Is link building still needed?

 Search engines have never stopped rewarding pages that receive a good number of inbound links. Each external link received is interpreted, in fact, as a recommendation, a vote in favor of that resource expressed by those who have consulted and found it useful. Since the Google PageRank formula was unveiled, it has become clear, however, that not all the backlinks that a web page receives have the same value for ranking purposes.

The more the incoming links are relevant to the content and topics covered within the page and in general on the website, the more relevant they are for positioning purposes. Search engines would also and above all take into account the origin of the links, giving more weight to those that originate from reliable, authoritative sources, as well as once again "on the subject" with the subject matter. In short, link building is still needed and it is Google, in the Search Console guidelines, to suggest to those who use it to make sure that other sites contain links to their own. Today, therefore, it is increasingly a question of actively working in order to obtain quality backlinks.

You need to focus on content to get quality backlinks

The best and only formally accepted way by search engines to get quality backlinks to your pages is to create content that other sites cannot help but link to. The more the content is valuable, updated and in-depth, original and containing information difficult to find elsewhere, in fact, the more naturally the other sites in the sector will have an interest in taking it up and recommending it to their readers. It is easier to earn links of course - there is in fact a subtle difference between link earning and link building - especially when creating multimedia content (photos, videos, podcasts, etc.), infographics, webinars, small widgets and applications that require a certain expertise and a certain investment of time and resources that not everyone has available and which, for this reason, represent fundamental resources for other sites to be hosted internally.

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How to do link building effectively?

Committing to disseminating your top content can only help if the goal is to obtain quality backlinks. There are some practices - which some call “gray hat SEO” - which, while certainly not rewarded by search engines, continue not to be penalized.

You could carry out a search using the keywords for which you intend to have your page positioned, for example, to find out which are the most relevant sites for your sector or those to which your competitors are aiming for link building and in a second time to contact them, make themselves known, offer them a selection of contents in line with the topics they deal with most frequently and that they might be interested in linking to.

If you do this you may not have negotiating power over a key aspect when it comes to getting quality backlinks like choosing the right anchor text. The string of words used to "anchor" the hyperlink is also used by Google to identify the topic of the page and how related are the resource in question and the external links present; Thus, the ideal would be for the anchor text to contain the keywords for which you intend to position yourself, but this is not a controllable aspect when others decide if and how to link their pages.

The alternative is to propose press releases, advertorials, guest posts and posts for corporate blogs, quotes and quotes and pre-packaged and ready for publication to the sites of your interest, where you can directly enter the address to receive the desired backlink and anchor text. Being good at digital PR serves in this case to make sure that the editors and managers of the sites that republish their contents do not replace the rel = dofollow attribute with the rel = nofollow one, a practice that is now increasingly widespread when you are not sure of the reliability of the linked site.

More generally, digital PR helps to gain visibility to your content and to improve the reputation and authority of your domain, increasing the likelihood that other sites will naturally be led to link to its pages. Among the practices to be avoided as much as possible if your goal is to obtain quality backlinks, however, there are subscribing to special lists and directories or, even worse, exchanging and buying and selling links: search engines claim to penalize them. .