Do you have a blog or a website? You work hard every day to optimize your pages and be at the top of search results, yet you can't seem to achieve the desired outcomes. Have you ever wondered why?
An important factor by which Google evaluates you is link building: the activity that allows you to receive links from other websites to increase your significance on the web.
What exactly does link building mean?
Characteristics, strategies, and examples of link building
Link building is defined as an off-site factor, meaning it's an activity that doesn’t optimize the site through complex internal procedures but does so thanks to work done outside of the site itself.
Let's understand this concept better:
- on-site factors are all those activities that serve to optimize the site internally within its structure such as lightening and renaming images, giving relevance to domain characteristics, managing internal links, and maintaining a correct structure in the site’s pages
- off-site factors such as social media reputation and interactions with one's posts, and especially link building
Engaging in link building means to increase your page rank (the authority of your page) through the acquisition of "good" links that talk about you.
In technical terms, backlinks are those links present on other sites, related and discussing similar topics to yours, that clearly point to a specific page on your site.
The question arises naturally.
How to increase backlinks and optimize your web page?
Link building strategy: link earning
Prior to the Penguin update (Google periodically updates its algorithm which scans all web pages and assigns them a value), link building consisted of opaque and forced strategies, like reciprocal linking and paid links, often malicious.
Since 2012, things have changed and it is now clear that a forced activity of creating links that lead to your website is detrimental.
Now the focus is on link earning, a natural increase in links pointing to your website.
IMPORTANT: links coming from portals equal or superior in authority will be very valuable, whereas backlinks from unrelated and low-quality sites will penalize you in the eyes of Google.
Do not add or remove many links all at once. Google would believe that you are engaging in a forced and improper practice and would penalize you!
Better a few very good links than many of poor quality!
To be considered a backlink, the href, which is the HTML code inserted when linking a page, must have the attribute rel=dofollow. However, if the attribute is rel=nofollow, the link will not be scanned by Google.
Examples of link building: guest posting and infographics
There are clean and highly effective techniques to increase the inbound links to your website.
Sharing your article on social media is now important, for example, but there are two other practices that especially in the beginning, allow you to do a proper link building.
We're talking about guest posting and infographics.
- Doing guest posting: a guest post is nothing more than an article written by you but on a different site from yours, obviously related to your content. It's kind of an exchange of information (NOT LINKS!) between you who provide your knowledge and the host site that offers its significance on the web. Usually, the site will allow you to insert a link that will lead to your blog, thus creating an effective and high-quality backlink.
- The infographics: we are talking about those images that develop vertically and that, through captivating graphics, allow you to be informed about a specific topic. If well-made, an infographic can be used to create link building. It has become a consolidated practice to include the infographic in a link that redirects to your site (an embed code similar to those of YouTube) so as to allow the use of your content only if a link leading back to your page is included on the page that will use your graphic.
