Since this is a beginner’s  link building guide, we will start from the very basics.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your own website.

The purpose of link building is to boost the “authority” of your pages in the eyes of Google so that these pages rank higher and bring more search traffic.

Is it possibile to get backlinks without paying for them?

Yes!

1. Create something notable (and therefore worthy of a link)
2. Show it to people who own websites (and thus can link to it)

Why is link building important?

According to Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. So if you want your website’s pages to rank high in search, you will almost certainly need links.

Google (and other search engines) look at links from other sites as “votes.” These votes help them identify which page on a given topic (out of thousands of similar ones) deserves to be ranked at the very top of the search results.

As a general rule, pages with more backlinks tend to rank higher in search results. Our own study of one billion pages found a strong positive correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and how much search traffic it gets from Google:

Links aren’t the answer to everything

From this introductory article, it may seem that in order to rank #1 in Google, all you need to do is build more backlinks than the pages that are currently ranking there.

And while that is true to a certain extent, in reality, things are a little more complex than that.

Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm, and while backlinks are one of the most important factors, they’re not the only ones you should be looking at.

SEO Google Ranking Factors

Recommended reading: Successful SEO strategies;

The links are not equal, and a high-quality and relevant link may be more powerful than ten low-quality links.

So if you build lots of links to your page, and it still ranks poorly, don’t blame this guide for misleading you. It may be because your links are of low-quality, and aren’t even indexed by Google.

Also, don’t forget to look into other ranking factors that might prevent you from ranking well.

What Makes a Link of High Quality?

Backlink quality needs to be evaluated both on an individual level and as part of your site’s overall backlink profile.

There are 5 criteria by which to evaluate a backlink and/or link profile:

Anchor text relevance

Linking domain quality and relevance

IP address

Link location

Traffic

Unfortunately, there are no easy and fast ways to evaluate each link. You have to look at the quality of each link individually and in the context of your site’s overall link profile.

Anchor text relevance

Anchor text refers to the clickable text of a link — usually, it’s blue and underlined. When Google crawls a web page and finds a link, it uses the anchor text as a way to determine what’s the page about.

The anchor should include a target keyword, but it should also be relevant to the content of the linking page.

Finally, you must be aware that having too many similar anchor links, or just anchor links, is dangerous for your site.

Sites that have been around for a while will naturally acquire links with a wide variety of anchor texts, but most backlinks should be non-anchored.

When analyzing the quality of your overall link portfolio, take a close look at the anchor text and text surrounding the links.

Linking page and domain relevance and quality

We briefly lit this in the section above, but the relevance of the page is also very important when determining the quality of the link.

Links from high-quality pages with content related to your page is going to pass a lot more link juice than a reference from an irrelevant and lower quality page.

IP address

If too many of your links come from the same IP address, that’s not a good sign.

You should also look out for IP addresses from spam-heavy countries like Russia, China, or India if your business doesn’t operate there.

Links’ location

Each link on the page passes link juice, but not all links on the page are of the same value.

Depending on where the link appears on the page, determines how valuable it is for SEO purposes.

The basic webpage has four sections:

– Title

– Footer

– Sidebar

– Body content

Each of these sections can, and often do, contain external links that pass link juice to their destination page.

However, only links that appear in the body’s content should be considered valuable for your SEO and safe from changes in Google algorithms.

Traffic

This is an easy thing to forget when evaluating the SEO value of a link, but remember that the backlinks also send referral traffic to your site.

This is not critical for SEO, but contributes to your overall marketing performance.

If you need quality links for a fair price, we recommend reaching out to crowdmark.net. It is one of the best forum link building agencies, and they have really attractive offers.

Let’s wrap this up

In this blog post, we’ve only scratched the surface of what link building entails.

However, we’re hoping that our guide has cleared up a lot of things for you and answered most of the burning questions you had about link building.

I want to finish off by saying that link building is a critical part of any SEO campaign, but getting backlinks for a site that isn’t user-friendly and has technical errors will only speed up its death.