Link Building to Improve Your SEO: A Beginner’s Guide

For over 10 years, we’ve been diligently working to help businesses improve their search engine optimisation. This article will focus on link building, which is a cornerstone of any business’s organic or local SEO. In the business world, regardless of the size of the company, you will often need to build high-quality links (do-follow and no-follow).

This guide will therefore walk you through the process and provide our expert knowledge in a clear and easy-to-understand way.
Shoppers and new businesses will often choose to link to your company because you might rank high on Google. Perhaps even you rank number 1.

Therefore, often you will be regarded by customers as the best at what you do.

However, what many businesses will realise is that once you have got your business onto the first page of Google, you will often need to be a very busy bee building backlinks.

 

Experienced link builders

We’ve been helping businesses for over 10 years, enabling them to generate more sales through search engine optimisation. Now, one of the time-consuming aspects is improving a business’s SEO to build backlinks. It can, in our experience, consume a significant portion of a client’s marketing budget, as it’s one of the most time-consuming aspects of improving a business’s SEO.

However, neglecting this aspect of improving your SEO often means that your company will not rank at the top.

Therefore, link building is something that must be done; however, it must be done to a high standard.

 

Our table of contents

• The basics of link building
• How can we build quality and authoritative company backlinks
• Which backlinks make a difference to a business’s search engine optimisation
• Why it’s essential to have a link-building strategy in place
• What are some of the best link-building tools that you use (we highly recommend Moz Pro)
• Why do many people hire Digital Tailors in South West England

The basics of link building

We understand that you may not fully understand how Google’s algorithm works.

Some of the most skilled marketing companies globally do not precisely understand how Google’s algorithm works. The reason is that the exact inner workings of Google’s algorithm are a closely guarded secret.

However, what might make it easier to understand is that Google uses an algorithm that is constantly being perfected, improved, and worked on to make it better. Therefore, the point we are trying to make here is simple: focus on quality. When enhancing your business’s SEO, always focus on quality.

For example, consider a retro computer games console for a moment. In your day, the Nintendo 64 was the bees’ knees. Fast-forward to today, and the gaming console is more powerful and significantly improved.

This is the same when it comes to Google’s algorithm.

Back in the day, we had Google PageRank; however, now, in 2025, we are starting to see AI being used to sort the results, just as gaming consoles have evolved, so has Google’s algorithm.

Back in the day, Google’s PageRank algorithm was a very early iteration of Google’s algorithm; it was like the Nintendo 64 – in its time.

However, the algorithm has evolved in terms of its operation.

To understand the importance of link building, we must revisit the early days, specifically the introduction of PageRank. In layperson’s terms, what happened then was that other websites linking to your company website were seen as a “vote of confidence”. A link was, therefore, like a thumbs-up, approval of your business; the more you obtained, the higher your business ranked.

Therefore, the more links you obtain, the more powerful your website is in terms of SEO.

However, many businesses attempted to manipulate SEO by purchasing links and spam links for as little as a few pounds.

Therefore, the algorithm could be somewhat manipulated; thus, Google requires a clampdown on businesses using spam, low-quality and purchased links.

This is when Google rolled out the Almighty Google Penguin algorithm update. Many businesses have disappeared overnight from Google because they have built spammy links.

The reason businesses would receive a link penalty is if they participated in purchasing low-quality links; they would then incur an algorithm penalty or a manual penalty from Google.

Why are backlinks an essential part of the SEO process?

First of all, you have to put yourself into Google’s shoes for a second

Google is presented with millions of new pages published every day, which have to be crawled and indexed.

Businesses globally are publishing content marketing at a rapid rate.

For the survival of some businesses, they must rank at the top of search engines like Google or Bing. Therefore, companies often have to produce and publish a large amount of content marketing.

Therefore, the company may have a dedicated team of content marketing writers, also known as copywriters, who produce content daily.

Businesses understand that they need to publish content marketing if they want to improve their Google rankings.

An essential aspect to remember is that good-quality content marketing can help you obtain good-quality backlinks.
Google’s algorithm works by taking into account various ranking factors.

Sometimes these are also referred to as Google ranking signals. Now, what is regarded as one of the primary ways Google uses to determine the quality of a business’s organic SEO is calculating the actual strength of a business’s backlinks.

Let’s summarise this neatly in one single paragraph: if your website has a long list of high-quality backlinks linking to you, you are most likely to rank on the first page of Google.

Businesses that have purchased rubbish links, links bought for a few quid, are likely to languish on page 10 of Google or worse, receive a Google Penguin link penalty.

 

Okay, enough of the suspense, how to go about building back?

You may read several articles that discuss how to improve your website’s authority and why it’s essential to review the authority of your company website. For example, a company’s backlink strength is calculated using a DA or “domain authority” score.

The reason is simple: a website, a business that has backlinks from respected other businesses, gains more authority.

Therefore, if a website has a high volume of quality links, it will likely have a high DA score.

But, hold your horses, don’t even though the back link is!

This explains clearly what backlinks are:

A link is simply a connection (a link) from one website to another; when you click on some text, called the “anchor text”, you are transported to the other website- this is called following a link.

The reason links are added is pretty straightforward: businesses often collaborate closely with other companies, such as suppliers. Therefore, if you make a product that includes a quality part or component, you may link to that supplier’s website.

For example, when you’re about to go on holiday, you book your flights on an airline’s website. Y
Once you finish making your booking, the website asks, ‘Would you also like to hire a car?’

They click the anchor text that says ‘Hire a Car’ and are directed to a local car hire company in the destination country.

This link is offered to help the customer, as they can now book a car much more simply after booking their flight on the airline’s website.
And therefore, the car hire website benefits from the incoming link because the airline has linked to it. Thus, when link building is done right, in a “white hat” way, it can help both the customer and the business’s SEO.

How do you go about building backlinks?

There are many ways to build links; you could choose to add a link, ask for a link, or request a backlink.

Here’s a snapshot of how you can build links; however, we would only recommend “earning links”.

 

You can build links in the following ways:

– Buying links
– Earning links
– Completing broken link building
– PR
– Outreach

 

What’s the hardest way to obtain a back?

We would say that the most challenging part is earning a backlink, but really, earning backlinks is the best way to obtain them.

Why was this so? Why do you only recommend earning backlinks?

The answer is quite simple; other methods of link building could be viewed as spam. It could be considered that you purchased the links, which is frowned upon. This could attract a Google penalty, and it could damage your search engine optimisation because it may be perceived as an attempt to manipulate your SEO by buying backlinks.

However, what you want to do is to link.

For example, suppose your business offers an excellent piece of content marketing that is both helpful and enables customers to solve a problem. In that case, you are likely to get linked to by other businesses.

The content marketing could range from how-to guides related to car repair to topics involving offering legal advice.

Other companies might want to choose the link because you have conducted market research; for example, you might have cited statistics that the company found interesting and related to their blog posts, so they cited your business as a source of those statistics.

There’s also a wide range of reasons why others want to link to your business.

This, therefore, involves writing content marketing, which is of excellent quality, just like the article that you are reading here.

Business directory links

It can be beneficial, especially if your focus is on improving your business’s local search engine optimisation to build some local backlinks.

These are often referred to as business directory links, and they can be easily obtained from sources such as the Yellow Pages.

However, we recommend building business citations, just enough to reinforce your company’s name, address and phone number. The number of citations you have, for example, NAP links from sources like Thomson Local, will help reinforce your company’s name, address, and phone number. Again, you need a considerable number of this type of link and NAP citations.

 

 

Outreach and asking for links

This often involves a lot of emails and perhaps phone conversations with other websites which are related to the website. For example, it could be a blog you have written about a particular brand of car, and how to change the oil of that car.

You might be a manufacturer of high-performance oil filters.

You might write a rather comprehensive article explaining how to change oil filters for a particular range of cars. Then you could write a high-quality piece of content marketing, which could be well-placed on another company’s website. Because you’re helping other businesses, readers and customers of our company will be interested in what you have to say as you dispense your knowledge about oil filters and related products.

Therefore, in return for your efforts in writing a detailed piece of content marketing on how to change the oil in their car, you can request a do-follow backlink from the publisher.

This is what is called a win-win situation; you’ve offered a high-quality piece of content marketing that the other company knows its audience will want to read.

Your efforts in writing, spanning approximately 2000 words, in dispensing your knowledge, you can then ask for a link back to, say, the homepage of your website.

 

What does link prospecting mean?

If you were to join an SEO agency as part of the team, they would likely have one or more link builders working for them. Because link building is such a critical part of the search engine optimisation process, as part of a large marketing agency, there will be a team of link builders.

However, their job is to analyse competitors’ backlink profiles, which can sometimes contain many thousands of links that they need to review line by line diligently, using, for example, Ahrefs’ backlink checking tool.

This is hard and tedious work because not all of those backlinks can be replicated.

However, some of them can be replicated, which means that they can contact those businesses with the ambition and aim of building a similar backing for their clients or the marketing company’s website. The purpose of this work is, therefore, simple: competitors are ranking higher than them because they have better backlinks; consequently, you can try to replicate some of those links.

It’s then simply a matter of seeing if you can replicate those links and whether you can also obtain high-quality links for your client, with the ambition of thereby ranking higher.

 

What is the skyscraper technique?

We think that this method is often overhyped in SEO and could lead to a possible waste of your time if you were to pursue it.

Essentially, the skyscraper link-building technique is defined as a page with numerous backlinks. However, the content marketing might have become outdated and stale, therefore offering obsolete advice.

Then, this technique dictates that you need to create a better piece of content marketing.

Then, after you have published a better article, you can contact all the websites that are linking to the other piece of content marketing and say, ‘Look at this; isn’t it better?’ Why don’t you link to me instead?

We believe that this technique is likely to fall on deaf ears, as businesses often don’t want to link to other companies solely because they have received an email telling them to do so.

What is far better is to link to or participate in outreach when a business wants a particular topic or subject covered.

 

Broken link building

Again, we believe this is another link-building method that is slightly overhyped and likely won’t yield the results that warrant investing a lot of time into it.

This method essentially means finding a page that receives a large number of links, but the page is no longer online, possibly due to a page error.

This, therefore, means that the link is broken because a piece of content marketing has been removed.

Therefore, the suggestion is that you then contact the company and ask them to link to your page, because the other link is broken.

We would place too much time and effort into this type of link building; for us, it is time-intensive compared to the benefits that it could potentially bring.

 

HARO and journalist requests –

Just as a journalist is doing a live broadcast, they often want to bring in an expert for their opinion live on air.
This is also true for content marketing, where, in exchange for your contributions to the article, you can often request a backlink in return.

 

Unlinked mention

Now, in our opinion, this is a compelling way to build backlinks.

Often scattered throughout the Internet, there will be many mentions of your brand and your company name.

Therefore, this presents an opportunity for you to contact those businesses and request that the brand mention be converted into a link back to your company website.

This gives you an example, let’s say that you run a restaurant and you were awarded a particularly prestigious award for your food.

Then, once you have been awarded this award, you can look at which bloggers and other companies have mentioned the Gold award you have won.

Then ask those companies to offer a link back to your website.

 

Should we purchase backlinks?

So, there’s an unequivocal answer to that question: you shouldn’t purchase backlinks.

The only reason businesses purchase a link or links is to try to fool Google’s algorithm, attempting to deceive Google’s algorithm into thinking that your search engine optimisation is stronger than it is

Therefore, businesses might try to cut corners and purchase backlinks.

You might think that’s a good idea, trying to buy, say, a hundred links, which might seem like a good idea, but it’s not.

However, buying links can cause a Google algorithmic penalty, which means that, in the flick of a switch, your website disappears from Google.

The reason this happens is simple: Google knows the websites that are selling links, often referred to as “link farms”.

Therefore, if you have a large number of links pointing to your website that originate from these link farms, which charge for links, it’s apparent that you have engaged in spam and low-quality link building.

This, therefore, means that if you have a lot of spammy links, your website will be removed from Google.

This is because a link penalty could have been applied to your website.

 

Why do you advocate for earning links as the best way of obtaining backlinks?

If you create quality content marketing, it can work for your business in two different ways.

Content marketing helps to make a website relevant.
For example, if you are writing content marketing about, say, “motorbikes,” you are already making your website relevant for relevant keywords about motorbikes.

There are also second benefits to this work, which, if helpful blog posts, helps people solve a problem. This can help a company accumulate backlinks.

What you often have to appreciate is that businesses that rank in the first position on Google may have a relatively high number of backlinks.

For example, it’s not uncommon for an excellent page to have over 1000 backlinks; therefore, this needs to be understood if you’re trying to rank higher than the current page on Google. The reason is quite simple: if you want to rank higher than that business on page one, you need better backlinks.

If you are competing with a page that has 1000 quality links, then it will be very hard to overtake that page.

Therefore, you do have to pick your fights

What is meant by that is that the competition has powerful backlinks; you have to be serious about whether you can compete with them.
With search engine optimisation, you have to be mindful of your time.

 

Which backlinks can genuinely make a significant impact?

Different types of backlinks will affect businesses’ search optimisation differently.

For example, a single back link from the BBC News could jump you up seven pages on Google.

Let us provide you with another example: suppose you run a solicitors’ practice, and there is a widely respected news website that thousands of solicitors in the United Kingdom enjoy reading and gaining news from. This is therefore a primary source for news in your particular industry.

Now, one single link from a website like that can often have a dramatic impact on a business’s organic search engine optimisation.
However, finding such links is akin to finding a needle in a haystack and is a challenging task.

 

Google E-EAT

If you’re thinking about starting work on improving your business’s search engine optimisation, you must begin by reading about Google’s E-EAT update. This stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Essentially, this is what Google quality evaluators are looking for when assessing the quality of businesses’ search optimisation.
How authoritative is your website?
The primary way to enhance a business’s authority is to gain backlinks. As we mentioned right at the start of this article, backlinks are still widely regarded as one of the most important ranking signals.

 

How do backlink tools calculate the value of a link?

Backlink building tools such as Ahrefs are used to measure a link’s domain rating (DR) or domain authority (DA).

 

Anchor text

For those unfamiliar with anchor text, it is simply the clickable text that follows a link. Now the anchor text is branded, for example, it could just mention your company name.

It can also be anchor text, which says ‘click here’.

Yet the anchor text can also be written descriptively; for example, it might mention Nike running trainers.

The descriptive anchor text indicates to search engines what the link is for.

However, just like building spam links, you can also damage your company’s SEO by over-optimising the anchor text, which can result in a link penalty in itself.

For example, your business often needs to rank highly on Google for, say, one main keyword.
Therefore, if you mention that keyword in the hundreds of anchor texts, this will result in a link penalty.

 

Placement of the link

Bill Slawski stated in 2010, after studying a Google patent, that the patent essentially explains the likelihood of a particular link being clicked on. For example, a link that’s more likely to be clicked on will often transfer more link authority. Therefore, the location of the link on the page determines its importance.

For example, if your link is positioned high on the page and in a main paragraph, it will pass more link equity.

However, links in the footer are generally considered less effective; therefore, a link that is prominently placed in the opening paragraph is likely to be clicked on more, receive more attention from readers, and thus is expected to pass and transfer authority to the linking page.

Competitor backlink research is essential for any article on backlink building, as it would be incomplete without discussing competitor backlink research.

We briefly discussed this earlier, but it is worth examining in more depth now.

Most marketing agencies find that the most effective way to build brand backlinks for a business is to conduct competitor backlink research.

This means identifying your main competitors and then examining their backlink profile to determine where they have obtained their links from.

SEO agencies globally utilise this method to build backlinks for their clients.

It can be very effective, the reason being that it identifies already established websites that are on the first page of Google; therefore, simply replicating those links can significantly boost your business SEO

Visit one of the top Bristol SEO agencies.

If your business is located in the South West, contact us. We are the SEO experts in Bristol.