Ten years back in time, backlinks were pivotal for SEO. In recent years, their role has been declining but they still have a significant impact on rankings. Therefore, link building is an essential website promotion strategy component, especially for highly competitive niches.
Furthermore, with some topics and when promoting in developed markets like the USA, Great Britain, Canada, and the English-speaking segment, it is often hard to receive traffic from Google without efficient link building.
Nevertheless, it goes without saying that the word ‘efficiency’ is key in this process. If the link-building effort is incorrect, it will most likely lead to inappropriate money and time loss at best or sanctions from Google for “unnatural links” at worst.
Consequently, you will lose the results you had before.
Unnatural links are artificially created to manipulate website ranking in search engines. It is a clear violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines, and the company can penalize websites for using them.
Further in the article, I will explain some important things worth knowing about linkbuilding if you have started to work on your website’s SEO.
There Are Different Types Of Links And Different Sources To Get Them
Links can appear organically, you can buy them, or work on getting them manually.
You can buy link placement to your website through special online advertising exchanges. In most cases, it looks like an article published on someone else’s internet platform citing your website and giving a link to some of its pages. You not only pay for placement but also prepare the article’s content to place this link in it.
Manual link building implies registration in catalogs published by various companies, on online platforms where you can place a link to your website in users’ profiles or the so-called guest posting. Essentially, you write an article for someone else’s website, and its owner posts it for free, receiving unique content. You get the backlink you need in return.
Organic links appear when someone independently leaves a link to a page on your website. For instance, you can prepare a case study or an expert advice selection, and media reporters will provide a link to them.
Actually, natural backlinks mainly originate from two activity types:
- Interesting and useful content creation
- Overall brand marketing activity.
Your Website’s Backlink Profile Should Look Natural
If you only buy paid links, your backlink profile will look artificial to Google, and you will almost certainly get a penalty for manipulating search results.
Virtually, websites receive many links of various types: from media, social networks, articles, forums, business catalogs, image links, and many others.
Therefore, the more diverse the backlinks to your website are, the better and the less likely you will get sanctioned for search results manipulation attempts.
The Website’s Age Matters
When it comes to new websites being active for no more than a year, it is necessary to add links in small quantities. However, you can leave a lot more external links more often for websites that have been operational for many years.
Besides, after entering the Google index, it takes some time for links to start affecting your website’s visibility in search results. You will see their effect over time (from several weeks to several months).
Good Backlinks Are Expensive
If someone offers you numerous cheap links, you are almost 100% dealing with another scam. Links from quality websites cannot be inexpensive.
So, you can compile a list of several dozen websites where you can post an article with a link, and it will cost you 30 to 50 dollars in almost any niche. However, pretty quickly this list will exhaust itself, and then, we will have to pay an average of $150 to 200 or more for one link.
That is how much it will cost you to publish your links on a relatively high-quality website.
That Is Why It Is Necessary To Combine Different Strategies
As you have already understood from the previous abstract, link-building is a costly affair. You should also mind that you have to post at least two dozen links every month to get a desirable effect. Now, you can calculate the budgets necessary for that.
Therefore, it would be best not only to buy links through article posting exchanges but also to use manual link-building and experiment with various strategies to stimulate organic growth.
For example, you can resort to creating quality content on a regular basis, generating linkable assets, working on newsworthy events, and other similar methods. Yet, it is already a topic for a separate article.
I hope you found this article useful. If you need the help of an experienced SEO consultant, write to me and I will help you grow your business!
Volodymyr Fedorychak
Search marketing consultant specializing in IT business and B2B SaaS. I help businesses and start-ups generate traffic, attract customers and build their brand online.
