Details: Website Traffic & SEO

In this article, we are going to discuss link building for beginners and outline a step by step guide for 2020.

Gaining relevant links from authoritative websites is still a key consideration for ranking high in Google. It's critical, therefore, to have a link building strategy in order to outrank your competition. The experts at Profitworks can support your business in getting trustworthy links from established websites to improve your overall authority in Google - contact us today for more information.

Now let's dig in and discuss what link building means, why it's important, link building for beginners, and more!

Link Building For Beginners: A Step By Step Guide For 2020

What is link building and why is it important?

Simply put, link building is a method of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to yours. A hyperlink is another way of saying link, which you probably know as a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. This is what puts the Web in World Wide Web!

Search engines methodically crawl the internet using a program or automated script to assess links between pages on your website and links to and from your website. If your website can gain links from high-quality, authoritative websites, they will rank your website higher than your competition.

The team at Profitworks created this helpful infographic for your reference.

What exactly are the search engines looking for? Let's break it down using the following example:

The anchor tag (the "a"), opens the link tag and tells search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.

The "href" stands for "hyperlink referral" and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the web address to which the link is pointing. This doesn't always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download.

The anchor text is the phrase on which you need to click if you want to open the link. The text is usually formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with blue colour and/or underlining, signalling to users that it is a clickable link.

Closure of a link tag is signalled with the </a>.

SEO experts agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs, putting a lot of effort into trying to do it well. If you can master the art of high-quality link building, it can really put you ahead of your competition. Profitworks offers strategic link building as part of our local SEO services for those who don't have the time to move past link building for beginners.

Follow vs. no-follow links

By following the link format outlined above, you're effectively telling Google your site endorses the link being shared. You can, however, designate a link as "nofollow." This tells Google not to follow the link. Why would you want to do this? As a basic example, say you're writing a post about link building for beginners best practices, and want to call out an example of poor link building. You could link to the offending site without signalling to Google that you trust it.

Standard links (ones that haven't had nofollow added) look like this:

<a href="/">I love Profitworks</a>

Nofollow link markup looks like this:

<a href="/" rel="nofollow">I love Profitworks</a>

"Nofollow" is one of a few relationship values you can place on a link. Here's more on their meaning via Google Support:

rel Value	Description
rel="sponsored"	Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) as sponsored. More information on Google's stance on paid links. NOTE: The nofollow attribute was previously recommended for these types of links and is still an acceptable way to flag them, though sponsored is preferred.
rel="ugc"	We recommend marking user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts, as ugc. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you might remove this attribute from links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time. Read more about avoiding comment spam.
rel="nofollow"	Use the nofollow value when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site. (For links within your own site, use robots.txt, as described below.)

Link building for beginners: Guiding philosophy

Link building must be done naturally so that Google doesn't conclude that you're trying to manipulate its search algorithm.

Per Google, "Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."

You should, therefore, build relevant links for your business by associating them first and foremost with great content. In other words, Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines put a great deal of importance on the concept of E-A-T: expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. Google will keep you in the search results and your business will grow if you stick to this. Sites that don't display these characteristics tend to be seen as lower-quality in the eyes of search engines. Creating a site that's considered expert, authoritative, and trustworthy should be your guiding light as you practice SEO. Not only will it simply result in a better site, but it's future-proof. After all, providing great value to searchers is what Google itself is trying to do.

Link building for beginners: Tips and tricks

There are a number of tasks you can perform in order to help increase your link building success.

The basic idea is to create an asset which you use to try and get links. This takes the form of a piece of content and can include something like:

Infographics
Data visualization
How-to guides
Video
Image gallery
Lists

You create this content with a view to earning links from people who find them relevant, interesting, funny, informative, etc.

Infographics are actually a good place to start in link building for beginners. However, it's important to note some people will embed your infographics but may forget to give you a link. To check, follow these steps

Find the infographic, right click on it and select "Copy Image URL"
Go to Google Images and look for the camera symbol
Click on this and paste in the URL you just copied
Click search by image
Visit the URLs that pop up and make sure that there is a link pointing back to your website. If not, contact the website owner and ask them to add a link to the original source.

Here are some other helpful resources when looking to get started with linking:

Buzzstream Blog
Growing Popularity and Links
Ultimate Guide to Link Building by Eric Ward and Garret French
The Link Building Book by Paddy Moogan
Link Building Strategies by Jon Cooper
Link Building on the Moz Blog

Link building for beginners - Rely on Profitworks!

Profitworks Small Business Services provides email marketing, website traffic, and website conversion optimization services which increase the number of sales generated from a website.

The focus of our services is on increasing sales and providing a positive return on investment.

To learn more about Profitworks click here.

What Profitworks clients are saying:

"I reached out to Profitworks because I was looking for a company to help me with marketing and branding. I had a conference with Chris and Beth and they were incredibly knowledgeable about marketing and how I could generate business. I learned so much from our conversation and left with a lot of tools to make my business a success. They were exceptional at creating a clear vision for my brand and helping with marketing strategies that would allow me to reach out to my target audience. Looking forward to working with this Profitworks again in the near future!" (Amanda Claire)