As we have seen in the second chapter, the authority of a website depends directly on the number of pages that link it, the authority of these pages, the level of thematic similarity between your website and the one that links you and other factors related to The content that surrounds the link, such as its anchor text (link text), the words that surround it and even the position that the link occupies within the content.
That is why much of the SEO work, in addition to optimizing the web and its content, is the generation of links in order to increase the authority of the web and improve its positioning. This practice is known as link building.
In this chapter, we will focus on how Google values links, why people link to other websites, and the main ways to get a link, including the main link-building tactics.
Link to How Google Interprets
When the Google robot crawls a website, it pays special attention to the links it finds and "follows" them by going to the linked page and analyzing it as well. Links work like votes in an election, broadly speaking, if you have more links, you have a better chance of getting out first. If you expand this information, review chapter 2: Factors of web positioning.
It is necessary to know that there are many factors that determine the value of a link, many hypotheses about points that could influence and some discrepancies between professionals. The main most important points are:
- Relevance: A link to a page that talks about a topic similar to yours gives you more value than another that talks about a totally different topic. For example, if the most reputable page in the world on chocolate cookies links to your website about desserts, it will be much more valuable than a link from a generalist newspaper, even if it has more authority.
- Authority: A web page to which 100 other links link will add more value through a link than another to which only 10 links, if we consider that the average quality of each link was the same in both cases. Thus, a link from a page with authority is much more valuable than another from a page without it.
- Trust: Google chooses some websites that it considers to be the most trustworthy (institutions, universities, government ...) for its robots to initiate a search. These pages have a maximum trust value. Google follows the links on these pages and discovers new websites. The more intermediate websites there are between the initials and you, the less trust Google will give you.
For all this, it is more important to generate links from pages with great authority, relevance and trust than any other type of filter except built links.
How Has Link Building Changed?
A few years ago, link building was carried out automatically by means of signatures with links in forums, bots that randomly commented on publications by inserting links, exchange of links, and a series of easily scalable techniques that today do not give results. The latest updates to the search engine (especially the Google Penguin versions ) have focused on better identifying these unnatural patterns and making them not only do not transmit value but also penalize the SEO of a website.
The speed with which Google changes forces us to consider not only what Google values now, but what points work now but may be penalized in the coming months. In general, it will help us to put ourselves in the shoes of Google: Their business is to offer their users the best possible result for a question, the links are only a way to identify it, so we have to start by creating content that is really the best answer. to that question before looking for shortcuts.
If you really succeed, that content will receive links without effort, and if the page is optimized you will start to climb positions in Google.
Why do we link?
First of all, it is important to understand the psychology behind a link. Links are not usually born from desperate attempts to get them, rather, the big pages that have the largest link profiles do not usually get them actively: people just link to them.
Passive link generation is when your page receives links without an external effort to obtain them. But why would they link you?
- You are relevant: This happens to brands like Coca Cola, Sony, or those that are very relevant in some niches. Only being relevant in other channels is an advantage online.
- You are an authority : If you are a reference within your industry, you will get links from people who link to you to complement a content.
- You add value : People put links in articles, news or portals to offer additional value or complementary information. If with what you do you offer a value that complements the content of others or generates new / interesting information such as news, they will link you.
- They appreciate you : It may be your friend or someone who falls in love with your content. In either case, this relationship can lead to a link.
- Partners and partners : When two people collaborate and therefore the improvement of one is good for the other, it is normal that they link with each other, since this can improve the SEO of both domains. EYE! Do not force this technique, the exchange of links is penalized by Google.
- Others : It may happen that people link you because they hate you , because they want to criticize you or because you are relevant for a negative reason . This is not a type of link that will benefit you in the long term, because it damages your brand and because in the medium term Google could detect that it contains a negative sentiment.
In short, generate relationships, make those who see your content fall in love, add value, become an authority and, finally, get relevant. This is the way to a page with a great link profile that generates SEO traffic.
Link building tactics
There are specific link building tactics that can help us to systematize our task and generate greater profit for a website, but always starting from a main idea: think about the user, generate good content with the keywords in mind and share it.
- Through content: This technique condenses what we call passive linking in the previous point. It consists of improving your content in a way that adds value and is a source that everyone wants to link to. A variant, link baiting, involves generating concrete content in order to generate attention and links. Within the baiting link, we would include the creation of infographics, controversial websites, reports, and studies, etc.
- Through contacts: A person or organization has a series of relationships that it has built over time. The more connected you are, the more relationships you will have established. And these relationships can be transferred to the online world in the form of links. For example, it is very possible that among your family or closest friends, several have blogs or other types of web. It is normal for company employees to have their own page. It is normal for distributors, customers, and people who serve an organization to have an online presence. Therefore, it is important that an SEO is well connected and always has a good number of contacts in the online sector. Do not see it as asking for a favor, but as a way to add value with your website to another page.
For example , in the case of a restaurant, you could try to get your trusted staff and customers with websites to link to you from them. Suppliers and associates could be contacted to request that they put us in the sections of their websites dedicated to this. We could even go to blogger conventions to invite top bloggers to eat for free or with an offer to get mentions and links.
- Directories and social repositories : All the pages where you can link to your page through registration or registration. This is one of the most dangerous points in SEO, as there are hundreds of free resources on the web, but they are potentially harmful to our page. There are good and bad directories and repositories; The maxim to know if they are positive for us is: Will it bring me traffic from people who click on the link? In general, a link that generates this type of traffic will be positive, if you want SEO value, focus on the following points:
- Niche directories: Niche directories are those that try to provide information about a very specific sector. For example, technology blog directories or technology company directories. Here you can even put lists or compilations that fulfill the same function on pages or blogs, for example: "The best marketing agencies in Spain." Here we could try to communicate with the author to justify why he should include ours or try to reach him by other means.
- Local directories : These are especially relevant for local businesses like restaurants, bars, driving schools, etc. Not only do they add great value, but Google reviews many of them to verify information about your business, and the activity and comments that are generated in them have a great influence.
Some examples of local directories:
- Google Plus Local
- Yelp!
- 11870
- Yellow Pages
- Tripadvisor
- Exit.com
- Social Networks: Most Social Networks allow you to generate a link to your website, and most are indexable for Google. This does not mean that you have to create a profile on each network that exists, but rather that you make sure that you take advantage of your social presence in this sense in the channels that make sense to use for your website.Apart from that, Google+ has a huge effect on the positioning of a website as shown by the latest studies
However, do not forget that the main SEO benefit of social networks is indirect: The dissemination of your content makes it easier for it to receive links, so Social Networks are in a way a passive link-building tool, and a complement to the active .
- Content aggregators and social bookmarks: These are pages that are dedicated to trying to curate the contents of the web, either through user voting, popularity in social networks or other factors. Really popular sites are interesting, not because of the SEO benefit they can bring you, but because they can generate traffic peaks of thousands of visits from the public that you can build loyalty. You have more information in this post about alternative channels to viralize your content.
- Guest Blogging: The guest blogging or guest blogger is a technique by which a blogger writes in an external blog in exchange for popularity, and sometimes, to be able to include links to other pages. If you have a blog or your page includes one, this technique can be one of the most effective as long as you take it seriously. It is necessary that you add real value to the blogs you write in, only in that way will you get your post to spread and get a greater reach for the story you want to tell.
Tip: Reserve your best posts for the blogs where you are going to get the most visibility, not yours. If you are going to include links, try not to appear to be wedged in with a shoehorn , but rather links to some valuable own resource or to websites that complement the reading. Guest blogging cannot be a form of link spam , and putting a link in the bio is not as effective and is susceptible to being detected by algorithms.
- Sponsorships: The sponsorships of NGOs, popular initiatives, or the celebration of events to take care of Corporate Social Responsibility can be a great way to generate links and contribute to the improvement of your environment. People love linking to charities or philanthropic events , so partnering with them is also good on an SEO level. Make sure that if you are carrying out actions of this type you can give it an SEO return, either by creating your own page if it is something from your own organization or website or by ensuring that the collaboration also materializes in a link .
- Broken Link Building: Broken link building consists of identifying broken links on third-party web pages and recommending to the webmaster a series of options that include pages from our own web. To do this, we look for links on pages, niches, and themes similar to ours, we identify possible links and we get in touch with webmasters. It should be noted that it is one of the most scalable and effective tactics today,
Conclusion
In short, although link building is one of the legs of SEO, it is not something that can be done separately from the company: you need content, be relevant, make contacts. If all this is done correctly, and also viewed from an SEO perspective, you can achieve wonders. However, an SEO team will never be able to correctly improve the positioning of a page without on-page changes and without fierce support from communication and marketing.
Even the best SEOs are not wizards. They cannot put a website in the first position of the search engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of pages that offer basically the same thing and provide basically the same information. If they could, you'd see a ton of millionaire SEOs.