What is link building?

Link building is a key element of search engine optimization (SEO) and refers to both the internal and external linking strategy of a website. The aim is to optimize the link popularity of a website in order to improve its ranking in the SERPs.

Internal link building refers to the creation of links between different pages on your website. This can help to improve navigation on the website, increase visitor dwell time and help search engines to better understand the structure and content of the website. It is important here that instead of the "Learn more" tests or buttons often used in the past, speaking link texts are used, for example: Learn more about link building here. On the one hand, this makes it easier for search engine crawlers to read the information, which places it in an overall context. On the other hand, this is also helpful for accessibility.

External link building, on the other hand, means that other websites link to your own. This can include entries in web catalogs, directories, forums, blog and guest posts, etc. These so-called backlinks increase the visibility and ranking of the website in search engines such as Google.

It should be noted that search engines use different factors to evaluate backlinks. These include the following:

• Authority of the linking site: Backlinks from highly authoritative sites, such as established news sites or educational institutions, usually have a greater positive influence on the ranking.
• Relevance of the content: Google rates links higher that come from thematically related and relevant sites.
• Naturalness of the link profile: A diverse link profile that comes from a variety of sources is beneficial.
• Dofollow links: By default, all links are "dofollow", which means that search engines take them into account when calculating rankings.
• Link position and context: Links that are placed in the main content of a page and in a thematically appropriate context tend to carry more weight than links in the footer or page navigation.
• Anchor text: If the anchor text of the backlink is relevant to the content of the target page, this can also contribute positively to the relevance of the backlink.

It is important that backlinks are no longer bought, but should be created naturally. Google can recognize and potentially penalize unnatural link patterns, such as sudden, inexplicable increases in backlinks. Generating qualitative links as part of an online marketing strategy requires a lot of time and resources, but is worthwhile in the long term in order to optimize the ranking of your own website.