SEO Link Building

When doing SEO for a website, just optimizing our own site is not enough. A website becomes strong and trustworthy through word of mouth, which means having other websites link to it. We call this technique “Link Building.”

Link building is also known as Off-page SEO, which means doing SEO outside of our own website. It requires both science and art; it’s a technical matter, but it also requires creativity and precision to obtain backlinks for our website.

How important are Link Building and Backlinks for SEO?

Creating backlinks from high-quality websites is one of the most important factors that Google and other search engines consider.

Receiving backlinks indicates the quality, credibility, and reputation of your website (read more about Google’s Search Engine Guidelines here). And of course, it affects your ranking on Google and the chances of people finding your website through search.

For example, if a well-known marketing website in Thailand like Thumbsup or Marketing Oops sends a backlink to Content Shifu because they find its marketing content interesting, Google will view Content Shifu as a quality website in the marketing field. This will improve Content Shifu’s ranking on Google.

How to find quality backlinks to build a strong link building strategy

If a website gets a lot of backlinks, it should help the website rank better. But that doesn’t mean we can get backlinks from any website, because not every link is of high quality and will yield good results for our website.

So, what are the characteristics of a quality backlink?

A quality backlink refers to a website that links to us, which helps Google understand our website better, sees it as trustworthy, and is also beneficial to the website users.

We have three simple criteria to measure the quality of backlinks.

• Backlinks from high-authority websites – The higher the Domain Authority of the websites linking to ours, the more credible our website will appear in Google’s eyes (try checking the website’s Authority).

• Backlinks are relevant – The linking website should be related to our website, not just any website. For example, Marketingoops.com links to the website contentshifu.com (which is related). Google will understand that Content Shifu’s website is related to marketing.

• It is a link that people actually use – a website that people genuinely use must have good authority. On the other hand, it also increases traffic to our website from the backlinks it provides.

What are DoFollow vs NoFollow links?

Not every link helps promote SEO for our website.

Link Building or Off-page SEO SEO is about using both science and art to get our website backlinks from quality websites. These backlinks can be easily divided into two types: DoFollow, which helps boost SEO power, and NoFollow, which does not provide any power to the website receiving the backlink.

1. DoFollow is when that website sends a backlink to your site, passing on the SEO benefits to you. Generally, if that website emphasizes quality in its content, you should receive a DoFollow link in return.
2. NoFollow is when a website sends a backlink to your site without passing on any SEO benefits. Typically, NoFollow links are found in comments, links from various social media websites, and affiliate links.

Even though NoFollow backlinks do not directly affect SEO, they still have indirect benefits, such as increasing the visibility of our content and bringing in traffic.

How to check if a link is DoFollow or NoFollow

We can easily do it by right-clicking on the link and selecting “Inspect” to view the code.

Once you click Inspect, you’ll encounter some convoluted code that might be a headache for some. But what you need to look for is the ref=”nofollow” behind the link as shown in the image (if you don’t find it, that means the link is DoFollow).

7 techniques for link building with the art of finding quality backlinks

1. Create quality content

Before discussing tips, tricks, or techniques that help in creating backlinks, the most important thing is to create content that is valuable to the target audience.

Good content doesn’t need to cater to everyone. It should help some people or certain groups solve the problems they are facing or add value to what they are doing.

And the content can be in any format, whether it’s articles, videos, infographics, audiobooks, and others that the target customers can access.

If our foundation (content) is solid, building upon it won’t be difficult.

2. Do On-page SEO well

On-page SEO is something we should do from the moment we create the website. Conduct keyword research before writing articles or content on the web pages.

Choose to place the Focus Keyword in appropriate positions and quantities in the article, add appropriate Alt Tags to every image, and rest assured that Google will find you much easier than before.

Now, once Google finds you because you’ve done well with On-page SEO, the next thing you need to do is to make Google aware that your content and website are of high quality through Off-page SEO.

3. Use an infographic or slide to share

If it’s about Off-page SEO, whether it’s an article, video, audiobook, or anything else, no content format can create backlinks as effectively as infographics.

Because when comparing infographics with articles – it can be seen that viewing information as an infographic is easier to digest and understand than reading text.

When comparing infographics with videos – although the trend of videos is on the rise, doing off-page SEO on videos is not easy at all. The reason is that videos require a considerable amount of time and money to produce.

Another very important reason is that, normally, videos are not stored on our own servers but are often uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo instead. And many times, videos do not tend to get backlinks back.

But just creating an infographic alone is not enough. There needs to be something that stimulates or encourages people who share it to also provide a backlink.

For example, we created an Inbound Marketing Report where we generated a code that anyone can easily copy and paste onto their website. This code includes a backlink that points back to the website contentshifu.com.

The easier it is to share, the more likely people will share it (but sharing can only happen because we started with creating quality content in point 1).

Paraphrase

4. Use social media with the 70/20/10 formula.

Even though the backlinks from social media are NoFollow backlinks, if the social signals such as the number of likes, comments, shares, and clicks are high enough, Google will consider your website to be of good quality, which will also positively impact your off-page SEO.

Of course, the way to get people to Like, Comment, Share, or Click probably won’t come from just selling, selling, and selling. Because normally, people don’t want to hear what the brand wants to communicate, but they want to hear what they want to know.

There is a content creation formula on Social Media from Social Media Examiner that recommends creating content in a 70/20/10 ratio.

• 70% of all the content on your Social Media must be valuable content and content that your target audience wants to hear.

• 20% of all content on Social Media is content created by others.

• 10% of all content on Social Media focuses on sales, promotions, or various campaigns that help boost sales activities.

And for Thailand The most popular social media platforms are likely Facebook, LINE, and Instagram. It is recommended that you do not need to use all three, but should choose the ones that are suitable for your business.

5. Have someone famous or influencer help.

No matter if your business is in IT, a startup, marketing, or anything else, in various businesses there will be influencers (experts who have an impact on the thoughts of the majority).

What we need to do is just let them know about our good content. For example, writing an email to share articles or content that we think would be useful to them. If they find it useful, they might share it with us. Given the credibility or influence we have on people in the industry, our content might reach more people.

Additionally, we might share good content such as articles and infographics in Facebook Groups related to the content’s topic. This means distributing the content to communities with people interested in that subject, increasing the chances of sharing and the likelihood of ‘big players’ seeing it.

6. Volunteer to write articles for free

Waiting for big, popular websites to mention us and send backlinks is not easy and may take a long time. If you don’t want to wait, The method of volunteering to write articles (Guest Blogging) and sending backlinks back to our website through the author’s bio is one of the interesting methods.

In the beginning, we might need to start building our reputation by writing our own blog, as well as finding opportunities to volunteer to write articles for smaller websites.

For Thailand, finding websites that accept article writers might not be easy because most websites do not advertise for volunteer writers. Therefore, what I recommend doing is what I would like to suggest:

• Try checking first if that website is really reputable. The easiest way is to check with Moz’s Open Site Explorer. Once you input the link of the website you want to check, Moz will process it and provide the DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) values. I recommend that you write for websites with a DA/PA of at least 15 each.

• Try to do some research to see if there are other writers who have already written for that website. If you find that there are, try to contact the website you want to write for directly. Send them the link to your blog along with your other writing works, and explain why you want to write for them.

• Try leveraging connections or website partners where we can request to write articles and get backlinks to your website. Alternatively, creating press releases for relevant news agencies or websites is also an effective method.

7. Create free resources for people to share

Free and good things are what people want to share the most.

Content Shifu has created a wealth of resources and materials, including E-books, presentations, and Calcula’te, a website pricing calculator.

If our product is truly ‘premium’, people will want to thank us and reference us by sending backlinks back. For example, the Inbound Marketing Report we created has been shared over 2,000 times.