Chapter 6: Link Building

This is one of the most well-known off-page ranking elements used by search engines. 

It was also one of the first major factors used to rank pages in search engines.

Links were first used as a method to increase content relevancy with Google's PageRank algorithm in the late 1990s.

While links are still one of the most powerful signals for Google's crawlers, many facets of link building have evolved.

An important note: external and internal links are both important. 

While each portion of link building requires its own guide, the below tips hold true for both.

Value

All links were not born equal. 

A select few websites in each nice hold the highest trust and authority, which means that any other website besides those elite few will have lower trust, authority, and perceived quality.

This means that it's important to focus on quality over quantity when gaining links to your website.

A common topic of discussion is Nofollow link attributes. 

This attribute prevents links from being used for ranking purposes.

There are white-hat purposes for this, such as preventing advertising links or user comments with links from being analyzed by search engines.

There are also black-hat purposes for this. 

Nofollow attributes are generously sprinkled throughout sites that are implementing link schemes to fraudulently redirect traffic.

Anchor Text

This is the clickable text (typically blue and underlined) that brings a user to the linked URL.

Anchor text is used by search engines and users to understand what type of content that link leads to.

An easy rule to make sure you're making the most of your anchor texts: vary the anchor text used when linking to the same page. 

Using the same word or phrase might get your page penalized and will turn users off.

It's important to understand that you will have no control over inbound (other websites linking to you) anchor text but you do have full control over internal links.

A few tips for anchor text success:

Use normal, everyday language in your anchor text.

Use relevant phrases.

Use blue, underlined text. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Keep it concise.

Backlinks

These are the links everyone cares about. 

Inbound links give Google an idea of the quality of your content. 

If a bunch of low-authority websites links to your website, that's a bad sign to Google.

In the opposite case, Google will increase your trust, authority, and ranking accordingly.

We've said this before but will repeat it: quality over quantity. If you can do both, then by all means do that.

But don't pursue 500 links from garbage websites when you can focus your effort on inbound links from 50 high-quality industry-leading websites.

We do not endorse black-hat SEO techniques such as link buying, link exchange, and other tactics. 

With that being said, many of your competitors are implementing these strategies. Do with that information what you will.

Our system for effective link-building is this:

1. Create top-notch content

2. Make a template email specific to each type of link (guest post, dead link replacement, etc.)

3. Train someone to use these templates

There is no reason for you to waste time on this tedious task, so train someone to do it as fast as possible.

As a final note, do not discount internal linking. We will write more on this in the future, but we are having almost mythical levels of success with no backlinks and only internal linking.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Understand that my intention is to gain your trust and provide volumes of high-quality information. 

As such, I work at a breakneck pace to bring value to you. This results in numerous typos and grammatical errors.

If you are having trouble understanding a concept due to language errors, then let me know and I will clarify.

If you comment about a missing apostrophe while understanding the spirit of a concept, you will earn yourself a spot on the "never doing business" list.