The whole SEO activity is centered around link building. It is at the core and represents the pillar of good SEO. To get good results in your SEO activity good link-building effort is a must. It is always easy to handle your link-building effort by paying professionals to do it. Companies like the Link Department can always do a great and professional job. But it is important to have some knowledge and some good understanding of link building. Knowing about hyperlinks and the basics of link building is a necessity in today’s fast-paced internet-oriented business. Understanding SEO, its tools, hyperlinks, and even what aspects of a hyperlink are not important for SEO is valuable for your marketing effort.
A word on link building
Well, link building is any activity that is centered around creating a network of connections with other websites through hyperlinks. These hyperlinks can be inbound, outbound, or internal. For link building, these inbound links are the most important. Building a network of inbound links is link building. Creating this network improves the visibility of your website and improves your scoring and ranking. The more links you have the higher your rank will be as search engines verify your website through backlinks. But the higher rank and authority of inbound links the higher the value and rank of your own site.
So, link building is centered around getting a good portfolio of backlinks. Both the quantity and quality of these backlinks play a role and their balance is crucial for the success of link building and the SEO effort. To do this right it is important to understand hyperlinks, their elements, and their forms. It is also necessary to understand which aspects of a hyperlink are not important for SEO.
Understanding this will help you avoid costly mistakes. Concentrating on things that are not that important can be a waste of time and money. You invest an effort into it and it doesn’t produce any positive results. In addition, you can get spotted by Google and get penalized for bad link-building practices or Black hat SEO.
What is not important
Many companies tend to try anything to improve their SEO and rankings. This often causes them to make mistakes and take actions that can hurt their webpage in the long run. Many dive into black hat SEO tactics that are not excepted by search engines. Many on the other hand invest time, money, and effort into hyperlink elements that are not that important. In the first case, they risk being severely penalized by Google. In the second case, they wasted time and resources without too many results. Knowing what is not important is the key to proper link building.
Basically, as Google tries to provide the best experience for the user everything that does not contribute to this is not important. If your link building doesn’t provide or add value to the user then it is not important and you should avoid it. Some aspects of a hyperlink are not important for SEO and here is a short overview:
- Artificial links
- NoFollow links
- Quality external links
Artificial links
Getting inbound links is a goal of link building. The more the better. The higher authority and quality of inbound linking sites the better. However, many websites try to artificially generate a rich portfolio of inbound links. They are usually from non-reputable web pages and social media websites.
Generating these links is called a black hat SEO tactic that search engines like Google penalizes. This means that through unethical behavior and activity a website tries to increase its rank with Google. Once Google notices this activity it can penalize the webpage by removing it from the search result page. Avoiding this kind of tactic today is important because this kind of activity is bad. You should always strive to get links from high authority web pages which will increase the credibility of your content.
NoFollow links
As we said, some aspects of a hyperlink are not important for SEO. How do nofollow links fall into that? Well, once you create an internal link on your webpage you are essentially referring a user to other websites. These are outbound links that may be useful for the user and provide it with additional high-quality content. However, once the user uses this outbound link many website owners believe that they are giving up a part of their page rank to the sites they are referring users to. To prevent this they insert a nofollow clause in their outbound links.
This means that with any click on the outbound link the page tells Google not to follow this outbound link. In this way essentially the site we refer users to does not get the vote of confidence and does not get a contribution to its rank and scoring. In some cases these tactics are acceptable. But, Google may consider them black hat SEO. If used on all outbound links it will be unnatural and it will seem as the website is hoarding page rank. If Google detects this practice it can penalize a website. So, having a good balance in this aspect is important.
Quality external links
In addition to having inbound links, it is important to have outbound links. They provide added value to your audience, users, or customers. Through them, you can provide a way of easily finding valuable information and elaboration on certain topics. They can provide additional and complementary data to your content. Providing outbound links to high authority and quality websites is therefore important.
When Google finds this behavior it assigns a high value to these websites. It can also sort you into a group of similar high-quality web pages. But if you tend to link to low-quality web pages you can place yourself in this lower category. So, providing quality content and outbound links is important to you, your user, and Google rankings. Doing the opposite is the practice that is not important for your SEO and that search engines do not accept.
A quick summary
There is much to know and learn about link building and hyperlinks. Having the knowledge is the first step in quality handling of your hyperlinks, link building, and SEO. One of the first steps you should go through is hyperlinks. Understanding what they are and what is important and what aspects of a hyperlink are not important for SEO is a good basis for having a quality and efficient link-building effort.