SEO Basics: How to Improve Website Visibility with Link Building

Link building is and remains one of the most important ranking factors, and is still necessary in addition to good content. One often reads that good content is linked and distributed by itself. Realistically, however, it must also be said that a certain SEO foundation must be in place to achieve this. Not every website has enough authority and reach from the beginning to let content spread by itself.

How does Google rate your link profile?

The more backlinks — with corresponding quality and quantity — your website has, the higher the ranking potential. If you have a new domain, your first goal in link building should be to build a competitive or comparable link profile.

All in all, backlinks strengthen the authority (an important part of E-A-T, i.e. Expertise-Authority-Trust) that you or your website enjoys on the Internet. Basically, the links are like a kind of voting system. Every vote for your website says that your content is valuable and your site is helpful and that you are credible.

With backlinks it is the quality that counts, not the quantity

Unlike in the past, it is not only the quantity of backlinks that counts nowadays, but above all the quality. In this context, quality is a link from a website that has a thematic reference to your own site and at the same time enjoys trust in Google.

Trust is defined by a high-quality link profile of the linking website and the classification of Google as a serious source on the respective topic. Therefore, when selecting link sources, it is essential to examine the link profile of a potential link source more closely and get an idea of the link environment, thematic focus and quality of content and appearance.

So when building sustainable links, make sure that you build as many high-quality links as possible from thematically appropriate pages and avoid building excessive links that have nothing to do with the actual topic. Google is keen on quality, not quantity.

To ensure that link building is not built on the wrong basis from the start and you run the risk of the foundation collapsing later, you must always keep an eye on the technical factors. A sustainable link building should never be static and requires a lot of tact and sensitivity.

Every project and every industry requires different actions, there is no general recipe.

But if you consider the following points, you are definitely on the right track:

• Never use one-sided link texts and use all variation types
• Take a close look at the link sources. Is the source reputable, relevant to the topic and has a good neighbourhood? (Trust / Backlinks check)
• Strengthen not only the homepage but also the subpages
• Build both Follow and Nofollow links

What has to be considered when building links?

1. Do not just link to the start page

A typical link profile of a website looks like that most links lead to the start page. But this is rather unfavourable — it is much better if there are also deep links, e.g. blog articles.

2. Pay attention to the anchor text

The anchor text is the link text used on the linking website. Usually you have no control over this, but if — for instance, because you have written a guest article and want to link to your website — it is important that the anchor text is not “Website” or “More Information”, but includes the name of the guest author, the company name, the domain name, etc.

3. Not resting on the links

Once you have been referred to and your ranking has improved, you should not rest on your laurels. Continuity is one of the keys to success! Always keep your website as up-to-date as possible.

Analysing and cleaning up backlinks is a time-consuming task. It is much better to build quality links instead of having to break them down again. It always depends on your goals. If you want to be found on the net and even appear on the first page of Google, then there is no other way around link building.