. Many small businesses also don’t have the resources to generate regular on-site or blog content, which further hinders link building success.

Fortunately, there are agencies and specialists that offer this service as part of their SEO marketing and public relations efforts. These professionals make it their full-time job to secure links for their clients from noteworthy websites.

When business owners feel like they’re taking all the necessary steps with their SEO and still not reaching their website’s full potential, link building can often be that added boost they desperately need. All at once, it can elevate brand authority and help a website soar in the search rankings.