How to implement a link building strategy for SEO ranking

If you want to improve the ranking of your website in the Google SERP, SEO On-Page is not enough. It is indeed crucial to develop and create a proper SEO Off-page strategy which is very useful when it comes to optimising the links and other outer elements that are not present on your website.

One of the most common and helpful Off-page SEO strategies is link building, which consists in creating and obtaining useful links from other authoritative websites and platforms. The aim of a link building strategy is in fact to enhance your website’s prestige and authority to improve search engine visibility and Google rankings.

Link building for SEO: which factors does Google consider for SEO ranking?

In terms of ranking and positioning of websites, Google takes into consideration two very important aspects: quality and quantity. The search engine uses a method for classification based on relevancy and authority of a website and proceeds to evaluate the quality and the quantity of the inbound links. According to these specific measurements a page rank is then defined and a score on a scale from 0 to 10 is assigned to every web page.

But what do we mean with “quality” of a link?

To evaluate the quality of an inbound link, Google takes into account many aspects such as: popularity, relevancy and authority of a website. Other features that have to be taken into consideration include relevance of contents, the level of trust of a website as well as the freshness of a link, the newer the link, the more it will affect content quality. There are certainly other more technical factors that Google takes into account regarding the way a backlink is promoted.

For instance, many digital experts consider the position of a link in the content essential, that is to say that a link positioned in the upper part of the page will guarantee a major effect and quality than a link placed at the bottom of the page.

Another element that has to be considered is the Anchor Text, the text on which the inbound link is positioned. Due to past inappropriate behaviour, nowadays Google tends to punish all of the pages that use a link with an Anchor Text with direct correspondence to the main keyword that we want to rank.

But how is it possible to obtain a valuable link for your SEO strategy?

When it comes to optimisation and rankings, link building tactics are considered to be a fundamental resource for better results in SEO strategy. As a matter of fact, links allow Google to understand how authoritative, trustable and valuable your website could be for users, with the aim of positioning it in the first few results.

There are numerous ways to obtain valuable SEO backlinks.

The first, easiest and most natural strategy is link earning. The tactic consists in the publication and sharing of valuable links on your website. By sharing interesting contents it is possible to improve the engagement of a website, hence turning the website into an authoritative source and, consequently, more likely to be mentioned on other websites. For this reason it is important to plan and develop an effective content marketing strategy capable of suggesting useful contents for your community.

Another strategy is about sending links to another website or author to get noticed. In case of services or products, the plan could be to release testimonies and reviews on a specific product that has been bought and tested with the aim of obtaining more inbound links.

Regardless of the chosen strategies, it is essential that the links used are ‘Dofollow Links’ since they allow the connection of two websites organically and can be crawled and indexed.

In conclusion, as Google expert Matt Cutts highlights, having backlinks inside a website remains a priority for SEO optimisation and improvement. Therefore, we recommend developing an effective link building strategy and integrating it into your content marketing plan in order to maximise your results.