Intro
Link building in 2024 continues to be as important as it has been since the PageRank Algorithm was first introduced by Google and search engines began to rank web pages based on more than just the content on the page itself. The landscape changes and evolves every year and this is why it is important to understand how to be most effective with link building for the year ahead, whilst maintaining the practices that have worked well for some time.
What is link building?
Link building is the practice of creating backlinks to a website with the objective to improve the visibility of that site on search engines. There are a few common strategies for link building, including content marketing, email outreach, as well as fixing broken links. Links within content have been important for many years now, specifically since Google introduced PageRank and began to look at how many people linked to a page, alongside the structure, quality, and quantity of the content on the page.
Is Link Building Necessary For Website? →
What has changed over time with link building?
In 2024, more than ever before, Google pays attention to the quality of the links on site and not just the quantity, whilst also focusing on the quality of content. In the past, the more links on-page the better and the greater the keyword stuffing the more likely it was for a page to appear high up the Google ranks. Now, there is more of a focus on quality, well-written content and links that have genuine authority and quality.
Why is link building important?
Link building continues to be a vital part of search engine optimisation (SEO) practice, improving the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Link building is important as it is the process required to increase the authority of a website and to become a credible source of information. Search engines look at quality links as a vote of confidence from other sites in terms of the value of the content on your site and how trustworthy it is.
5 Tips for link building in 2024
It is essential to look for links from reputable websites within your industry that provide you with real authority, and that’s where we begin with our 5 tips for link building in 2024.
Tip 1: Quality Over Quantity
No longer should you hoard as many links as you possibly can to use within your link building campaign. 2024 is certainly the year where search engines are smarter about how they prioritise certain links and authoritative sources from your industry. You should always seek quality over quantity. The idea is that the links you have are reflective of how you are perceived by your peers and shows the search engine (and therefore the world) that yours is a website to be trusted.
Tip 2: Focus On Content Or Do Good Like A Great Company Would
Link-worthy content is the first step to create content that attracts quality backlinks. It needs to be informative, engage with the reader and be useful. If you are attracting people to read about a specific topic, you should answer any questions they may have and provide solutions. Long-form content is the way forward, as this allows you to cover a topic extensively, with several relevant sub-topics included too. Content should be evergreen, informational, and not self-promotional or too ‘salesy’ in style. Quality content is a magnet for quality links.
“By creating quality content, you should be able to also get quality links. It’s either that or you should be able, as a company, to be newsworthy or do real company things like organizing events. Getting links will increasingly be harder from 2024 and going forward, everything regarding links will take more effort.” - Floris, SEO specialist at Hatless
Tip 3: Do Not Focus On Anchor Texts
If you focus solely on the anchor text this can be detrimental to your overall link building campaign. Over-optimisation of anchor text can lead to search engine penalties, so it is important that you have a varied and natural approach to anchor text. Crawlers are capable of understanding the concept and nuance of an article without the need for an ‘obvious’ anchor text. Manipulating anchor text ratios to certain keywords or adding irrelevant keywords will only hurt you in the rankings over time. The idea for link building in 2024 is for natural anchor texts.
Tip 4: Look At Competitors
Look to SEO tools that can analyse how your competitors are performing. This should never be used as a way of copying exactly what your competitors are doing, as you need to be smarter and outshine them on the whole, but it can’t hurt to be as prepared as possible when putting together your link building strategy. To be successful you need to find a different angle to anyone else, or a niche area that can be explored and made the most of. This can help you reach those areas that have yet to be explored and to refine the strategy you have in place.
Tip 5: Let’s Get Creative
Producing a creative and innovative angle to the content you are creating ensures that you are more likely to attract creative links. There are many different ways in which you can create a unique angle on the content you create. Tell a story, collaborate with experts in the field to provide a different perspective to your own, use data to support your content well, and use visual aids that are shareable and more likely to create a buzz.
Quality over quantity is certainly the key concept for link building in 2042. With these five tips it should help you create the perfect plan for the year ahead, with creative content and a unique approach to acquiring authoritative links that builds your website as one to be trusted in your industry.
