What is link building and how do you do it

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

Kevin Ocasio

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It? If you’re going to optimize your website to rank high on Google, outperform your competition, and attract more customers, consider link building .

Definition and Importance of Link Building Link building is an essential SEO strategy where you get other bloggers and site owners to link their high-quality websites to yours.

SEO experts strongly agree that link building leads to long-term success.Click To Tweet Now, you may be wondering why links are so valuable.

Google crawls the web by following links to pages.

More backlinks from quality and relevant sources to your site send Google the message that it deserves to rank .

How to Identify Good Backlinks Not all links that point to your website are equal. What site metrics you need to check to identify whether your backlinks are good or not?

Website Metrics

1. Trust Flow (TF) – A very important metric, Trust Flow is the number that indicates the trustworthiness of a website. The higher TF, the more trusted the site is.

2. Citation Flow (CF) – Citation Flow is a number that reveals the popularity of a backlink without considering its quality. A higher CF does not always mean that a site is a good one.

3. Domain Authority (DA) – This is a score developed by Moz that determines the likelihood of a website to rank on search. Sites with high domain scores have a large number of quality links that point to them.

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It? 4. Page Authority (PA) – This score determines the likelihood of a page to rank on search. According to Moz, there is not necessarily a good or bad PA score. PA is influenced by the number of quality links that link to a page.

Trust Flow and Citation Flow Ratio

Image source: Doseoyourself.com, TF and CF ratio of Moz.com When checking your backlinks using the Majestic tool, pay close attention to a site’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow ratio.

A ratio that’s near 1 or scores that are closer to each other is a good sign. This means that a site has a huge number (Citation Flow) of quality backlinks (Trust Flow).

On the other hand, a high CF but very low TF is a red flag . It implies that although a site has plenty of backlinks, those links are low-quality or spammy.

Looking at the example above, we can tell that Moz.com is a trusted and quality site because the CF and TF scores are close and that the TF is definitely higher.

You shouldn’t be stressing a lot about the difference between a site’s DA and PA when doing link building strategies.

Why? DA and PA, according to Moz, are alike in many ways. Again, both metrics are a measure of ranking power.

DA is the strength of the entire website while PA is to a specific page of that site.

A huge domain and page score make potential links to your site.

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

DA and PA of Problogger.com However, you would want to make sure that a site that links to yours has a high Domain Authority .

This means that the site is established and has potentially ranking individual pages .

Using Moz Open Site Explorer, I can check a site’s DA and PA. In the example above, the results show that Problogger.com (a popular site on blogging) has good DA and PA scores.

How to Get Quality Backlinks (Good Link Building Strategies)

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

Now that you know how your backlinks affect your SEO and what metrics to look for in a backlink, how do you actually build links?

1. Create great content on your blog.

Nothing beats the power of great content to help you rank.

This is the kind of content that is highly interactive, informative, solves readers’ problems, has the right keywords, and uses compelling headlines.

Basically, other top bloggers will want to naturally link to sites that make a good resource to their audience.

2. Guest post follow backlinks.

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Look for websites with good metrics related to your niche that allow you to guest post. To do this, type the keywords on Google search guest post + [your niche] .

You need to check whether a site gives do follow links. A do follow link is a form of link that can potentially boost your ranking.

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

I use the Moz SEO toolbar to find out whether an outbound link (a link that points from one site to another) is a do follow or no follow.

Check the screenshot above. The Moz toolbar shows me that the links in one of Forbes’ articles are do follow (highlighted in blue-green ).

3. Add your site to good web directories.

If you have no idea what a web directory is, it’s a site that allows bloggers to add the URL of their sites.

That way, random visitors can simply use a web directory to access sites they are interested in.

Make sure to list your site on quality niche directories like AllTop. You no longer have to write a guest post, you only need to submit a link to your site.

CommentLuv is a blog commenting plugin that rewards people who leave valuable comments with do follow backlinks to their site.

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It? Do a simple Google search to get access to a list of CommentLuv enabled blogs this year.

If you want bloggers to approve your comments and allow you to leave a link to your site, always follow the best blog commenting practices.

5. Simply ask for backlinks!

A practical way to get good backlinks is to simply ask for them.

You cannot do this without having friends or family members with blogs or building relationships with other bloggers.

Let your connections with sites that are relevant to yours know that you have a piece of content that they might want to link to in one of their posts.

Will You Immediately See Results From Link Building?

Link building is a solid long-term strategy and with that, you cannot expect overnight results.

You cannot say, “Oh, I’ve acquired 50 high-quality backlinks to my blog using the best practices. Maybe I can see results tomorrow or next week!”

Moz advises business owners and SEOs that the focus of link building must be on long terms goals and not immediate wins.

Focus on great marketing and you will reap the results of your efforts in time.

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What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?

What Is Link Building and How Do You Do It?