What Is Link Building? Simple Link Building Strategies To Help You Rank

Link building is the process of getting other pages (preferably quality and relevant sites) to link back to your website's content or pages. In the early days of search, link building was a breeze but now? Well, let’s see.

To rank first on the first page of Google SERP, all a webmaster had to do was create a ton of links pointing to a page or piece of content without caring if the linking page was relevant to the linked-back-to website page or piece of content. Enter the Google Penguin algorithm update.

Launched in April 2012, the Google Penguin algorithm served to filter sites that used spammy linking to manipulate ranking. In particular, the Penguin update sought to identify sites that bought backlinks or used link networks to gather ‘votes of confidence’ to manipulate ranking.
Google hates link schemes. Don’t believe me? You can check out the webmaster page on Google.

This begs the question: what backlinking option is available to webmasters, and how can you build penalty-free backlinks guaranteed to help you rank better?

Here is how...

How to Build Penalty-Free Backlinks Google Loves
To create quality backlinks that attract zero penalties and tons of Google cheer without paying a dime, use the following guide:

Step 1: Prepare Your content and page for Link Building
While Google considers deliberate link building unnatural and spammy (thus prone to penalties), it still pays special attention to links. “Unfortunately, while looking to build natural links, most webmasters often neglect a very important aspect: preparing your site for link building. Preparing your site for link building is one of the most overlooked aspects of off-page optimization.

How do you prepare your site for link building?

1: Optimize Internal Links
As you may have noticed, this guide likes to quote authority figures as a way to emphasize what it teaches. Remember Brian Dean, whom we mentioned earlier; Here is what he had to say about creating and optimizing internal links: “The number of internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on the site.”
Naturally optimizing your internal links relevant to your keywords can make a huge difference in your ranking. When building internal links, here is the rule: Create silo pages. Silo pages are pages that connect to categories and supporting posts and pages. Silo pages aggregate your ranking and boost your search performance because, after creating silo pages, when you link back to, say, your homepage, the linking juice flows through supporting pages and categories.

Ideally, no page internal link should be standalone. Instead, each page, and essentially, each link, should be an interlink and be an integral part of your overall site so that all your pages and content are, in one way or another, interconnected, which makes page navigation easier. As a rule, from a single page or piece of content, a user should be able to jump to any location on your site. Further, related pages and content should link together to provide a seamless, rich user experience.
Examine the image below.

Neglect silo pages and internal link building at your own peril. Ken Lyons, co-founder of Measured SEM, an internet marketing agency based in Boston, outlines 9 ways to create a well-structured internal linking structure that works.

2: Get Your On-Page SEO Right
We covered how to get on-page SEO right; therefore, other than mention its importance in preparing your pages and content for linking, here, we shall avoid talking about how to get your on-page SEO right. As an additional On-page SEO tip, ensure a well-structured site, use exact match, long tail, and LSI keywords, optimize your Meta data, media, and optimize the other on-page SEO elements discussed earlier.
Another thing is that, as we saw in sections 2 & 3, keywords play a massive role in ranking. As you perform your on-page SEO and interlink your pages, pay special attention to the use of exact matches and related keywords because they account for 40.75% of your on-page SEO activities, as shown in the image below.

Before we close out step one, I want to point out something because after preparing your site for linking, the subsequent steps are the actual steps you need to engage to get tons of quality backlinks. In 2024 and beyond, if not done in a spammy way, most of these link-building strategies will work. With that in mind, start building links to your pages and content, on to step 2.

Step 2: The BL Strategy
The broken links link-building strategy is perhaps the most neglected, most potent link-building strategy.
Here is the thing, while guest blogging accounts for 46% of most webmasters’ link-building efforts, creating quality backlinks from high-value blogs is not easy. To use guest blogging to create backlinks, you first have to do a ton of research to find blogs targeted to your audience and keywords. Once you discover blogs in your area, you have to reach out to that blogger, who may, or may not agree to a mutually beneficial link-building strategy, once he or she agrees, you have to write the post, making sure to adhere to quality control, submit the post, and wait for the post to go live.
The BL (Broken links) link strategy, on the other hand, is simpler, faster, and highly effective at providing high-quality links. Here is why this strategy works like a charm.

messes during site transfers, hyperlinks, and typing mistakes that lead to the dreaded 404 error pages.
By fixing link rots, Google can love, and reward you with better rankings. Using broken links to build quality backlinks is not a new strategy: it is an age-old, tested, and proven link-building strategy that shows no sign of fizzling out.
Using this strategy to create backlinks involves three steps: perform a backlink analysis on related websites, find the broken link, reach out to the webmaster, and inform him or her about the link rot. Your aim here is to inform the webmaster of the dead link and provide an alternative link, your link.

Step 3: The Info-graphic Strategy
Here is a fun fact about infographics: if they are compelling enough and highly relevant to a subject, other bloggers in your niche will link back to them, which results in an instant, high-quality backlink. Other than being great engagement drivers, visually compelling infographics earn high-quality editorial links from high-quality, relevant sites.
Further, as shown in the image below, since 2008, the uptake, and demand for info-graphics has increased by 800%. You can also employ other, lesser-known back-linking strategies such as creating a job board, launching a meet-up campaign, etc. In a post shared more than 1,572 times on various social platforms (Facebook=766, Twitter=604, LinkedIn=202), Neil Patel outlines 8 almost unheard-of back-linking strategies guaranteed to rocket fuel your ranking.

Note: In 2016 and beyond, Google also pays special attention to social shares and considers them as backlinks. Pay special attention to creating highly sharable content that appeals to readers and creating a social media strategy inclusive of a social share strategy.
As we close this section, let’s mention something; at the start of this section, we outlined, through the use of images, the main off-page SEO elements. As we stated, while link building is not the only important off-page element, it is an important aspect. In this regard, and because Google values user engagement above everything else, if you use YouTube videos in your content, you may want to subtly interlink the video on YouTube and your content. This will count as a backlink from a site Google trusts: YouTube.

In the next section of our blog series on SEO, we shall look at the elephant in the room — the one aspect that makes most SEO professionals tremble from the fear of Google penalties: Technical SEO or Site-Wide SEO.

Feel free to hit me up for further explanations on any SEO-related inquiries.