Link building in simple words

Link building is one of the methods of website promotion in search engine results (especially Google). It consists in getting links to the promoted project from other sites. Speaking very roughly and simply, the more links you can get to your project, the better. However, nothing is simple, so we’ve prepared some useful information about link building.

Types of links

Links can be divided according to many parameters, but most often SEO specialists distinguish the following types:

• • Link attribute (nofollow, sponsored, UGC). There are also the so-called ‘dofollow’ links that are the main value in SEO. Typically, this value is assigned to the default link, i.e. if the link has no other attribute, it is dofollow.

• • Location of the link on the page (main content, sidebar, footer, comments, etc.). Links from the main content are most valued.

• • Crowd links (crowd marketing). In most cases, this is banal spam on forums and comments – wherever you can leave a link for free (most often they come with nofollow or UGC attributes).

• • Anchor, non-anchor, diluted. Anchor links are specially monitored, and they try to put them on the most powerful resources from a link point of view. Non-anchor sites, as a rule, go to the crowd and weak sites to dilute the link profile.

According to Google, if the project deserves to be linked to other sites, links will naturally appear – someone will put links on our project simply because it is useful for visitors. For example, forums often leave links to some goods or services and discuss them, or news sites often link to the source of information.

But in practice, it is difficult to imagine that other sites will immediately start linking to a newly created online store. At best, it will take years, at worst, no one will know about our online store.

Therefore, they resort to link building, the essence of which boils down to the fact that where possible – we get links for free, where it is impossible – we buy. This is done both directly by webmasters (so-called outreach), and through specialized services (exchanges). When planning SEO website promotion, sooner or later most commercial projects resort to link building.

How to choose a site to link to

Ideally, the link donor site should be ranked according to the pool of requests we are interested in. But on the other hand, it turns out that it will be our competitor, who is unlikely to want to link to us. After all, it is difficult to imagine that one online store will put a link to its competitor. The way out in this situation is to look for related (often informational) sites of the desired subject and try to negotiate with them (if they are not represented in the link exchanges).

Thus, the main parameter is the theme. However, in practice, it is often impossible to find ideally suitable thematic donor sites and get a link from them. Therefore, sites of related topics and general projects are chosen, but with one condition – the material from which the link will be placed must be thematic of our promoted project. This greatly expands and simplifies searches and website promotion and becomes more efficient.