Beginners Guide to Link Building in 2022

Link building is how you get other sites to link to yours. These links are votes of confidence that indicate an elevated level of trust in your website’s content and authority.

Search engines have used links as a primary factor for ranking websites since their inception; hyperlinks (link building) from one site to another provide a clear path for search engine bots, allowing them to swiftly crawl through pages and gauge the relevancy and popularity of sites across the web.

A multitude of factors contributes to how links can impact your rankings, such as:

• How many other sites link back to your domain (domain authority)?
• How authoritative are those sites themselves (link quality)?
• How recently were these links created (link freshness)?

Why do we need to build links?

Many people think of link building only in terms of SEO. While that is correct, there are many other areas where building links can help your business and website.

1. Google’s search engine relies on links to index and rank web pages. The more high-quality links your site has, the better your chances of ranking well in search results.
2. Links from trusted resources (like an established news outlet or government institution) help improve your rankings. In contrast, links from untrustworthy sources (like a link farm) can hurt your page’s position in search results.
3. When someone clicks a link and arrives at your website, it tells Google that readers find value in what you have to say—which is why website owners who want to rank well need to focus on building high-quality links from relevant sources.
4. Links also help you connect with other businesses and websites in your industry, resulting in valuable collaborations for marketing campaigns and projects down the road.
5. Links strengthen your brand awareness and credibility online. Earning backlinks from top news outlets sets an important precedent for other people who may come across those stories later. 

How should I approach link building?

Before you can begin, you’ll need to figure out where exactly to start. To do that, identify which competitors are also trying to rank for your target keywords. Then, find out what websites link back to them. 

You might even want to check out other sites that aren’t direct competitors but still cover the same topics as your site to get a sense of who’s already linking to similar content. Finally, investigate your existing contacts and see if there’s anyone or any site you could reach out to about featuring your content or letting you write for them. 

Here are some valuable tips:

• Focus on quality over quantity. A single high-quality website linking to your website is much more valuable than several low-quality websites.

• Don’t buy links. Overall, buying links for search engine optimization purposes is a bad idea since it’s against Google’s guidelines and may even violate laws in some countries (like the US). 

• Don’t overdo it. While building links can boost your search rankings, nobody knows exactly how many backlinks Google considers unnatural—and once they’ve decided that you’re trying to cheat their search algorithms by including too many backlinks in an article (or cross-linking between multiple sites), they can penalize all your sites at once.

• One way to build links is with broken-link building: finding and fixing broken links on other people’s websites to be more likely to cite your page as a source when they update their site’s information. 

What common mistakes should I avoid?

The most common mistakes we see with link building are:

• Duplicate content—If you want your website to rank, you need to have unique and engaging content. Copying content directly from other sites is a bad idea for several reasons. It can get you in trouble with search engines that will penalize your site, and it won’t provide any value for readers.

• Unsecure websites—Google won’t show HTTPS pages as prominently in their search results as they will secure sites with an SSL certificate. If you’re trying to build links back to a website that doesn’t have an SSL certificate, it will not work very well for SEO purposes.

• Broken links—If the links you’re trying to build go nowhere or lead people somewhere they don’t want to be (like a 404 page), they aren’t going to be all that helpful in helping boost your rankings on Google or other search engines like Bing.

• Too many links in one post—You may think having lots of links back from diverse sources will help with SEO, but Google doesn’t like this practice either because it looks spammy and unnatural. It’s better if each post only has one or two relevant outbound links pointing elsewhere online, so people don’t get overwhelmed by all of them at once!

• Inferior quality links—Google determines whether a link should count towards ranking by looking at how many other sites already point there, too (known as “link juice”). If there are more than ten different domains linking back to yours, it might be time to prune! This can mean:

• Removing deadweight like old blogs, which no longer exist anymore but still point outbound. 

• Deleting unnecessary redirection scripts which aren’t doing anything except slowing down the loading time of your web pages; or

• Narrowing down the number of URLs being used internally within a single article so only those most relevant remain visible externally (and thus counted).

Conclusion

If you want your site to rank well and attract more traffic, you must try to get links from other sites with good rankings. If your site is rated high on the first page in Google, then it means that it has valuable content and is likely to attract more visitors and people who would like to visit the site. In addition, this will help you earn more money through advertising revenue.

You should also make sure that you consider all aspects of SEO when building links. Link building takes time and effort, so you must keep trying until you find a solution for your website’s problems. If you cannot solve them right away, then do not worry too much about them because there are always new strategies available for getting backlinks from other sites with high rankings.