Link building helps you climb the search results. It’s an important part of search engine optimization. Of course, you shouldn’t forget that website technical aspects and high-quality content are also important. But link building definitely helps you influence your position in the search results.
Link building involves gathering relevant, high-quality links from other websites to your own. These links (also known as backlinks) influence your ranking in search results and how Google views your website.
You can think of link building as a popularity contest. The more websites that link to yours, the more popular you are. After all, why would anyone want to link to your website if it isn’t any good?
When you have many relevant and high-quality links pointing to your website, Google considers your website to be trustworthy and popular. This results in a higher ranking in search results. Your authority is one of the three components of SEO.
The relevant, high-quality links you acquire ensure that Google views your website as popular and trustworthy. But why is that? Every link has a certain value.
This link value consists of the domain value and the page value. The link value increases as the website has been online for a longer period of time and as you focus on search engine optimization.
When a link points to your website, some of that value is passed on to your website. This value partly determines how popular and trustworthy your website is and what position you receive in the search results.
Now that you know that high-quality links strengthen your position in search results and can even improve it, it’s important to get links. But how do you get links?
Google says that if you write good content, other websites will naturally link to you.
Unfortunately, the reality is different, because not everyone sees your content. There are several ways to get links from other websites to yours.
Do you have extensive knowledge of the industry you work in and are you always up to date on the latest developments? If so, guest blogging is definitely for you. Reach out to relevant websites in your industry and ask if you can post a guest blog. This way, you’ll naturally earn links to your website.
Guest posts are also published on our own website, such as the guest post on reducing your bounce rate by guest blogger Gijs Wierda. The benefit for you is a backlink from a high-quality website. The benefit for the website where your post is published is relevant and valuable content.
A link exchange is simply the exchange of a link. Do you know a fellow business owner? Ask him if he’d be willing to post a link to your business.
Avid link builders, like us, even have an entire network for acquiring links. As an SEO agency, this is one of the ways we efficiently acquire relevant and valuable links for our clients. Just make sure you get links from legitimate websites. Avoid links on spammy websites—they’ll hurt your Google rankings.
Do you remember the start pages? You’ve probably used them at some point in the past. These days, these directory websites—such as startpagina.nl and startkabel.nl—are still frequently used for link building.
The old pages have built up a lot of domain value. Placing a link on these homepages passes that value on to your website. Keep in mind that these homepages must be relevant.
If you plan to use homepage services, it’s important to make sure you use reliable ones. There are dozens of homepage services that offer no value and will actually harm your backlink profile.
Share your content on social media channels as well. This is an easy way to build authority for your website. When you share interesting content, there’s a good chance that others will share it too.
Shared content influences Google rankings. Google wants what’s best for its users, and content that’s shared frequently must be good content.
It’s not always easy to get backlinks. Although Google says that paid links are penalized, this might be a good option for you. Many authoritative websites allow you to purchase an advertorial or pay a fee for a backlink in an existing article.
These are relevant links that often have high domain authority, which is a positive signal for Google. Be careful with this, though. If you buy a lot of links all at once, Google will penalize you.
Finally, it’s also possible to get links through online business directories, such as openingstijden.nl, Yelp, and Allebedrijvenin. This is an easy way to get links to your website quickly and for free.
Can’t get enough of these tips? We have even more tips for getting backlinks for your website.
The methods for acquiring links listed above aren’t always entirely risk-free. The best way to acquire links is still the organic approach. This means you acquire links that are relevant and high-quality because others voluntarily link to your website. Google wants to see a natural link profile. If you don’t create a natural link profile, you run the risk of receiving a penalty.
A natural link profile consists mostly of high-quality links and, to a lesser extent, lower-quality links. In addition, the links in a natural link profile are acquired over an extended period of time.
It looks unnatural to Google if you acquire a large number of links in a short period of time. This natural link profile has become more important than ever since the Penguin update. Since this update, link-building activities have been monitored in real time to combat black-hat SEO.
With black hat SEO, you use various methods to climb the search results as quickly as possible, but you don’t follow Google’s guidelines. In other words, you don’t take the user experience into account; instead, you focus entirely on climbing the rankings.
One example of this is blog networks, which are part of link building. With blog networks, you create various blogs with the goal of linking from them to the website you want to rank higher for in search results.
Google definitely doesn’t want this. If Google finds out that you’re cheating, you’ll receive a penalty. So, create a natural and valuable link profile for your website. Produce high-quality content and make sure other websites want to link to you. Google looks at how your website acquires links, whether the links are relevant, and over what period of time they were acquired.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive for results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has built an extensive body of knowledge spanning technical SEO to complex site migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help businesses achieve sustainable online growth.
His academic background in information science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in natural language processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about visibility in search engines, it’s about sharing knowledge and guiding businesses toward sustainable online success. That mission also led him to write a Dutch book about GEO.