Link Building for 2020: What Works and What to Avoid

Last Updated: December 16, 2021

Backlinks to your website can garner traffic, build credibility, and help your brand rank higher on search engines. That’s why it is vital to make link building a part of your SEO plan. Here are our four link building 101 tips to push your hyperlinking game to new heights in 2020.

If you’re an SEO marketer, or simply looking to boost your brand’s ranking on Google search, then the top link building techniques for 2020 are probably on your radar. Link building can help reaffirm your website’s credibility, creating a network of access across multiple publishers and web pages.

Marketers often ask why link building is important, and if this technique still holds in 2020. Well, new SEO research highlights the importance of backlinksOpens a new window based on an analysis of 600,000 keywords from SEMrush’s worldwide base. This is reaffirmed by link building case studies— for instance, a content marketing agency was able to boost a client’s Google rank Opens a new window from 18 to 1 through the judicious use of link building.

If you’re looking to leverage link building techniques in 2020 and increase the organic traffic pouring into your website, it’s vital to know which practices to follow and which to avoid. But first, let’s begin with a quick definition of and why link building is so important.

Learn More: Marketer’s Guide To Building Backlinks, Gaining Referral Traffic And Establishing Thought LeadershipOpens a new window

What Is Link Building in SEO?

Link building is an SEO technique that helps readers find informative blogs and articles on the internet via other webpages and helps brands be found across the massive content repository available online. It involves getting other pages to link back to a particular webpage to:

  • Drive traffic to a content asset and generate revenues
  • Help a search engine crawl the web to find and rank your webpage
     

While the user sees only a part of the link, the search engine sees the entire hyperlink structure and extracts useful data from it. Here is a link building example that makes this clear. If you’ve linked to a blog on how to make pasta, the user will see this text: it takes only five minutes for pasta, even if you are a beginner and on clicking it will reach the blog post: http://myblog.com/five-minutes-pasta-for-beginners.

But when you’re linking back to this blog on a different page, link building techniques must be carefully followed so that the Google crawler can find your page easily. This means selecting the right text for the hyperlink, ensuring a keyword in the hyperlinked text, and regularly checking to see if the link is still active.

When crawling a page where this blog is hyperlinked, the Google crawler will see something like this:

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From this link building example, it is obvious that Google (or any other search engine) understands more than just the title of your blog. That is what makes link building in SEO such an essential technique for marketers.

Learn More: Move Past Beginner’s Level Link-Building Practices to Improve SEOOpens a new window

Link Building Do’s and Don’ts for 2020

Like any link building 101 guide will tell you, best practices in this segment are always changing. For example, Google introduced a brand-new set of rules in September 2019 that could identify spam links. Applying these rules to the link building example we discussed earlier, you would have to individually specify what type of content you’re sharing through the blog. In case you’re back-linking to a comment on a forum:

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The new rel=”ugc” tag helps Google understand that you’re referring to user-generated content.

This is a classic example of the evolving nature of link building and why it could be challenging for marketers to keep up. Fortunately, there is a set of dos and don’ts that have stood the test of time, and we recommend you follow these link building techniques for 2020 as well.

DO insert long keywords when link building
 

This is link building 101. Continuing the example of link building we’ve been looking at, there are two ways to refer to a blog on making pasta. On the homepage of your website, you can write “click here to learn pasta making” and hyperlink “here.” Or, in a different article, you could incorporate the phrase as “as I mentioned in my earlier blog on five-minute pasta for beginners.” The latter is a better idea, as the long keyword helps Google contextualize the link and display it to genuinely interested readers.

DO increase social visibility for your page
 

Social sharing can help route more traffic to your page and encourage readers to link back to it on social media. Pages that perform well on social platforms systematically gain an uptick in terms of SEO. We recommend embedding share buttons for all major platforms at the top/bottom of your page.

DON’T look for purchased or sponsored links
 

The aim of link building in SEO is to populate a sizeable number of websites with hyperlinks to your own webpage. Marketers often choose to buy links, a technique that is largely frowned upon by Google. A link building technique for 2020 would be to mention the rel=” sponsored” tag in case you have a compensation-based agreement.

DON’T mention the same keyword repeatedly
 

If we go back to our link building example, there are many ways to hyperlink an article on “Five minutes pasta for beginners”. Instead of repeating the title in an identical format across pages, try semantic equivalents like “pasta for dummies in just five minutes,” “even you can make pasta in five minutes,” and “pasta, the popular Italian dish, takes only five minutes to make.” Again, this will help Google zero in on the exact context, making your link building efforts in SEO more effective.

Learn More: Content is The Ruler But Links are Ruling – Here’s How!Opens a new window

Getting Started? Let Technology Simplify Link Building in 2020

Interestingly, this can be an entirely manual process if you follow a link building 101 guide. However, as your business grows, with the number of pages, articles, and social handles steadily growing, link building tools like SEMrush, SEOBuddy, and Ahrefs can help you balance volume with quality. And remember to check your website regularly for broken links — this can ensure sustained performance on Google SEO.

There you have it; we hope that you now understand why link building is important and how you can ace it in 2020 with our link building techniques.

Have you witnessed an uptick in SEO performance by applying link building techniques? Talk to us on LinkedInOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , or TwitterOpens a new window . We’d love to hear about your success story!

Chiradeep BasuMallick
Chiradeep BasuMallick

Contributor, Ziff Davis B2B

Chiradeep is a content marketing professional with 8 Years+ experience in corporate communications, marketing content, brand management, and advertising. Over the course of his tenure, he’s worked on several big-ticket projects, led and trained a variety of teams, and been instrumental in driving delivery quality, timeline adherence, and talent harvesting.
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