New to SEO? Don't have any idea what the terms backlink, DR, nofollow or guest post mean?

This article will help you. It's made to take you from zero to competent in SEO link building, one of the most important and evergreen skills in online marketing.

We'll first briefly explain the basic definition of SEO and how it works. You don't need to pay too much attention to this part. We've kept it brief, because this information is not really actionable. It's the dictionary definition you'll get off Wikipedia.

A little further down, we'll get into the more practical information you need to know if you're going to work in an SEO team.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In plain terms: it's getting your website to show up when people search for things on Google.

When someone types "best running shoes" into Google, the results they see aren't random. Google has a system for deciding which websites to show first. SEO is the work you do to make Google pick your site over someone else's.

Why does this matter? Because the higher you rank, the more people find you, and you don't pay for each click the way you do with ads. It's free traffic that keeps coming as long as you stay near the top.

Google decides rankings based on a lot of factors, but most of them fall into two buckets:

  1. What's on your website - Is your content good? Does it actually answer what someone searched for? Does the site load quickly, work on phones, and not feel broken?
  2. What other websites say about you - Do other sites link to yours? How many? How trustworthy are those sites?

The first part is easy to understand. There's a little more to it than that (on-page SEO, which is how you create content that's more likely to show up on Google), but the overall idea is straightforward.

What Is a Link? (And What Is a Backlink?)

You already know what a link is. You click on them every day. This is a link. And so is this: https://www.mobiloud.com/

It's a piece of text, often blue/underlined, that takes you to a different page when you click on it.

A link is just one website pointing to another website. That's it.

When another website links to your website, that's called a backlink. "Back" because the link points back to you.

One of the primary goals for SEO is to "build links" - which means getting more sites to put links back to your site in their content.

Why Do Links Matter for SEO?

Google's entire ranking system was originally built around one simple idea: if a lot of other websites link to a page, that page is probably good.

Think of it like recommendations. If one friend tells you a restaurant is great, you might check it out. If twenty friends all recommend the same restaurant, you're pretty confident it's worth going to.

Links work the same way. You can think of links as recommendations. When another site links to your site (or a page on your site), it acts as a recommendation to Google supporting your site (or the specific page).

The more of these recommendations Google sees, the more it trusts your site, and the higher it ranks you.

And if the recommendations come from sites that have a lot of recommendations themselves, even better.

A link from a site that, itself, has a lot of links is generally worth more than a link from a brand new site, or one with few other sites linking to it.

What Is Link Building?

Link building means "building" links to your site - getting other websites to link to yours.

Some links happen naturally. You write something useful, someone finds it on their own, and they link to it from their own site.

Building links means proactively seeking out sites to ask them to link to your site.

You can do this in many different ways - and it usually takes more than simply asking "can you link to my site".

But link building is arguably the most important part of SEO, and the number one factor that separates successful sites from sites that struggle to get traffic.

A Few Concepts You Need to Know

Before we get into how link building actually works in practice, there are a few terms worth understanding. None of these are complicated, but they come up constantly.

Domain Authority (and Domain Rating)

Not all websites are equal in Google's eyes. A link from the New York Times means a lot more than a link from someone's personal blog that gets ten visitors a month.

We don't know Google's actual scoring system. They don't tell us whether https://www.nytimes.com/ or https://www.espn.com/ has higher authority.

But some SEO tools give us scores that are a good approximation of how Google might view them.

Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating (DR). Moz calls it Domain Authority (DA). Both are scores from 0 to 100 that estimate how strong a website's backlink profile is.

A site with a DR of 70 has a lot of quality links pointing to it. A site with a DR of 10 doesn't. When the DR 70 site links to you, that carries significantly more weight than a link from the DR 10 site.

DR isn't a bulletproof metric, and it's relatively easy to manipulate. But it's a good starting point for assessing a site's authority (and a link's quality).

Relevance

A link from a website that's related to your industry is worth more than a link from a random, unrelated site.

If you sell fitness equipment and a health and wellness blog links to you, that makes sense. Google sees the connection. But if a website about car insurance links to you for no clear reason, that looks odd, and it carries less weight.

When building links, you want links from sites where the connection between their site and their content and yours would make sense to a real person reading it.

Link Quality (and Why It Matters)

This ties everything above together. A "quality" link means:

Why does quality matter so much? Because low-quality or spammy links can actually hurt your site.

Google's algorithm is built to detect unnatural link patterns. If your site suddenly has hundreds of links from irrelevant, low-authority websites that exist only to sell links, Google can penalize you for it. Your rankings can drop instead of improving.

This doesn't mean every link needs to be perfect. But it does mean you should care about where your links come from. A handful of links from relevant, legitimate websites will always outperform a pile of links from junk sites.

Nofollow & Dofollow

We said that links act as recommendations to Google. But site owners can tag some links to indicate they don't want them to act as a recommendation.

This is whether a link is supposed to be "followed".

By default, every link is a dofollow link. This means Google sees it, follows it, and counts it as a recommendation for the page it points to.

A nofollow link has a small piece of code added to it that tells Google "don't count this as a recommendation." The link still works for users - they can click it and visit the page - but Google doesn't give the linked page any SEO credit for it.

In the code of the website (under the hood of what the reader sees), it will be attached with rel=nofollow.

Why would a site add nofollow? A few common reasons:

When you're building links, you generally want dofollow links, because these are more likely to give authority to your site.

Nofollow links are not always worthless. Google uses the follow attribute as a recommendation, not a rule - so sometimes a nofollow link from a very high authority site (like NY Times, ESPN etc) will provide more authority than a dofollow link from a lower authority site.

But in general, you want the links you build to be dofollow.

Anchor Text

Anchor text means the clickable words in a link.

When you see a sentence like "check out this guide to running shoes" and "guide to running shoes" is the part you can click, those words are the anchor text.

Why does this matter? Because anchor text tells Google what the linked page is about. If ten different sites link to your page using the words "best running shoes," Google takes that as a signal that your page is relevant for that phrase.

You don't need to obsess over this, but it's worth knowing the term. When you're getting links, the words people use to link to you have a small influence on what you rank for.

How Link Building Actually Works

Now for the practical part. Usually, there are two general ways that link building happens in practice: guest posting and link insertions.

Guest Posting

Guest posting means you write an article and publish it on someone else's website. Within that article, you include a link (or multiple links) back to your site.

This is perhaps the most common form of link building. It lets you place the link you want, in the context you want, with the anchor text you want (providing this is all approved by the site you're posting on).

Link Insertions

Link insertions (sometimes called "niche edits") are simpler. Instead of writing a whole new article, you get a link placed inside an article that already exists on someone else's site.

Say a blog already has a post called "10 Best Tools for Home Workouts." You reach out and ask if they'll add your product to that list, with a link. The article is already published and showing up on Google. Your link gets added into it.

This is often easier than guest posting because you're not writing anything. You're just asking someone to add a link, which is quicker and less work for them (which is important, as we'll expand on shortly).

However, you need to find a relevant article where your link fits naturally. You don't have as much control over the content as you do with guest posting.

How You Actually Get These Links

To publish guest posts or link insertions, you're dealing with the owner or manager of another website. You're not just publishing a post or adding a link yourself.

(There are sites where anyone can publish an article - medium.com for example. But in general, if anyone can publish on the site, the quality of the link will be a lot lower, even if the site has an extremely high DR - like Medium does).

This is the hard part about link building. To get your link published, you need to:

Generally, you need to give them something in exchange for this. Saying "this link/article will be valuable for your site" rarely works. And adding a link or publishing a post takes time and effort. You'll need to give something back in exchange for this effort.

This usually means:

Paid placements

You pay a website to publish your guest post or to insert a link into one of their existing articles. This is common practice and happens at every level, from small niche blogs to large publications.

It's technically against Google's rules to pay for links, but in reality it happens all the time, and can be done safely.

That said, a lot of sites that accept payments for guest posts or links will accept them from anyone, which reduces the quality of their site, and these links are a lot weaker (or can even hurt your site).

Paying for links is fine - but only if the site is decent quality, and doesn't have a lot of random, low-quality, spammy posts published on their blog.

Partnerships and mutual exchanges

You provide the other site with something valuable other than money.

Often, this means giving them the same thing you're asking for: a link.

Common practices are link swaps/guest post exchanges:

This is a win-win partnership, where both sides benefit. The site you're reaching out to is, most likely, doing the same thing you are: trying to build links and increase their site's authority.

If they are, it's an easy sell to offer them a link on your site in exchange for them publishing your link.

How to Tell If Link Building Is Working

Link building takes time. You won't see ranking changes overnight. But here's what to watch:

Be patient. It's common for link building to take 3 to 6 months before you see meaningful movement in rankings. That's normal, not a sign something is wrong.

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