Links on the Internet form a relationship between pages and sites that are hugely important to both search engines and marketers. Search engines, like Google, use links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher's query.
If you are new to link building, we highly recommend starting out with our Beginner’s Guide to SEO with Growing Popularity and Links.
While link building can be hugely beneficial for SEO, it's important to stay up-to-date on the latest practices. Below you'll find the most recent posts from the Moz Blog. In addition, we've selected a few quality resources that deserve particular attention.
The Beginner's Guide to Link Building : Everything you need to get started with link building.
The Professional’s Guide to SEO : Professional’s guide to link building and link earning tactics written by SEO expert Paddy Moogan.
Link Building Tactics : There are lots of ways to get links. This guide shows you tactics applicable to almost all websites.
The Rules of Link Building : You need links, but building bad ones can mean trouble. You need to know the rules!
Link Building: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Learn the basics of link building for absolute beginners, all in 10 minutes!
As part of a small business, I always find it very frustrating when I read articles about the ‘best ways to build links to your website.’ What I get frustrated about is that if you are a business with very low influence and you create this type of new, unique content, it can be quite a struggle to get it in front of those you wish to see it. With this in mind, I thought I would share the methods that I have found to be most effective for all us ‘little guys.’
Since the inception of Penguin and Panda, SEOs have been shifting from link building strategies that may have involved anything from mass article submissions, social bookmarking, directory submissions in bulk, purchasing links, as well as other frowned upon strategies and have recently jumped on the guest posting bandwagon.
Along with quality content ideas and relationship building, the Blogger Outreach Equation can help place your content in the hands of top tier publishers to get your company's message and thought leadership out to the masses. Kelsey Libert lays out the steps to show how the Blogger Outreach Equation can work for you.
This post is not about finding and getting niche directory links or about getting guest posts. It is about going after the big fish. Whatever it takes to get the link from a big site, the basis will be an understanding of the website that you want a link from and its aims. In the same way as you need to understand a customer to sell something to them, in order to get a link from a website you need to understand that site incredibly well.
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![How Blog Commenting Can Still Be a Healthy Part of Your Post-Penguin SEO Strategy [Case Study]](https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/images/blog/banners/link-building-caa8312_2021-03-30-214534.png?w=1180&h=400&auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=crop&dm=1617140734&s=84cd09e5590d1310a4840f19f5b58653)
This is a true SEO story. One of my daily tasks is to find, visit and sometimes write comments on blogs that are related to the two different companies for which I do in-house SEO. Now, I am not talking about using some cheezy interface that serves up blogs and tells me how many words I need to write and then takes my keywords and turns them into anchor text and leaves them as the comment author's name. That's not what I'm talking about.
For many years, content was treated by SEO professionals with anything but regal regard. Often relegated to subordinate duties – or banished altogether – in favor of aggressive link building strategies, King Content’s ascendency to the crown was delayed.
If you work with local businesses, you have seen first-hand the impact of the localized universal results that Mike Ramsey covered in his post on the Venice update. If you can build a solid local link profile, you can rank organically for universal search terms with local intent in your vertical.
Link building is not completely a thing of the past, but definitely is thought about differently than it was. Link building now is more of a relationship building effort. The same way that building links through commenting is now comment marketing. Dare I bring you back to Rand's whiteboard Friday on the topic?
But what do you think? Will today's linkbuilding strategies last? Are SEOs who use these tactics likely to cause their clients to get penalized? And more importantly, are poor quality SEOs destroying small businesses?
The “hack day” is a popular and effective practice used by developers and designers alike to quickly ship new products with minimal administrative overhead. In this post, I'll walk you through the steps we take at Distilled when hosting our hack days and help you apply them to your own business.
Guest blogging has become a common link building tactic. The concept is a good one. Provide a blogger with something they can use (content), and in return, they give you a link. In practice, it's not always that smooth. Good blogs get approached all the time with free content offers.
Over the years, we’ve checked off a host of SEO to-dos, including an on-site keyword strategy, fresh website content and product descriptions, an active company blog, and even a Twitter page. Although these initiatives have driven traffic to our site, customer engagement is a challenge. To take the next step in our SEO efforts (with a primary goal to increase inbound links and improve search engine rankings), we knew we needed to put on our thinking caps. After holding several brainstorming sessions, we came up with a new campaign: a Custom Lanyard Design Contest.
Guest blogging is not a strategy, and it’s not a generic solution that can be applied to every client or every part of your site. Guest posts can be an effective supplemental tactic to a fully-formed strategy, but giving this tactic center stage is a recipe for frustration and inevitable defeat.
There have been a few link building articles I've read that have included these four words: "link building is tough." Since April (post-Penguin), I think many SEOs and link builders will agree that it's tougher than ever, with Google placing more emphasis on natural links. This is especially tough for link builders, as even via white-hat methods, not all links are arguably 'natural,' and if a site was doing fine purely through receiving natural links, then it may not necessarily need link builders to work on it at all!