Based on what I have learned building links in the past 5 years, I put together this beginners guide to link building so that you too could learn what makes them important and how to build them.
This guide covers the basics of link building and backlinks. I discuss how links are built and some of the best practices I've learned building hundreds of links for clients in different industries.
According to Wikipedia, link building is the effort to increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website with the goal of increasing search rankings.
Most common strategies to acquire backlinks include content marketing, email outreach, broken link building, exchanging links, buying links, and PR campaigns.
Link building focuses mostly on creating dofollow links. These links pass link equity, unlike nofollow links.
Backlinks act as votes of confidence for your content. They signal to search engines that your site is trustworthy and your content is valuable. If your content is valuable, it ranks higher in search.
In our survey of SEO experts, 89.7% identified backlinks as an important factor for search engine ranking.
Link building is important because of the PageRank algorithm. Instead of solely relying on the content on the page to assess its quality, Google looks at how many other websites link to that page.
The more and the higher quality backlinks a page has, the more valuable the content is assessed, and it should therefore be ranked higher.
Semrush's 2024 study on ranking factors, highlighted 8 backlink factors that were important for ranking.
For businesses, higher keyword rankings means more traffic to the website and eventually more business. Backlinko's study on click traffic found the #1 ranking result gets 27.6% of the clicks. Top 5 rankings combined get 69.1% of the clicks and the rest are distributed among the 6-20 rankings.
Because of this traffic distribution, we often recommend to build links to pages with keywords that rank in 3-10 for quick wins.
How fast link building affects your search rankings will depend on the amount and quality of links you build. It also depends on how competitive your industry and target keywords are.
We've seen ranking and traffic increase in 3-4 months in our customer cases. Some as fast as 3 weeks if the customer has had an existing brand, lots of brand mentions, and good quality content.
For low competition keywords (we use Ahref's KD to measure this), you only need 5-10 links if the keyword has a KD of 0-5.
The earlier you start link building the better as SEO can take some time.
There's different backlink types when some website is pointing to your website. And then there's external and internal links that sit on your website. Each has in impact on SEO.
You can get a link from several places as long as it's on the web. I put together a list of the 10 most common backlink types:
Editorial links: Links placed naturally within high-quality, relevant content on a website. These are often earned through creating valuable content that others want to reference.
Guest post links: Links earned by writing articles to another website, usually within your niche, to provide value and gain backlinks. From my experience, the industry standard in link building is to get 3 links from a guest post so you can exchange the other two if you have collaborations with other websites.
Digital PR backlinks: Links earned through public relations efforts such as media coverage, press releases, or influencer outreach. These help increase visibility and domain authority.
HARO backlinks: Links gained through the "Help a Reporter Out" (HARO) platform, where businesses provide expert commentary for journalists in exchange for a backlink.
Link insertions: Backlinks inserted into existing content on a website, typically through outreach to website owners or editors.
Broken backlinks: Links pointing to non-existent or broken pages, which can be fixed by reaching out to the site owner with a suggestion to replace the broken link with a relevant one.
Reciprocal backlinks: A type of backlink where two websites agree to link to each other. They can be effective but shouldn't be used excessively as Google can detect the pattern. ABC exchanges are much more common and it's what we use for our link building clients such as SSH.
UGC backlinks: Links placed within content created by users or customers, like reviews, forum posts, or comments on a website.
Directory listing backlinks: Links from online business directories or niche-specific directories. These help with local SEO and can also increase credibility and visibility.
Webinar and podcast backlinks: Links earned from hosting or being featured in webinars or podcasts. These often come from the show's website or the podcast description. It's recommended to spell out your domain when you guest a podcast because then the transcription tools can pick it up.
Badge backlinks: Links placed within badges or awards displayed on websites. Websites often link to the source that issued the badge. This is a common strategy used by G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot.
PBN backlinks: Backlinks from a network of websites created solely for the purpose of passing link equity. While they can be effective, they are considered a black-hat SEO practice and can lead to penalties. At The Backlink Company, we don't recommend building PBN backlinks.
Widget links: Links embedded in interactive elements like widgets or tools that other websites can place on their pages. For example review tools and form tools often act as widget links. They can grow your domain metrics fast but are less effective for ranking increases based on my experience.
Service links: Links generated by businesses providing a service, where they link back to their site as part of the service offering, such as through client pages or case studies.
Internal link is just a link from one of your own page to another page on your site. However, they're very powerful because you can use them to control the link equity you receive from backlinks.
Think of internal links as water valves that you can adjust. Link equity is the water that flows from other websites to yours, and you can direct that link equity (water) to the pages you really want to promote in search results.
Most of the time you're only able to build links to blog articles and other high-value resources. You then need to interlink those to your money pages (landing pages, service pages, and case studies) so that
A) the people can navigate to your offers, and
B) your offer pages start ranking for relevant keywords as well.
External links are links you link to other websites. The are backlinks for them. External links help your SEO if you help answer the user's search query, for example, by linking to an interesting related research resource.
Several factors impact backlink quality: authority, relevance, placement, and attributes. And many more that we cover in our deep dive guide to backlink quality.
You can check backlinks by looking at domain-level metrics. However, I suggest evaluating them on three levels: page, domain, and network. This way, you get a complete picture of their quality.
Link building is also about balancing link velocity with quality so it doesn't make sense to analyze all the metrics under the sun. The perfect link doesn't exist.
Read that again.
Over time, you'll build your own process for link building and you'll find a balance of quality and how many links you can build. At the end of the day it's about bringing ranking results as fast as possible sustainably.
Google's PageRank algorithm is not public, but platforms like Ahrefs and Semrush have created their own metrics to assess domain authority.
Most link builders that I have met and built links with use Ahref's Domain Rating. It's also what we use for clients of our link building service.
While relevancy is important, without high authority your backlink is going to be very little value.
A high authority page gets lots of backlinks. Getting a link from a page like that would be extremely valuable.
However, from my personal experience I know that most website owners don't want to link out from their most valuable pages.
When it comes to links, relevancy matters as well as authority.
In fact, can you imagine getting a link to your AI note-taking SaaS website from a food blog? Neither can I. For our AI note-taking SaaS client,
Relevancy matters both on domain and page level.
On domain level, the website linking to yours needs to be somehow semantically connected. Eg. you get a link from another AI productivity tool. The trick here is that you're not going to get a link from a direct competitor which would be super relevant. This makes it near impossible to get 100% domain level relevancy.
How about page relevancy?
It's much easier to get a link from a relevant page, unless the target the exact same topic as your page. A relevant page placement might be from, let's say, a blog post discussing "Future trends in productivity" to your page on "How to take notes using AI during meetings".
Where the link is on the page also page a big role in how much link equity it passes on.
A link from a website footer is not going to be as powerful as a link from an article.
Additionally, it matters how high on the page that link appears. The higher the better because it signals higher importance.
Based on my experience exchanging hundreds of links, however, it's usually not possible to place a link in the intro paragraph of a page. This guideline is shared by many webmasters.
Anchor text is the text section a user clicks on in a link.
Google uses anchor texts to understand what the target page is about so it's important to optimize it as well.
Overuse of the same anchor will lead to an unnatural looking anchor profile so it's good to vary the anchors when you do link building.
The more natural the anchor in the paragraph text the better backlink it is. Exact matches don't matter anyway.
Dofollow links carry the most link authority and are have a higher impact on rankings than nofollow or other types. That's why most of link building revolves around building dofollow links in my experience.
Link builders don't usually use sponsored or ugc attributes in their links because they devalue the link.
All of the tactics mentioned here are tactics we have successfully done for clients - even buying links according to the clients wishes.
Depending on the project you're working on, you might need to change tactics. For example, we've found that the gray area industries that you're not allowed to advertise on Google almost exclusively deal in paid link acquisition.
This is a brief version of how to build backlinks. For a more comprehensive guide, check our guide on how to build backlinks in 2025.
Let's dive in.
Earning links is the most sustainable and ethical way to build your backlink profile. It involves creating content or assets that are valuable and relevant to your target audience, which will naturally attract links from others.
The down-side is that this tactic takes the longest and requires you to have really great link-worthy content. A lot of people like to link to stats posts, but your less important pieces are not going to attract any naturally because the topic has been covered by hundreds of other websites.
Here’s how you can approach earning links:
The backbone of earning links is high-quality content. Create content that people naturally want to link to. Some strategies include:
This is one of the most common methods to acquire backlinks, but it’s important to approach this correctly. Asking for links involves reaching out to other website owners or bloggers in your niche and asking them to link to your content.
Here's the key to success with this method:
While this is a more proactive approach to link building, it still falls within the scope of earning links.
Guest posting involves writing articles or blog posts for other websites in your niche, and within those posts, you include links to your own content.
Here's the process:
From my experience, directories work well if you have a fairly new website. Google probably expects you to be on some directories if you're a legitimate business.
Using directory links early on grows your domain rating, making your website more valuable for exchange with other link builders.
Buying links is a black-hat SEO tactic that is heavily discouraged by search engines, especially Google. While it may be tempting to purchase links to speed up your SEO efforts, it comes with some risks.
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While it's good to use a combination of tools for link building, all these tools come at a price. If you're a solo-marketer in a startup and this is your first time doing link building, I recommend you to not buy all the expensive licenses.
Now, here's the link building tools we have found useful.
Ahrefs is arguably the most powerful backlink analysis platform available, thanks to its massive link index and rich set of filters. Ahrefs is our main SEO tool at The Backlink Company. We use Domain Rating and Ahrefs reported traffic to build our links. We know DR can be gamified but there's other ways to check for bad actors.
Semrush offers end-to-end link building from our experience. It includes tools for identifying gaps to managing outreach campaigns. However, the feature we really like is the Backlink Network Graph.
Moz is beginner-friendly but powerful for qualifying link opportunities and understanding domain strength.
Each tool serves a different purpose in your link building workflow. Here's the overlap of what these tools are capable of:
| Task | Best Tools |
|---|---|
| Backlink discovery | Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz |
| Outreach prospect list generation | Semrush, Ahrefs |
| Authority scoring | Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush |
| Broken link building | Ahrefs, Semrush |
| Link reclamation | Ahrefs, Semrush |
| Competitor link gap analysis | Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz |
| Toxicity evaluation | Moz, Semrush |
Here's 3 case studies:
SSH is a cybersecurity company specializing in secure remote access and network management solutions. With a growing demand for cybersecurity tools, they were looking to improve their visibility in a competitive market.
Laatukoru is a premium jewelry brand based in Finland, offering high-quality, custom-made pieces. They wanted to expand their online presence and gain recognition within a competitive luxury jewelry niche.
AI Note-Taking is a SaaS product that helps businesses and individuals by using artificial intelligence to generate accurate meeting notes and summaries. They needed to stand out in a crowded SaaS and productivity tools space.
Black hat link building refers to manipulative tactics used to acquire backlinks that violate search engine guidelines.
In fact, over 60% of penalties imposed by Google are related to unnatural links, according to industry reports.
Common black hat methods include buying links, using link farms, and leveraging PBNs. These tactics often involve obtaining backlinks from low-quality or irrelevant sites to artificially inflate a website’s authority.
PBNs, in particular, have gained attention as a major tactic in black hat link building. In 2015, Google’s Penguin update made it clear that manipulative link building, including the use of PBNs, would result in substantial ranking drops or penalties.
Other manipulative methods include comment spam, content scraping, and link cloaking, where links are disguised or hidden to pass link equity. Websites engaging in black hat link building often experience drops in search visibility of up to 50% or more once penalized.
AI will impact link building by changing the way we write content, discover link opportunities and placements, and create tools for ourselves. The change is already happening and we're already using some of the new ways of working in our link building service.
A big cost factor in link building used to be the cost of content. Now AI can write a lot of blog posts rather quickly. On the contrary, website owners are not going to accept surface level guest posts anymore because they could just create those themselves. It's possible that outreach as a link building strategy will go away with AI.
When link building, discovering where to place your link has always been manual. You would go through a website to find the most relevant placement for you. In the future, AI can find that placement for you and it will be the most relevant placement.
SEO is full of SaaS tools. We use a SaaS tool to manage our and monitor the links we've built. We can now create our own SaaS tool at almost no cost to do the same. And we can customize the tools to fit our use cases for link building better.