Link building basics: where to get natural links for a site?

Every website owner at least once in their life had to deal with the term search engine promotion or search engine optimization. Those who have already plunged into the wilds of SEO (from the English. Search Engine Optimization) know that the most difficult thing in this process is finding quality links for the site. You can spend a huge budget on creating the fastest / high-quality / beautiful / convenient site, but, alas, it will not work to conquer the TOP only due to bright buttons and an ideal source code.

If you analyze organic results for any of the commercial queries in Yandex or Google, you will see that any of the sites found are linked from several hundred to several thousand other sites (the so-called link donors).

To analyze the link profile of any site, there are many services. Among the free ones, one can single out the site – Linkpad (although the data in it may be outdated), as well as the Ahrefs service. The last one for $99 (plus VAT) will allow you to get the entire history of the desired site from the appearance of the project to the present day.

Search engine representatives tell us year after year that links should be natural and appear without active participation on the part of the webmaster, i.e. when users themselves share information about your site in social networks, on forums, on their blog, etc. But it’s one thing when your site is a collection of jokes with kittens, and quite another is a complex B2B topic, like the wholesale sale of concrete or SIP panels.

If you do not resort to active link building (i.e. link building), it will take more than one decade to overtake competitors, and you need to take into account that your competitors will also not stand still.

But to paraphrase an old advertising slogan, not all links are created equal. Moreover, posting a large number of links from the so-called “link dumps” (that is, sites of dubious content that sell thousands of links to everyone) can not only not be beneficial, but also drag your site under the filter of search engines with a complete loss of traffic from the search. Therefore, always be guided by the rule: less is better, but better.

What are the criteria for a quality link donor?

There are many different guidelines for selecting links and link donors, but they all boil down to these three basic rules in one way or another:

It is also very important to avoid sudden spikes in the purchase of links: the increase should be smooth, constant and as natural as possible. This will show the search engines that the site is developing and is being constantly and painstakingly worked on.

An example of a correct link profile — the chart grows smoothly, there are no sharp spikes.

But there are some problems – it is clear that there were one-time attempts to increase the link mass, as a result, the site was abandoned and the graph went down. Such a picture should be avoided.

A few words need to be said about the correspondence between the theme of the donor and your site. It may be due to the many myths surrounding SEO, but some SEOs take it too literally: “if I sell small breed dog food, then the site you need to buy a link from is a site dedicated to small breed dogs, everything else is bad.”

Of course, the closer the theme of the donor, the better. However, in practice, such sources can be counted on the fingers of one hand of Homer Simpson. Therefore, do not neglect good sites around the topic, women’s communities, popular groups, etc. Various “female-parent” forums can show especially good results. As a rule, these are very visited sites, where there are many potential and active audiences. Practice has shown that in such communities, women discuss almost everything in a row – from choosing an air conditioner for a country house to the aforementioned dog food. And this is quite natural and, most importantly, it works for your promotion. Users of such forums actively follow links and share their experience. Do not miss the chance to get a quality link because of any myths.

The popular parent forum baby.ru has over 12 million users per month!

How to set up a link building process for your site?

There are three ways to solve this problem:

You need to decide for yourself which method is right for you. It all depends on the availability of certain competencies and experience, as well as on the amount of free time and money.

If such terms as “trust”, “anchor”, “x”, “ags”, “nepot” make you think, you should at least entrust the work to a professional. It will not be superfluous to also conduct a regular audit of the work of this specialist, with the help of other specialists. If you have not yet achieved visible results, at least you will be able to understand how things are going in general.

In the case of independent work, you will have to not only understand all the intricacies of optimization, but also spend a lot of time searching for sites, “pumping” profiles (after all, in order for users to trust your opinion, you need to have a reputation), as well as endless correspondence and communication (both on forums and in groups, and by mail, if we are talking about direct agreements). Get ready for the fact that you can spend a whole day preparing a profile, and your link will simply be deleted by a moderator or active links will be completely disabled on the forum. It won’t be overly dramatic to say that this job is not for the faint of heart.

Link building with “LinkBuilder”

The Linkbuilder service appeared in 2014. Every day, not only new users come to us who want to promote their site, but also candidates for the vacancy of a link specialist. Statistics showed that only 1 out of 100 people is able to perform this painstaking work, while only 1 out of 10 capable people can stay to work on a permanent basis. Thus, only 1 person per 1000 new users stays with us for more than 6 months. Needless to say, how much time was spent to assemble your team of specialists?

Of course, our strict rules and very demanding moderators (specialists who check each completed work according to the checklist) are partly to blame for this, but still the main factor is the laboriousness of the work.

Now we will briefly describe how to launch a promotion in the Linkbuilder service.

After registering in the system, you need to add a new site for promotion:

Immediately after adding a site, the system will analyze it, select recommended queries and landing pages, and also calculate the promotion budget for each query.

An important point: the quality of the selected queries directly depends on how popular your project is in the search at the moment. If the site is new, the system may pick up not quite relevant queries. This does not mean that they should be promoted. You can remove them and add the ones you want. We recommend promoting at least 30 requests at a time. The bigger, the better.

Having decided on the list of requests, be sure to check the assigned pages. It is important that the conditional query “buy Nike shoes” is linked to the appropriate page on your site. Otherwise, the promotion will be ineffective. If you like some new request, for which there is no separate page on the site, create it and make it at least as good as your competitors. Don’t promote all queries to the home page – this is also inefficient (unless, of course, we are talking about the main queries of your business, like “online sports shoes store”).

(to edit the page, click on it)

For each request, the system calculates the recommended budget per month. If you are determined to compete for a specific request, we recommend that you do not deviate from the calculated budget value by more than 30%. But a more competent decision would be to choose those queries for which there are already positions in the TOP-20. So you can get the coveted traffic from the search faster. If there are no such queries, choose the queries with the highest Wordstat frequency (FR in the query table) at the lowest budget, so that the cost of the traffic received is minimal in the end. Data in tables can be sorted.

We also recommend that information requests be excluded from the promotion list. Such requests, as a rule, do not bring buyers. For example, if you’re promoting pizza delivery, queries like “how to make your own pizza” or “how to choose your pizza dough” should be avoided.

In the screenshot, we highlighted queries worth running in green, information queries in red, and non-selected queries are already in the TOP-10. However, the query “hot pizza delivery” will not hurt to pull it up in the TOP-3, now it is in 8th place in Yandex.

A few more words about the promotion budget per month. Even if you are not constrained by funds, you should not pour huge amounts of money into the link budget right from the start. Remember what we said a little earlier – when buying links, naturalness is important. This is especially true for young sites that do not have a large number of incoming links. A sharp spike in link mass (also called a “link explosion”) can negatively affect your site, up to the imposition of a filter.

Therefore, if your site is less than 1 year old, we recommend starting with the most “simple” queries with a total budget of no more than 10,000 rubles per month. As the link mass grows, you can launch new queries, increasing the link budget from 10 to 30% per month.

As soon as you reach the desired positions, we recommend leaving a minimum budget (around 5000 rubles per month) to maintain the effect of naturalness (remember that the link mass should grow, albeit slowly). Also keep in mind that over time, links can “fall off” due to the same natural reasons – sites are closed, sold, content changes, etc. Yes, we place all links indefinitely and give a 90-day guarantee against deletion, but you need to understand that eternity in SEO is a very relative concept.

After you decide on the requests, replenish the balance for the required amount and start promoting the site.

Some more tips

Link building is an important step in website promotion. But don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You must not only outperform competitors in terms of backlink quality, but also not be inferior in all other parameters, whether it be site loading speed or availability of a mobile version (the share of mobile users is growing every year).

Here are some tips we recommend you follow:

Note that for the search term “iPhone XI buy”, it already ranks first in organic search results. Of course, it is still impossible to order a phone, but the product card exists, the search engine knows about it and ranks it highly. As soon as the product is in stock, the store will immediately receive targeted traffic when others are just starting to promote the product.

Thank you for reading this article. We will be happy to answer any of your questions in our online chat, in the support section or by email.

Author: Evgeny Yakovina, Head of Linkbuilder service