How can links be used to increase a website’s authority?
What needs to be done so that users can navigate to your website via various links, thereby increasing traffic to your online resource? How justified is their use, and is it worth spending money on them, or is it ineffective?
Let's take a look at what external promotion is, try to understand what needs to be done to increase the number of links, and answer the questions above.
What is “parasitic” SEO? Follow the link to find out how it works in practice.
What is link building, why is it done, and what results can it achieve?
Link building is a set of strategic techniques that help promote a resource by increasing external links. It is used to create a network of links that make a resource more authoritative and attract more visitors to it.
Google looks favorably on websites that are referenced by well-known sources, considering them to be reliable and worthy of high rankings in search results. Ultimately, this approach increases traffic and improves conversion rates.
Many modern specialists involved in website promotion on the Internet have a positive attitude towards link building and actively use it, considering it a key component of SEO.
Link building is very important because search engines evaluate the quality of an Internet resource based on various criteria, including the number of external links to it and their quality. However, it is important to understand whether it is reasonable to expect a natural increase in links or whether this is insufficient and the process needs to be accelerated.
What is link building based on?
Search engines use various algorithms to evaluate websites. They evaluate them based on various criteria, including the relevance of the resources to user queries and their authority. In doing so, they pay attention to the number and quality of external links. If a website contains a link to another resource, this is considered a kind of recommendation on its part.
The number of such “recommendations” directly affects the website's position in the search results.
However, success also depends on other factors, such as the quality of the website's internal optimization, the usefulness of its content, the correctness of its structure, etc. Therefore, link building should not be seen as a unique way to quickly promote a website.
Which links are the most effective?
Links vary in usefulness. Those that lead from authoritative resources are much more useful and significant than the rest. Backlinks from sites that are irrelevant or not well known are unlikely to bring a large number of new users to the resource, so they are of little use.
When evaluating the effectiveness of backlinks, consider the following factors:
- Reputation of the donor resource. The most useful are popular resources that are visited by a large number of users.
- Theme of the donor site. It should be comparable to the theme of your site so that users are interested in it and click on the link.
- Anchor text. The words located next to the link are also important.
- The content of the page to which the link will lead.
Thus, the priority characteristic of any links used to promote an Internet resource is not quantity, but quality. A few links from popular resources will have a greater effect than links from little-known resources with low traffic.
What links do you need: incoming or outgoing?
To make your website look natural to search engines, it needs to contain both types of links – incoming and outgoing.
Inbound links, or backlinks, lead to your resource from other sites and have the greatest impact on ranking. Outbound links, on the other hand, lead from your Internet resource to other sites. Such links demonstrate the integration of the site into the information space. Therefore, they are also useful, but they should be used wisely, referring only to relevant, reliable sources.
The purpose of link building is not just to “pump up” links. It is an essential part of an overall SEO strategy that requires a comprehensive, well-thought-out approach.
Types and features of links
To do link building correctly, it is important to know what types of links there are and be able to distinguish them from each other.
By type of anchor, links are divided into the following types:
- Anchor. The anchor of such links contains a search query or keyword. They help search engines and users get an idea of where the link leads. An example of such links are branded URLs. They use the name of a specific product or organization as the anchor.
- non-anchor. In these links, the anchor text is represented by neutral words, such as the word “here.” In this case, it is important to place high-quality content near the non-anchor link so that it is immediately clear what topic the resource is about when you click on it;
- image links. In this case, the link looks like a picture. After clicking on this image, the user is taken to another page or a new website.
Links can also vary depending on their location. They can be located directly in the text of publications. Such links are the most valuable, as they are clicked on by people who are genuinely interested in a particular topic. Some links are located in the sidebar (side column) or footer (bottom of the site). They bring a small amount of traffic but are well indexed by search engines. Another type of link is those that appear in posts, reviews, and user comments.
Based on the rel attribute, links are divided into Dofollow links, which pass “weight” to the resource and help it rank higher in search results, and Nofollow links, which are used to prevent spam in forums or comments and do not pass “weight.”
Depending on how they are obtained, the following types of links are distinguished:
- Natural, obtained without agreement. Ideal for SEO, but mainly work for large brands.
- Placed on request. Similar to natural links, but placed by agreement.
- User-generated. Placed in forum posts, user reviews, and comments. These links used to be very effective, but many people began to abuse them, causing search engines to become suspicious of them.
The types of links listed above have their own characteristics, so they have different effects on SEO. When link building, it is important to create a high-quality link portfolio, making good use of natural links, contextual mentions of the resource, and correctly composed dofollow URLs.
