The art of creating a strong backlink profile

Where link building was once a simple question of quantity over quality, it is now one of the most difficult areas of SEO to get right. Quality is a word cropping up more frequently than ever as search engines place increasing emphasis on it with every update to ranking algorithms. This means that in terms of optimisation, links to your pages from websites Google considers to be trustworthy and of high value are worth their weight in gold. Conversely, spam and dodgy links from questionable sources lead to ranking penalties that can be hard to recover from.

The process of backlink building includes researching relevant websites and blogs, reaching out to suggest suitable links and providing new URLs to website owners whose pages contain broken links to your website or others. It may sound simple in theory, but in practice it’s a nuanced challenge that takes plenty of experience and a knack for recognising the right opportunities. Part of link building is also ensuring your website has something worth linking to: if the destination is of little or no value to people who click on it, the link may prove detrimental to your page’s performance and other websites will be far less likely to cooperate. But if the page in question is a rich resource with engaging, high-quality content, people will naturally want to link to your website and traffic will have a greater chance of turning into genuine leads.