Beginners Guide to Link Building in SEO

Links, or hyperlinks, are pieces of text that connect different web pages by clicking on a specific word or phrase, usually underlined, highlighted, or in a different color. They lead users from one webpage to another. 

This article will discuss what link-building is, why it’s important in SEO, and how you can develop a link-building strategy for your website.

What is Link Building?

Link building is an SEO strategy that utilizes hyperlinks to help Google, and search engines like Google, better crawl different sites and understand their content.

Links also help users navigate between different websites and between different pages on the same site.

The main goal of a link-building strategy is to get other websites to link to your website. In other words, increasing the number of backlinks to your site. 

Types of Links?

There are three classifications of links used when creating a link-building strategy. They are internal, external, and backlinks.

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect pages on the same website (this is an example of an internal link). They cross-reference a website’s own content. 

External links are hyperlinks from your website that link to a different website domain. 

Backlinks are hyperlinks from another domain that link back to your website. 

For example, a blog about photography might include links to different cameras that are recommended. Readers can click on the link to be navigated to a different website that sells those cameras. This would be an example of an external link. 

Additionally, the photography blog article might link to a different article on the same website that discusses a similar topic. This would be an example of an internal link.

Lastly, a different website might link to the photography blog article if they think the information discussed would be relevant to their users. This is an example of a backlink. 

Good vs Bad Links

Google identifies link-building best practices in their developer’s guide. They outline some key factors that make links more crawlable for Google. 

Writing good anchor text is imperative to improving the success of a link-building strategy. Anchor text is the visible text of a link, that tells readers and Google the context of what is being linked to. 

Effective anchor text is descr