Link Building Data and Tools

Link building is a process whereby you ask or incentivise another website owner, or a writer for a specific website, to post an article, image or other piece of content on their site and include a hypertext link to a page on your website.
It has been used by search engine optimisation professionals for the past twenty years or so to increase the perceived popularity of their sites and improve the standing of their sites in Google therefore increasing their rankings and organic traffic and sales.

Conventional wisdom amongst leading SEOs is that links are still a major ranking factor alongside website performance, content, Rank Brain and so on.  

Even Google recognises in its Webmaster guidelines that webmasters can improve the ranking of their sites by gaining natural authoritative links from high quality sites.

It is likely that the importance of links has diminished over the past decade as Google has sought to find other ways to rank websites less prone to manipulation.

Forgetting Google and other search engines for a moment; it’s certainly a good thing from a marketing perspective for trusted sites with real visitors to link to you, as it will bring you real visitors that might buy from you.

This is a difficult question to answer because it depends on a variety of factors, including your industry, the competitiveness of your keywords, and your website’s authority.

However, a good rule of thumb is that you need around 50-100 backlinks to rank in the top 10 for most competitive keywords. And, you need around 1,000-2,000 backlinks to rank in the top 5.

But, don’t forget that backlinks are only one part of the equation. You also need to have high-quality content and a strong SEO strategy.

Creating backlinks is an essential part of SEO.

There are a number of ways to create backlinks, but not all of them are effective.

In order to create backlinks that will help your SEO, you need to follow a few simple steps.

The first step is to find high-quality websites that are relevant to your niche.

Then, you need to find a way to contact the webmaster or editor of those websites.

You can do this by email, social media, or by submitting a guest post.

Once you have contacted the webmaster, you need to offer them something of value in exchange for a backlink.

This could be a free eBook, a discount on your services, or any other type of offer that is relevant to their website.

This list is not exhaustive, for more comprehensive suggestions please check out our SEO guides.

There are lots of different link building techniques that you can utilise.  The best is surely, just publishing regular good quality content that your audience loves and are inspired to share, creating lots of natural links and referrals from relevant websites in your niche and on social media.  

Here’s some suggested options that are relevant in 2022;

1. Great high-quality content and make it is easy to share (promote it if necessary)

2. Ensure your PR team understands how to utilise its PR campaigns to generate relevant links from trusted sites

3. Target sites and authors linking to many competing sites in your niche

4. Become a trusted authority by writing quality articles and providing industry commentary on major sites in your space

5. Offer free tools and calculators that other can link to or embed on their sites

There are a few ways that competitors can steal your backlinks. One of the most common methods is to use link poaching tools. These tools allow you to search for websites that have linked to your competitors' websites. You can then contact these websites and ask them to link to your website instead.

Another common method is to use link-building tools to find broken links on other websites.

You can then reverse engineer the websites that are linking to these broken pages and let them know that the resource they are linking to no longer exists.  If you have a suitable replacement piece of content, then you can politely suggest that they change their external link to your site instead.

Again, this depends on a variety of factors. But, a good rule of thumb is to aim for 1-3 backlinks per day.

If you’re getting more than 3 backlinks per day, some people say you may be risking a Google penalty.  We don't think it's that cut and dried.  

Make sure you are publishing new link worthy content - otherwise a rapid increase in links to old, out-dated or stale content might look odd and could raise potential red flags.

Again, this depends on a variety of factors. Some people would say, a good rule of thumb is to aim for 500-1,000 quality inbound links.

But, it entirely depends on the industry you are competing in and who you are competing against on a landing page vs landing page level.