What is link building? – SEO FAQs Simply Answered

What is link building? – It’s the process of getting one website to link to another.

That’s it.

Well, it’s actually not as easy as it sounds – keep reading to find out more.

What is link building?

Link building refers to a complex practice of attempting to gain outside web pages (preferably authoritative ones) to link to your website.

Link Building is one of the major aspects of Search Engine Optimation because Search Engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing uses the link to crawl the individual pages, to crawl the link in the single page and it will crawl the entire site. It is also another way to engage the user on the site.

More about what is a backlink read here.

How to get backlinks?

There are as many ways to build links as your imagination allows to come up with.

Just to outline what I am talking about here are 11 different link building ways:

And here are 31 additional link building strategies.

Execute one of them and you the backlinks will be rolling in.

My favorite is number 1, 6, 21, and 36.

How to do link building internally?

You can also do link building from one of your website pages to another. That’s called internal link building.

In WordPress, you can simply color the text and paste the link – done. Backlink was made.

It’s really simple.

In other blogging platforms, it’s almost as quick as that.

1st Step – Color the text:

backlink

2nd Step – Allocate and click on the icon that looks something like this:

what is a backlink

3rd Step – Insert the URL you want to add to the text.

DONE! – You just created a backlink.

Different types of Backlinks

All backlinks are not created equally. Thus, link building won’t give the same results.

Different link building techniques will yield different results.

On top of that, there are 2 different types of backlinks:

  • Do-Follow Backlinks
  • No-Follow Backlinks

Dofollow backlinks

Dofollow backlinks indicate not only link one page to another but transfer site’s quality metrics. Which means the more dofollow backlinks you can get, the more qualitative your domain will be.

Dofollow backlink example:

This is how dofollow backlink looks like in the code (HTML editor):dofollow Dofollow backlinks are the links that are inserted into blog posts, news releases, and very few times also as a comment or a forum post.

Nofollow backlinks

Nofollow backlinks connect one website to another but transfer no authority.

These backlinks can be seen in blog’s comment sections and forums.

Nofollow backlink example:

The only difference in code is that nofollow backlinks have rel=”nofollow” or rel=”external nofollow”.

nofollow backlink

That might seem like a small difference but for Google, that means a lot. When search engines are crawling the web – they notice this “rel” and knows that backlink is just a link from one page to other and doesn’t transfer any authority metrics from one domain to another.

Why do you need to do link building?

Backlinks are like votes – thus the more votes your site has, the popular it gets.

By link building, you build the website’s popularity online and your site’s organic traffic will start growing as well.

The more (dofollow) backlinks you have the more important search engines will “think” your site is.

Build link internally

There is a large number of website owners that check and monitor their backlinks. So, when you link to other sites – they notice you.

Being noticed in the online environment is hard but very important.

Linking to other sites is a long-term strategy, especially, if you are just starting out. But eventually, it will start paying off once your website builds authority.

Thus, start now.

I hope now you know what is link building!

To recap – link building is the process of getting links from one site or page to another.

The more (dofolow) backlinks you have the popular your site will be.

And there are as many link building strategies as one can think of.

Moreover, if you struggle to understand any other SEO term – feel free to visit our SEO FAQ section.