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November 16, 2022

Ashot Nanayan

22 min read

Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing

Links are the currency of the web. The webpages that have plenty of them are deemed “authoritative” and are rewarded with high rankings in Google. While pages that don’t have any are bound to obscurity.

Backlinks in Business Profiles: These are links from business directory profiles or company listing sites.

SEO Impact: Low impact

Author Bio: Links included in the author bio section of articles or guest posts.

SEO Impact: Low impact

This guide will teach you how to get quality links that move the needle without risking a Google penalty. We created it with absolute beginners in mind and made sure to pack it with plenty of actionable advice that you can start implementing right away.

According to Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. So if you want your website’s pages to rank high in search, you will almost certainly need links.

Google and other search engines look at links from other sites as “votes.” These votes help them identify which page on a given topic (out of thousands of similar ones) deserves to rank at the very top of the search results.

PRO TIP

If your competitor is getting a lot of search traffic and it’s not from branded keywords, chances are you could target those keywords too.Here’s how to find them:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
  2. Enter your competitor’s domain
  3. Go to the Top pages report

This report shows you a website’s top pages by estimated organic traffic and the keyword sending the most traffic to each page. So using our blog as an example, we can potentially analyze moz.com:

According to Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. So if you want your website’s pages to rank high in search, you will almost certainly need links.

Google and other search engines look at links from other sites as “votes.” These votes help them identify which page on a given topic (out of thousands of similar ones) deserves to rank at the very top of the search results.

How to Start a Link-Building Company in 2023

Thus, as a general rule, pages with more backlinks tend to rank higher in search results.

PRO TIP

If your competitor is getting a lot of search traffic and it’s not from branded keywords, chances are you could target those keywords too.Here’s how to find them:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
  2. Enter your competitor’s domain
  3. Go to the Top pages report

This report shows you a website’s top pages by estimated organic traffic and the keyword sending the most traffic to each page. So using our blog as an example, we can potentially analyze moz.com:

The Top pages report for moz.com, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
The Top pages report for moz.com, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

 

Links are incredibly important for ranking well. And it is quite rare that you will outrank pages that have a lot of strong links—unless you get just as many. And yet, links aren’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages.

So if you build lots of links to your page and it still ranks poorly, look into other ranking factors that might prevent you from ranking well.

Ashot Nanayan

Search Engine Optimization @ Surfer

Ashot is the partnerships manager at Respona, the all-in-one PR and link building tool that combines personalization with productivity. Along with creating content, he looks for unique ways to build meaningful relationships with other bloggers.

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