Link building - what is worth knowing? Highlights
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27 January 2023
Link acquisition is an excellent way to ensure the visibility of a company's website, and thus an opportunity to increase profits. How do you achieve this? See what link building is, how to apply it and where to promote yourself online with its help.
Link building — co to jest?
Link building is one of the actions taken to best position a website in the organic search results. It consists in acquiring links to the promoted website. This means that, unlike in the case of sponsored links, what matters here is the natural indication to Google's algorithms of a valuable website. Importantly, SEO link building is currently focusing on this search engine. The reason for this is its popularity among Polish internet users, only around 2% of whom use other web browsing tools such as Bing and DuckDuckGo, among others.
Link building activities boil down to linking to a site on your own or another site. Recommending content gives Google's search engine a signal that there is valuable content there for the reader. Nowadays, this is very important for the success of online promotion of a brand and its products. The reason for this is the strategy of the search engine giant, which is increasingly concerned with ensuring that the top positions are occupied by links to content (content) that is genuinely useful from the point of view of the web user.
Link building in SEO - why is it so important?
Link acquisition not only supports the visibility of a website, it is actually essential. Link building builds the authority of a domain as useful content from the point of view of the average viewer. Without taking such measures, it is only theoretically possible to get to the top of the search results. In other words, even the most substantive text, additionally enriched with key phrases typed in by Internet users, will almost certainly be lost in the flood of content.
The link building strategy is also the best way to show your brand to people who have not found your website in the organic search results. After all, it very often happens that an Internet user types in a phrase directing him/her to a portal completely unrelated to the topic of the linked website. A sponsored link increases the chance that they will move to the promoted website if they are interested in the content they find there. What is more, thanks to such links, it is also possible to reach people who mainly browse bookmarked sites in their browser. 
What are the types of links?
First of all, it is important to clarify what a link is. A link can be not only a text, but also a graphic. An image placed in the content fulfils a triple role. Firstly, it enriches the content with an aesthetic element or serves to illustrate the issue described in order to make it easier to understand. In addition, it allows a website to be found not only in the organic search results for content, but also for graphics. What is more, when an alternative description is added, it becomes a textual anchor for Google's algorithms.
Anchor is, in turn, one type of text link. It is a hyperlinked, clickable section of an article or category in an e-commerce site. Because it is part of a sentence, using it for linking keeps the text consistent. Thus, the article, product description or other type of content remains reader-friendly while fulfilling its purpose. There are four types of anchors, three of which take the form of a word or phrase that suggests the subject of the linked text.
These are:
- Exact Match Anchor (EMA) - a link that describes exactly what the content is about, usually referring to an article on a topic, product description or category, e.g. send a package;
- Brand - a link containing the name of the brand, generally redirecting to its homepage, e.g. InPost Company;
- Partial Match Anchor (PMA) - a link carrying advertising content that encourages clicks, also generally taking the internet user to a sponsored text, product description or category, e.g. ways to send a package quickly.
In addition, the following are also used:
- Zero Match Anchor (ZMA), a stripped-down link whose content is informed by the preceding sentence, e.g. the best car brands can be found HERE;
- The URL, which is simply the address of the linked website, like ZMA information about what the reader will see when they click on it, can be included in an earlier sentence, e.g. see www.inpost.pl for details.
What attributes do links have - what is their role?
The subject of the link should be communicated not only to the reader, but also to the Google robots responsible for ranking and positioning. For this reason, SEO specialists attach great importance to tags, i.e. attributes (parameters) embedded in the HTML code of a page. These take the form of rel="information for Google algorithms". The entire address written in HTML, on the other hand, may look like this: <a href="https://przykladowastrona.pl/" rel="dofollow">followlink</a>.
The key information from Google's point of view is precisely suggestions such as dofollow and nofollow. The former indicates that the downstream link is related to the content of the page to which it is added. The opposite of dofollow is nofollow, which is a command showing that the content on the linked site does not have much of a connection to the page on which the link was placed. It is worth remembering that links without the dofollow parameter are by default treated by Google as redirecting to a page with similar content. For better positioning of the page, however, it is recommended to add both attributes. In this way, it gains credibility "in the eyes" of the algorithms, indicating where the user will find content that is maximally relevant to his or her searches.
Another attribute of links is rel=ugc, i.e. user generated content. This parameter indicates that the link was made available by an internet user in a comment. Links can be found both underneath content published on social media sites and, for example, product ratings on online shop websites.
In addition, there is rel=sponsored, which notifies Google's robots that the link contains sponsored content, rel=noreferrer, which informs the algorithms that the website does not pass on the address of the referring page, and rel=noopener, which blocks potentially harmful sites from accessing that contained in the link. The latter two attributes are set for security reasons. Importantly, they do not negatively impact SEO. On the contrary, a secure site will rank higher in the search results than one about which Google has doubts. 
Link building ideas - where, how and where to link your own site from?
Acquiring links to your target site should include all places on the internet. It is worthwhile to promote yourself with sponsored articles. Above all, popular portals and blogs provide great visibility. However, publishing texts there is associated with high costs. For this reason, sites with few readers should also be included in the company's marketing strategy.
This tactic enables a two-pronged approach. Popular sites attract genuine readers, which provides a great opportunity to attract new customers even though linking a small number of articles does not build up the authority of the site sufficiently. On the other hand, insignificant portals will agree to place a sponsored text for a lower amount than those visited by multitudes of Internet users. This gives you the opportunity to publish articles with a link on dozens of sites, thus giving Google a sign that your company website is frequently recommended and therefore authoritative.
How do you acquire links in other ways? It's worth being active on social media. Adding them in the comments on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube is a chance to get thousands of people interested. More than one forum that brings together enthusiasts of a particular issue can also help to build the visibility of the website. Such venues are especially important when promoting a particular product or service. They are less important when marketing is focused on a brand. The reason for this is that the threads set up in forums are overwhelmingly for giving advice on a given topic or answering questions, rather than for exchanging opinions about brands.
External linking, to which all of the above ideas refer, needs to be complemented by internal linking. In other words, links between individual sub-pages are necessary for proper positioning. In this way, not only the promoted product, but also others in the product range will be more visible in search engines. Building links to the page additionally opens the path to the customer's interest in the next item in the range.
The most common mistakes made in link building
Knowing how to get links to a site is not enough for them to help its positioning. It is also necessary to embed them skilfully in the text. For this reason, it is important to ensure that links such as EMA and PMA were included in phrases relevant to the content to which they lead. It is a mistake to add a hyperlink loosely or not at all relevant to the topic. For example, the phrase passenger cars should not lead to a text describing the problem of a lack of parking spaces in a particular city.
A similar mistake can be made with a brand link. A hyperlink with the brand name should lead to its main page or the article in which it is described. ZMA and URL links are the most difficult to misplace, which comes from the involuntary need to refer to them in the sentences preceding them. In addition to this, one must be mindful of describing infographics and images correctly. Not only is it a mistake if the text does not correspond to their content, but also if it does not.
How much do link building activities cost and what does the price depend on?
The cost of link building activities depends, among other things, on the number of links that will be placed in the articles. The type of content they will be placed in and the place where they will be published also have an impact on the price. The cheapest are simple texts inserted into pages with low popularity. Much more expensive are expert articles, especially those that can be read by thousands of visitors to a well-known portal.
Both of these factors, combined with the different amount of links ordered by each company, make it impossible to clearly determine the cost of link building. It is possible to spend a few hundred or a few thousand PLN on cooperation with an SEO agency, as well as tens of thousands. Thus, it really depends solely on the financial possibilities of the company.
Link building is nowadays one of the most important actions to take to promote yourself online. Without it, the chance of securing visibility for a company's website drops significantly. Rather than putting your company at risk of losing out to competitors high up in Google, it is better to invest in building your website's authority and thus always be one step ahead.
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