Linking has been the basis of website positioning for years and is still important in this process.

Learn how to properly build the structure of links leading to your website, where to get such links and what rules to follow when choosing them.

Linking is simply posting links in very different places on the Internet that lead to the website that you want to promote. This is part of the process of building its position, which translates into how high it will rank in search results on sites such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex or DuckDuckGo. With over 90 percent of searches in the world being Google, the situation is very similar in Poland. The Internet search engine is very often the first place where Internet users look for information, entering the appropriate phrase, for example 'cheap computers’ or 'car rental Warsaw’. A high position is necessary because the average web user sees only the first few items on the list of searched pages. Of course, you can also use the option of paid ads appearing before the results, but this is a more expensive option and your link will be marked as an advertisement.

Links to your website can be placed in many places. Most often these are sites such as:

• website directories – once very fashionable and the basis for positioning. Today they are less popular, but the best ones can still be useful, although they are usually paid;
• the backend of the website – these are places in the form of blogs or entire portals supporting the main page, where you can post numerous texts and the links to the main page;
• sponsored articles – published in the general or industry press can be very effective both in creating the position of the website and increasing the number of people visiting it;
• social media – they do not directly build the ranking of your page, but they affect the assessment of its trust, so it is worth posting them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and similar places;
• forums, blogs – these are both main entries with links and the so-called word-of-mouth marketing, i.e. links with the offer posted in the comments;
• business directories – for example, Google listings and many similar places.

A good strategy is to use tools such as Semrush Link Building Tool, Semrush Backlink Audit or Semrush Backlink Analytics. Acquiring links is much easier when you use the first of these tools. It will give you a list of pages – based on your site, the keywords you provided, and your competitors – that you should be linking to. Through this tool, you will also be able to contact these parties directly with a proposal for cooperation. In order to check what links your competitors’ websites use, you can use the Semrush Backlink Analytics tool. This will let you know where to place your links to be competitive. In order to supervise links, use the Semrush Backlink Audit regularly, which will show you all the links leading to your site with their basic data.

The most valuable links should meet a number of criteria. Poor quality links will not bring any benefit, and a large number of unnatural links can even lead to blocking by Google and not appearing in search results. First of all, links should be on pages offering valuable content. This increases their usefulness and visibility by recipients. For example, publishing links redirecting to a page with something completely different than the text on the page is very badly assessed by Google’s algorithms. That is why you need to focus on the quality of links here, and not on mass production. Proper execution of the link and the use of the do-follow parameter allows Google robots to download part of the content of the page with a link to the linked one. This significantly increases your position when searching for phrases used on the page with the link. Always check the TrustRank of the page when placing links. The higher it is, the better. This automatically increases the trust level of your site.

As already mentioned, you should avoid mass linking from weak or unrelated pages. Such actions will not only not help, but even harm, because search engine algorithms react to such actions, lowering the rankings or completely omitting a given page from the search results. It is worth getting acquainted with the topic of linking and building the page’s position in general, or entrust this task to professionals. The biggest mistake that is quite common is simply not doing linking at all. This means a low position in search engines, and this is one of the most important issues in creating recognition of a company, brand or a given product or service on the Internet.