Briefly explained: Link building is about the targeted acquisition of high-quality links from external websites (backlinks) and the strategic setting of links within your own website (internal links).
Why should I do link building?
Link building is one of the three pillars of search engine optimization (SEO). Most of the time, the term link building just refers to building backlinks. Search engines evaluate the relevance of a website, among other things, by how well it is networked with other websites. It is about the number and type of backlinks.
Because in the eyes of the search engine, a link from one website to another is a sign of good content that offers the user added value. And the more websites linking to your content, the better. This is now first of all spoken in very general terms, of course, there are still a few things to consider here. You can find out more about this below.
There are many strategies for link building, i.e. the targeted construction of backlinks. We have written a step-by-step guide for you on how to use your best content for link building.
Link building also includes the strategic development of internal links . Because links can be a great help when structuring a website. This provides a user experience as the user can easily find relevant information on your site and navigation is made easier as well. Incidentally, the same applies to the crawlers of the search engines. Good internal linking helps them capture, understand, and rank your site in the index.
Of course, we also have detailed articles about internal linking for you: Find out everything you need to know about internal linking . Also learn how to optimize internal linking with XOVI .
The aim of link building is therefore to increase the relevance and thus findability (ranking) of your own website in search engines such as Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo and to make it easier for the user to navigate on your website.
What is a backlink?
Technically, a backlink is a link to your domain from another website.
But why are backlinks created? Backlinks are set when the content of your domain is considered to be of such high quality or useful that it offers the reader added value. Backlinks are therefore to be understood as a recommendation or reference.
Search engines base the placement of your content in the search results on the number and quality (link profile) of these incoming links and their websites, among other things.
The more high-quality backlinks you get from as many foreign websites as possible, the better. Because that means that your content will always be recommended by others. For search engines, this is a crucial criterion for the relevance of your site.
What is PageRank?
Once upon a time, PageRank was THE yardstick for a website’s success.
Page stands for one of the two developers and founders of Google, namely Larry Page. Together with Sergej Brin he developed the Google algorithm at Stanford University and had it patented. That was in 1997. So in the translation, Page has nothing to do with the word “Page”, but with the name of one of the inventors. The PageRank was expressed on a scale of 0 – 10, with 10 being the highest and few websites worldwide had a PR of 10.
PageRank used to be an algorithm that said “the more links a website gets, the better it is”. This is why links spam methods used to work extremely well and for a long time. Only the number of links was evaluated to measure the relevance of a URL.
With a high PageRank, the website was also highly relevant. And a backlink from a site with a high PageRank had a greater impact on one’s ranking than a backlink from a weak site.
With the increasing importance of high-quality content, the PageRank has meanwhile lost massively in importance . Because it reflects the linking structure, but not the content of a website.
What is Linkjuice?
Linkjuice has replaced PageRank. Because: Websites and their links are still evaluated – only the factors for this have become more diverse. And as before, a backlink from a strong site (such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ) can give your domain a stronger ranking boost than that of a smaller website (e.g. a small niche blog). This is referred to as “inheritance” of the strength of one website to another. Or from Linkjuice or Link-Power.
The principle of quantity instead of quality is obsolete. Now, if a page is linked from many other important (and ideally thematically relevant) pages, it will rank higher. So the value of your page increases the more relevant pages link to you.
What are follow and nofollow links?
Links are for clicking. Of course, the search engines then also want to know what is to be seen at the other end. Therefore, all links are automatically “follow” links. Only if you slam the door in the crawler’s face does he turn around. This door is the “nofollow” attribute.
This attribute was introduced by Google in 2005. It is intended to prevent backlinks from forums, comments or advertising content from being used to improve your own ranking.
This also means: A “nofollow” link does not inherit any link juice.
“nofollow” should therefore always be used when the content is not editorial but paid for. This also applies to content that was rewarded with donations (e.g. of the product/service).
This is what a “nofollow” link looks like:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com/” rel=”nofollow” >sensible link text</a>
So you put the rel=”nofollow” attribute after the URL in the HTML of the hyperlink. Some CMS (or related plugins) offer the possibility to simply check “nofollow” in the editor. If this is not the case for you, enter the attribute in the text editor (HTML view) in the link.
This also means for your link profile: not every backlink counts. As soon as one of your backlinks is marked with the “nofollow” attribute, it has no influence on your link building – neither positively nor negatively. Nevertheless, they are part of a natural link profile and as long as the number of “nofollow” backlinks is relatively low, you don’t need to worry about your link profile.
However, a “nofollow” link is not worthless – even if it does not improve your rankings, “nofollow” links can also deliver valuable traffic and thus possible leads and conversions.
Conclusion
Backlinks are a key ranking factor for search engines. Without backlinks, a website can have as good content and user experience as it wants – it will probably not achieve good rankings and thus good findability without high-quality backlinks. Hardly any webmaster can afford to wait for backlinks to form naturally, as Google provides in its guidelines.
Because if you can’t be found, how are other webmasters supposed to find all the valuable content to link to?! Here the cat bites its own tail.
How exactly link building works and which link building strategies are available, you will find out in the following articles.
Strategic internal linking helps structure your website. This increases the readability of your site for humans and machines alike.
You can also focus on particularly important pages (e.g. landing pages) within your website by having many internal links pointing to them and forwarding Linkjuice via internal links in a targeted manner.
Link building is the art
- Build as many high-quality backlinks as possible from as many different sources as possible and break down bad backlinks through persuasion.
- cleverly set up internal link building to promote important pages and facilitate navigation.