Link building

When working with SEO, one of the most essential "pillars" is the concept of link building.

In all its simplicity, it's about getting links to your webshop. It sounds simple and easy in principle, but there are several nuances to the concept. For example, it matters where the link comes from, how it is designed (there are several types of links) and what text is used in the link. We'll take a closer look at this in this description.

Good and less good links

First of all, there is a difference between links. Let's say you have a webshop that sells dog food. A link from a dog kennel would be better than if you got a link from your local sports club. But if you sell soccer equipment, the link from the sports club will probably be best. These are links that are very relevant to your webshop. But it can be different. If you sell dog food and you can get a link from the Manchester United website, it will probably be better than a link from the local dog kennel. But why is that? We've just learned that relevance is important.

Well, it will be, simply because Manchester United is a very popular website that has a lot of links from many big sites. So it's what is known in SEO circles as "an authority". In other words, a particularly large site. If the authority is big enough, it can "win over" relevance.

But how do you decide whether to go for relevance or authority?

That's a really good question and almost impossible to answer. You should simply take the links you can get if they make sense. If you're offered 200 links from Filipino forums, you should say no. They will be so irrelevant to your Danish webshop that Google and other search engines will sooner or later realize that it's a scam and will drag your site down in the search results.

But what about a link from your accountant? Or your window cleaner? They're not relevant and they're not from any great authority.

The short answer is that you should include them. You can safely say that you are very satisfied with both your accountant and window cleaner and get a link from them. There's nothing wrong with that and they count in the grand scheme of things. But the links you need to work hard to get should be relevant links. So if you sell dog food, you can try to get links from veterinarians, dog clubs, dog trainers, dog groomers, dog breeders, etc. The most obvious place is to get a link from your suppliers. They are both relevant and also small authorities in their field.

Anchor text

A link can be a button, a graphic and a piece of text. Usually it's text and the text that you click on (the one that is typically underlined and often blue) is called the "anchor text". In many cases it says "click here" or "read more here" which doesn't tell you much about what's on the page. If your anchor text says "Buy dog food here", it will also have more value than if it says "read more here".

Knowing this, don't go out and change all your links to "Buy dog food here". If all your links have the same anchor text, Google will spot it and think "this shop is trying to cheat" and you will be penalized. So when getting links, make sure there is variation in your anchor text. The easiest way to do this is to not think about it and just let people create the link they want. That way, variation will naturally appear in your links. Some will use the anchor text "here" others "buy it here" others will use your shop name etc. So if you just let the link creators control the anchor text, you'll be fine.

The type of link

One last thing to be aware of is that there is a difference between links. You can put something on the link called rel="nofollow".

If you put this attribute on your link, it's like saying to Google (and other search engines) "this link should have no value to the recipient". And search engines actually respect that message. Nofollow links are only given very low value and by getting 100 nofollow links, you won't see much improvement in your search engine rankings.

So when you're link building, you should aim to get links without nofollow. Important: Again, if all your links are nofollow (these are called "dofollow links"), the search engines will also become suspicious and you risk being penalized. So here again, you need to provide variety. Basically, what we call "a natural link structure".

Link building is a fun discipline in SEO. It's a bit like a hunt. It's fun because it's quite concrete to measure whether you've got the link or not, and it's something that has a big impact on the bottom line in relation to your SEO efforts.

In addition, there are many different approaches. You can write around and ask for links (it's called outreach because you reach out to people and ask for the link). You can choose to sponsor good causes. You can try to influence the press and bloggers. You can create such great content that people choose to link to it. Brian Dean has done just that, which is why we choose to send you to this English-language but fantastic guide to link building.

In Danish you can buy Linkbuildingbogen which teaches you a lot about the link building industry.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.