Build Authority Through Link Building
Strong backlinks from external sites, internal link building, and outbound link building increase your website’s credibility and authority in Google’s eyes. A good link-building strategy is therefore quite valuable for SEO. Here, you’ll find answers to all the typical questions about link building.
Link building builds credibility
Link building is about creating links from other relevant and trustworthy websites to your own website. This can help establish authority and credibility, since Google and other search engines use links as an indicator of how relevant and reliable a website is.
In addition to content, link building is therefore one of the most important factors in search engine optimization.
Broadly speaking, link building can be divided into three subcategories:
- External Link Building
- Internal Link Building
- Outbound link building.
Links to your site tell Google that it’s worth visiting. That’s putting it a bit simply, but the more links your site receives, the higher Google will rank it. You can think of them as a kind of recommendation to Google that a website is worth visiting.
External Link Building
External link building involves obtaining links from external websites, and it is by far the most important subcategory within link building. After all, the more websites that link to your site, the more credible it will appear to Google—and that’s something that gives your website’s ranking in search results an extra boost.
However, it does matter whether the link comes from a credible and relevant website or from an Indonesian casino website, a Russian porn site, or some other more or less suspicious site with no relevance to your business.
Credibility is, in fact, a key factor when it comes to link building. To take an example from the real, analog world, it’s similar to when a restaurant is awarded a star in the Michelin Guide. In that case, there’s a credible source behind the review, and the restaurant will see the impact in the number of reservations.
Conversely, a competing restaurant that few people know about and about which very few have anything good to say is unlikely to have any significant revenue.
The same applies in the digital world, also known as the Internet. Here, however, your website’s reputation does not depend on mentions but on high-quality links from relevant and trustworthy websites—so-called backlinks.
Internal Link Building
Internal link building is when the subpages of a website link to one another. In other words, these are links that direct visitors to other (relevant) pages.
For example, right now you’re on a page about link building. That’s why it makes sense for us to link to the page about SEO in general. That way, we create better cohesion between the pages on our website to give you a better user experience.
Internal link building also makes it easier for Google to understand what your website is about and can therefore help improve its search rankings.
Internal link building is, above all, an effective tool for driving more traffic to the most important pages on your website. With internal link building, you have complete control over how many times you link to your most important pages from the other pages on your website.
Outbound link building
Outbound link building is when you link to external websites that are relevant to the visitor.
Right now, you're reading an article about how important link building is for your SEO. That's why it makes sense for us to link to an external page that discusses the 200 most important factors for success on Google.
High-quality links from credible websites
In short, high-quality links are links from trustworthy sites that are authoritative and relevant to your website and your business.
For example, a link from the Copenhagen Bricklayers’ Guild would be a high-quality link for someone who owns a bricklaying company. If you run a restaurant, a link on a well-known food blog would be a high-quality link. If you have a business that sells clay, a high-quality link would be one in a TV2 article about the TV show “Keramikkamp.”
However, you don’t just stumble upon those kinds of links—just as a restaurant doesn’t just stumble upon a Michelin star. The content on your site must, of course, be valuable and give people in your industry a reason to link to your site.
Good content on your website is, therefore, the be-all and end-all if you want to attract high-quality external links.
If you'd like to learn more about best practices, Erick Back has written an excellent article about link building on his blog.
Is link building a shady marketing tactic?
Unfortunately, link building has a somewhat tarnished reputation outside of SEO circles. For example, Politiken and Zetland have published a series of articles on link building that aren’t exactly complimentary. And the kind of link building those articles refer to does indeed fall into the less ethical category.
Just as there are high-quality links, there are also more shady ways to acquire links. This can happen, for example, when web agencies buy links on websites with endless lists of links in order to get their clients quick backlinks.
Another common method of acquiring links is through so-called PBNs (private blog networks). Simply put, PBNs are “fake” blogs with catchy and often generic domain names such as nyheder-om-alt.dk, billig-autohjælp.dk, or hele-molevitten.dk.
Here you'll find mass-produced blog posts that seem informative at first glance—but that exist solely so that marketing agencies can link to their clients' websites.
In other words, link building can sometimes be less ethical—but that’s certainly not always the case.
How We Approach Link Building
At Amplify, our philosophy is that quick PBNs and bulk-purchased links aren’t the right solution. We don’t want to turn the internet into a dumping ground, and we always take a long-term view when developing SEO strategies for our clients.
Google is constantly refining and improving its algorithms to provide users with the best, most valuable, and most relevant results. And if we look into the crystal ball, it probably won’t be many years before Google is smart enough to filter out PBNs from search results. That’s why we never resort to quick fixes when doing link building for our clients.
Instead, we focus on delivering high-quality, substantive content—content that is industry-relevant and tailored to each client’s target audience.
That’s why we have our own content department, whose primary task is to write valuable, well-written content for our clients’ websites. We do this partly because content is king when it comes to ranking higher in search results—but also because relevant content increases the chances of earning high-quality backlinks.
How We Approach Link Building
Link building encompasses external, internal, and outbound link building. Overall, the purpose of link building is to make your website appear even more credible and relevant. Effective link building strengthens your SEO.
Unlike external link building, internal link building takes place on your own website. You’re doing internal link building when you link from one page to another on your website.
External link building refers to backlinks or hyperlinks from external websites that link to yours. High-quality backlinks from credible and authoritative websites strengthen your SEO.
Outbound link building is when you create links to external websites. Outbound links should fit the context and be relevant to the visitor.
Learn Even More
Whether you're a generalist or a specialist in marketing, our experts have put together a number of helpful tips for you on our blog.
