Did you know that link-building is a critical player in SEO digital strategy? It’s not just about Google’ algorithms but also the success of your website. Backlinks, a crucial part of link building, can significantly boost your website’s visibility if done well. In this blog, we delve into the different types of link building, their importance, and how they contribute to your SEO strategy. 

Understanding and Leveraging Different Types of Link Building 

As a beginner or an established website owner, it is essential to understand different types of link-building to navigate the link-building world effectively. With this knowledge, you can acquire high-quality links and develop a successful link-building strategy.

Here are the main types of links:

Editorial Links – Unsolicited

Unsolicited editorial links are organic inbound links not asked for or traded for. Also known as earned links, they are some of the most valuable and desired backlinks any website can get because they demonstrate genuine endorsement and prove that your content is useful. To get these links, you just need to focus on creating something so good that people can’t help but link to it. 

While your eCommerce site may not earn any editorial links, if you have a helpful guide, you can earn hundreds or thousands of editorial links because websites want to recommend them to their readers. For instance, Apple may not ask for links when it releases a new iPhone, but writers, bloggers, and other journalists will write about it and link to it because Apple is a trendy smartphone. By generating these links over time, you’ll get the attention of enough people and relieve yourself from a lot of pressure when it comes to manual outreach and promotion of your website. 

Editorial Links – Solicited

Unlike unsolicited links, solicited editorial links are inbound links that are asked for. Although these links are just as valuable as unsolicited incoming links, you must work hard to acquire them. For example, if you create an essential industry guideline and promote it to journalists, they may find exciting insights to write about and link to it. 

One thing to note, though, is that your content must be link-worthy enough and able to grab the attention of the people you’re promoting it to. You can earn these links through:

• Leveraging PR for editorial backlinks.
• Taking advantage of unlinked mentions.
• Creating case studies.
• Guest posting.

You can also carry out surveys or create insightful content and share it with influencers or journalists so they may link to it in their articles. Besides boosting your web traffic, these links can increase your brand awareness and position you better in the market. Incorporating content on other platforms through editorial links also allows you to forge closer ties with industry experts, forming new collaborations, partnerships, and other benefits.

User-Generated Links

User-generated links originate from content users rather than the website owners or publishers. Some of these links include comments, forums, blog posts, reviews, social media posts, and other types of user content. Since these links represent a form of natural acquisition, they are pretty valuable. 

User-generated links are not under the direct control of the site owner. This means their quality and relevance may vary; hence, they must constantly be monitored to ensure you only deal with quality links. Unlike editorial links, user-generated links typically carry less weight. The types of links you choose to acquire with this strategy depend on your profile, but ideally, you should avoid links that aren’t editorially given. 

Understanding the Nofollow Attribute and Types of Link Building Strategies

The nofollow attribute is an HTML tag applied to a link using ‘rel’ and communicated to the search engines not to follow the outbound or external link. The attribute tells the search engines that you don’t want to associate with the website or crawl the page you’ve linked to from your site. While dofollow links are the main links that SEO prefers, 48% of marketers believe that “nofollow” is usually part of the process. 89.1% of link builders also believe that nofollow links impact rankings. 

As one of the types of link building strategies, nofollow links are typically applied when you want to link to another website but don’t want to put any kind of endorsement. An example of a link with the “nofollow” attribute is <a href= “https://example.com” rel= “nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>. While Google says nofollow links cannot make a site authoritative or reputable, they can still provide referral traffic and brand recognition. The main reason why a site may use nofollow links is that it lacks total control over the links used on its pages. Examples of websites that use nofollow links include:

• Forum posts
• Guest book comments
• Blog comments
• Quora
• Editable Wiki pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Guest post signatures

Advertisers can also use nofollow links on links that have been paid for. So, if you buy an advertising banner on a website that links to you, you should add a nofollow attribute so that Google doesn’t pass any PageRank across that link. While no follow links are counted for ranking purposes, they may still drive traffic and offer other benefits.

Safe vs. Risky Types of Link Building in SEO

Generating links or using different types of link building in SEO tactics that do not follow search engine guidelines may get you into trouble by having your website penalized. For instance, if you buy links from spammy sites or link farms, Google could penalize or even ban your website completely. While including many links on your website may help you rank quickly, it won’t help you in the long run. 

Major search engines such as Google have put in place a team that helps identify websites that manipulate them with black hat search engine optimization methods. 

Here are the two distinct approaches to link building from a risk perspective and examples of other tactics. 

1. Staying Within Webmaster Guidelines

Safe link-building tactics involve using low-risk methods within the webmaster’s guidelines to build links. When you use such link-building tactics, you’re unlikely to run into problems with search engines. Some examples of staying within the guidelines include:

• Promoting your website by writing personalized messages to relevant people 
• Creating high-quality, unique, and informational content
• Engaging genuinely with a community that interacts with your website
• Using approaches that are measured, such as emailing ten relevant individuals instead of spamming 1,000 people with a generic message

You can always find these guidelines on the Search Console Help Center, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, and Quality Raters Guidelines. By following Google’s policies, you can avoid common pitfalls and build strong links that won’t disappear overnight. These tactics are likely to take time but usually significantly impact revenue because they are less aggressive.

2. Riskier Tactics That Are Outside Webmaster Guidelines

Riskier link-building methods are tactics used to manipulate search engine algorithms and increase the ranking of websites. Often considered tactics that are not approved, search engines may penalize your website if you focus on them. A few examples of riskier tactics include:

• Paying someone to give you a link
• Including links to a website you do not own
• Overusing keywords driven anchor in link-building

Since search engines always look for ways to control them, these strategies won’t last long. In fact, if you are caught using them, your website traffic and ranking can drop overnight. It’s, therefore, essential to focus on safe tactics that provide long-term benefits to avoid penalties and effects such as sudden drops in rankings and traffic.

Importance of Sustainable Link Building and Choosing the Best Types of Link Building

You may want to compete with other companies if you have an online business. This means you need to carefully choose the best types of link building tactics so you can evaluate how risky they are. Like any business, some tactics carry a certain amount of risk while others don’t. For example, an offline business may conduct a PR activity to build awareness. If such a stunt backfires, it can negatively affect the brand and deter potential customers. This is why you need to use white hat techniques that pose the least risk and are unlikely to lead to Google penalizing you. 

Since white hat techniques focus on adding value to your industry and customers’ experience, it’s recommended that you follow the guidelines in full and offer your customers genuine and valuable content. If you compare these to tactics that fall outside of Webmaster Guidelines, you know that you’re building links for the long term that will yield better results than others. 

You won’t need to worry every time Google carries out an update. Remember, search engines such as Google use links determine whether a site is relevant or authoritative and interpret it. The more high-quality links a website has pointing to it, the more authoritative the search engines consider it.

An authoritative website typically ranks on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is critical as most internet users rarely click past the first page of search results. If your website doesn’t fall on the first page, you lose much potential traffic.

Mistakes to Avoid When Building Editorial Links or Choosing Types of Link Building in SEO

When it comes to link building, knowing the kind of pitfalls to avoid is very important. Here are some of the mistakes to avoid in link building or choosing types of link building in SEO:

Ignoring Content Quality: Alongside link acquisition, you must prioritize creating high-quality and valuable content to improve your chances of earning editorial links.

Being Over Aggressive: Since pushing for editorial links through unsolicited and aggressive means can be counterproductive, avoiding spammy sites and building links naturally is essential.

Focusing on a Single Source: Depending on a single source of editorial links may hurt your link profile.

Failing to Monitor and Update: Once you’ve acquired editorial links, it’s essential to monitor them if you want to remain active and relevant. Remember, broken and outdated links can affect your SEO negatively.

Ignoring Relevance: Pursuing links from low-quality and irrelevant sources or schemes can affect your website’s domain reputation and SEO. The links you get should align with your industry and content.

Link Research Tools When Searching for Different Types of Link Building

Tools such as Ahrefs, SEMush, Moz’s Link Explorer, and Majestic can help you research and analyze backlinks when presented with different types of link building. With these tools, you can get insights into your backlink profile and potentially the competitors’ profiles. 

BuzzStream and Pitchbox can also help you streamline the outreach and relationship-building process. They can also help you track your communication and manage your link-building campaigns. Additionally, content creation tools such as Yoast SEO, WordPreMeta description: Find out how many types of link building in SEO are available. Improve your rankings and attract more website visitors with our detailed guide.

How Many Types of Link Building in SEO?

Did you know that link-building is a critical player in SEO digital strategy? It’s not just about Google’ algorithms but also the success of your website. Backlinks, a crucial part of link building, can significantly boost your website’s visibility if done well. In this blog, we delve into the different types of link building, their importance, and how they contribute to your SEO strategy. 

Understanding and Leveraging Different Types of Link Building 

As a beginner or an established website owner, it is essential to understand different types of link-building to navigate the link-building world effectively. With this knowledge, you can acquire high-quality links and develop a successful link-building strategy.

Here are the main types of links:

Editorial Links – Unsolicited

Unsolicited editorial links are organic inbound links not asked for or traded for. Also known as earned links, they are some of the most valuable and desired backlinks any website can get because they demonstrate genuine endorsement and prove that your content is useful. To get these links, you just need to focus on creating something so good that people can’t help but link to it. 

While your eCommerce site may not earn any editorial links, if you have a helpful guide, you can earn hundreds or thousands of editorial links because websites want to recommend them to their readers. For instance, Apple may not ask for links when it releases a new iPhone, but writers, bloggers, and other journalists will write about it and link to it because Apple is a trendy smartphone. By generating these links over time, you’ll get the attention of enough people and relieve yourself from a lot of pressure when it comes to manual outreach and promotion of your website. 

Editorial Links – Solicited

Unlike unsolicited links, solicited editorial links are inbound links that are asked for. Although these links are just as valuable as unsolicited incoming links, you must work hard to acquire them. For example, if you create an essential industry guideline and promote it to journalists, they may find exciting insights to write about and link to it. 

One thing to note, though, is that your content must be link-worthy enough and able to grab the attention of the people you’re promoting it to. You can earn these links through:

• Leveraging PR for editorial backlinks.
• Taking advantage of unlinked mentions.
• Creating case studies.
• Guest posting.

You can also carry out surveys or create insightful content and share it with influencers or journalists so they may link to it in their articles. Besides boosting your web traffic, these links can increase your brand awareness and position you better in the market. Incorporating content on other platforms through editorial links also allows you to forge closer ties with industry experts, forming new collaborations, partnerships, and other benefits.

User-Generated Links

User-generated links originate from content users rather than the website owners or publishers. Some of these links include comments, forums, blog posts, reviews, social media posts, and other types of user content. Since these links represent a form of natural acquisition, they are pretty valuable. 

User-generated links are not under the direct control of the site owner. This means their quality and relevance may vary; hence, they must constantly be monitored to ensure you only deal with quality links. Unlike editorial links, user-generated links typically carry less weight. The types of links you choose to acquire with this strategy depend on your profile, but ideally, you should avoid links that aren’t editorially given. 

Understanding the Nofollow Attribute and Types of Link Building Strategies

The nofollow attribute is an HTML tag applied to a link using ‘rel’ and communicated to the search engines not to follow the outbound or external link. The attribute tells the search engines that you don’t want to associate with the website or crawl the page you’ve linked to from your site. While dofollow links are the main links that SEO prefers, 48% of marketers believe that “nofollow” is usually part of the process. 89.1% of link builders also believe that nofollow links impact rankings. 

As one of the types of link building strategies, nofollow links are typically applied when you want to link to another website but don’t want to put any kind of endorsement. An example of a link with the “nofollow” attribute is <a href= “https://example.com” rel= “nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>. While Google says nofollow links cannot make a site authoritative or reputable, they can still provide referral traffic and brand recognition. The main reason why a site may use nofollow links is that it lacks total control over the links used on its pages. Examples of websites that use nofollow links include:

• Forum posts
• Guest book comments
• Blog comments
• Quora
• Editable Wiki pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Guest post signatures

Advertisers can also use nofollow links on links that have been paid for. So, if you buy an advertising banner on a website that links to you, you should add a nofollow attribute so that Google doesn’t pass any PageRank across that link. While no follow links are counted for ranking purposes, they may still drive traffic and offer other benefits.

Safe vs. Risky Types of Link Building in SEO

Generating links or using different types of link building in SEO tactics that do not follow search engine guidelines may get you into trouble by having your website penalized. For instance, if you buy links from spammy sites or link farms, Google could penalize or even ban your website completely. While including many links on your website may help you rank quickly, it won’t help you in the long run. 

Major search engines such as Google have put in place a team that helps identify websites that manipulate them with black hat search engine optimization methods. 

Here are the two distinct approaches to link building from a risk perspective and examples of other tactics. 

3. Staying Within Webmaster Guidelines

Safe link-building tactics involve using low-risk methods within the webmaster’s guidelines to build links. When you use such link-building tactics, you’re unlikely to run into problems with search engines. Some examples of staying within the guidelines include:

• Promoting your website by writing personalized messages to relevant people 
• Creating high-quality, unique, and informational content
• Engaging genuinely with a community that interacts with your website
• Using approaches that are measured, such as emailing ten relevant individuals instead of spamming 1,000 people with a generic message

You can always find these guidelines on the Search Console Help Center, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, and Quality Raters Guidelines. By following Google’s policies, you can avoid common pitfalls and build strong links that won’t disappear overnight. These tactics are likely to take time but usually significantly impact revenue because they are less aggressive.

4. Riskier Tactics That Are Outside Webmaster Guidelines

Riskier link-building methods are tactics used to manipulate search engine algorithms and increase the ranking of websites. Often considered tactics that are not approved, search engines may penalize your website if you focus on them. A few examples of riskier tactics include:

• Paying someone to give you a link
• Including links to a website you do not own
• Overusing keywords driven anchor in link-building

Since search engines always look for ways to control them, these strategies won’t last long. In fact, if you are caught using them, your website traffic and ranking can drop overnight. It’s, therefore, essential to focus on safe tactics that provide long-term benefits to avoid penalties and effects such as sudden drops in rankings and traffic.

Importance of Sustainable Link Building and Choosing the Best Types of Link Building

You may want to compete with other companies if you have an online business. This means you need to carefully choose the best types of link building tactics so you can evaluate how risky they are. Like any business, some tactics carry a certain amount of risk while others don’t. For example, an offline business may conduct a PR activity to build awareness. If such a stunt backfires, it can negatively affect the brand and deter potential customers. This is why you need to use white hat techniques that pose the least risk and are unlikely to lead to Google penalizing you. 

Since white hat techniques focus on adding value to your industry and customers’ experience, it’s recommended that you follow the guidelines in full and offer your customers genuine and valuable content. If you compare these to tactics that fall outside of Webmaster Guidelines, you know that you’re building links for the long term that will yield better results than others. 

You won’t need to worry every time Google carries out an update. Essentially, Google and other search engines use links to determine the authority and relevance of a site and interpret it. The more high-quality links a website has pointing to it, the more authoritative the search engines consider it.

An authoritative website typically ranks on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is critical as most internet users rarely click past the first page of search results. If your website doesn’t fall on the first page, you lose much potential traffic.

Mistakes to Avoid When Building Editorial Links or Choosing Types of Link Building in SEO

When it comes to link building, knowing the kind of pitfalls to avoid is very important. Here are some of the mistakes to avoid in link building or choosing types of link building in SEO:

Ignoring Content Quality: Alongside link acquisition, you must prioritize creating high-quality and valuable content to improve your chances of earning editorial links.

Being Over Aggressive: Since pushing for editorial links through unsolicited and aggressive means can be counterproductive, avoiding spammy sites and building links naturally is essential.

Focusing on a Single Source: Depending on a single source of editorial links may hurt your link profile.

Failing to Monitor and Update: Once you’ve acquired editorial links, it’s essential to monitor them if you want to remain active and relevant. Remember, broken and outdated links can affect your SEO negatively.

Ignoring Relevance: Pursuing links from low-quality and irrelevant sources or schemes can affect your website’s domain reputation and SEO. The links you get should align with your industry and content.

Link Research Tools When Searching for Different Types of Link Building

Tools such as Ahrefs, SEMush, Moz’s Link Explorer, and Majestic can help you research and analyze backlinks when presented with different types of link building. With these tools, you can get insights into your backlink profile and potentially the competitors’ profiles. 

BuzzStream and Pitchbox can also help you streamline the outreach and relationship-building process. They can also help you track your communication and manage your link-building campaigns. Additionally, content creation tools such as Yoast SEO, WordPress, and Grammarly can help you create high-quality, SEO-friendly content that attracts backlinks and website visitors.

Conclusion

Overall, link building is a step-by-step journey that you must take with patience and using the best strategies. Once you understand the different types of links and their effectiveness, you are ready to start building links and establishing your online presence. If you stay ethical, focus on creating quality content, and adapt to changes, you’ll quickly build a robust online presence and avoid the risks of manipulative tactics.

ss, and Grammarly can help you create high-quality, SEO-friendly content that attracts backlinks and website visitors.

Conclusion

Overall, link building is a step-by-step journey that you must take with patience and using the best strategies. Once you understand the different types of links and their effectiveness, you are ready to start building links and establishing your online presence. If you stay ethical, focus on creating quality content, and adapt to changes, you’ll quickly build a robust online presence and avoid the risks of manipulative tactics.