Frequently Asked Questions:
About Our White Hat Link Building Service

We use outreach to build 100% whitehat links to real websites with quality traffic. Our process uses proven techniques developed over many years.

Are these links building strategies safe in the eyes of Google?

We don't use short term blackhat linking techniques, like private blog networks (PBN's). Our outreach generates quality, contextual links placed within relevant content on sites run by real people.

Put simply, a website owner comes across your website's content and chooses to link to it. All completely natural. It doesn't get any more safer than this.

What types of links are 'future proof'?

Google's algorithm is constantly changing, and it's updated many times every year. So to stay safe from any future updates, you should be acquiring white hat backlinks (through outreach).

Some example types are digital PR, guest posting opportunities, broken link building and link reclamation.

Are there any links that should be avoided because they aren't 'future proof'?

Given Google's vast resources, an army of PhD's and the advances in artificial intelligence, it's likely the search giant's algorithm will become even better at:

• automatically detecting spammy links, and;
• determining exactly what constitutes a real site, and what sites are part of a (private blog) network.

Can I see some sample links, so I know what to expect?

Samples are not provided, for good reasons.

We respect both client and website owner's confidentiality. Posting a list of sites means they would be low quality.

In short, SEO requires discretion.

How many links can I get?

We typically aim for 15-20 quality links from 200 relevant targets. This is an approximate figure because real outreach is all about nurturing relationships. One month we may get 25 backlinks, the next it may be 10.

Should I try to get as many links as possible?

It really depends. If you're in a competitive market, then you may well need lots of backlinks to be in with any chance to compete. But, these will need to acquired over time, to develop a natural link profile.

Sure, high-quality backlinks contribute to how competitively you can rank in the search results, or more importantly result in increased organic traffic. But, links on their own, are not a KPI (Key Performance Indicator). Backlinks were never meant to be the origin of a marketing campaign, but more a result of our outreach efforts.

Your KPI's as a business can (and should) be measured in various ways, including: ROI (on marketing spend), increased sales, more customers, increased traffic that converts, more engagement or brand awareness.

In summary, for long term results, an ongoing white hat SEO link building campaign is still required to maintain organic search rankings. For the simple reason, that the search results are ever evolving; with new search terms, increased competition, etc.

Is link building a one off solution?

You can stop at any point. But if you're looking for a quick, one-time solution, this is probably not the right service for you. We typically work with long term clients, who understand the value that links provide for their business.

Backlinks will help build your authority, increase your traffic and can have a major effect on rankings. These effects will be multiplied over time as you build consistent, high quality links. So once you've started building links, you'll likely be doing it for the entire lifetime of your online business. Whether with us or somebody else.

How long will it take to get backlinks?

This really depends on how competitive the niche is. On average, we'll try to find suitable links within one month, but this can vary.

Let's say for example, we want to help a local moving company get more clients.

ABC moving company specialises in helping high end families with, antiques, and collectibles that they don't want to break. This is expensive stuff, that needs to be insured.

What if you build a relationship with the local Museum of Art or some other museums nearby. They may regularly take in some famous artwork or sculpture (think expensive paintings by the masters, or priceless jewellery encrusted with precious stones). Can you imagine the 'wow' factor of being the company involved in moving something like that?

You won't get a link today from that Museum of Art for a moving company. It's going to take some phone calls, introductory emails. You'll have to nurture a relationship.

That could take three months of meetings, phone calls, personalized emails (without using an email template) letters, and agreement from all of the museum's board of trustees. The museum website may have a section for: partners, affiliations or sponsors. For instance: "these exhibits were moved courtesy of our partnership with ABC moving company". Bang, there's your HIGH quality link opportunity.

It just took you three months to get ONE link. This will help your moving business. And it will also help you with Google. Can you really place a price on having that great link?

We help top marketing agencies, online entrepreneurs and companies with in-house marketing departments to scale their link building efforts. We're like the executional arm of your in-house SEO team, specialising in link building and content strategy. Our clients are mainly in the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Our long term clients understand how much work goes into a successful SEO campaign and value consistent, organic search results.

Most clients already have an SEO strategy in place, their on-page SEO is on point and they have access to quality content.

They simply need a regular supply of relevant, authority links.

We provide this.

Who is this service for?

This service would be a perfect if:

• You're willing to invest in your business.
• You're ready to commit to at least 3-6 months to see significant returns.
• You're already seeing success in your business, and want to scale it.
• You're a damn cool person. We like working with cool people!

This service might not be a good fit if:

• You're launching a brand new firm and looking to get your first clients.
• You have a small marketing budget (under $1,800/£1,500 per month).
• You're looking for "quick SEO" services.
• You're looking to micro-manage. Once we've agreed with you on a plan, let us get on with it. We're professionals and know our craft.

Which clients don't you work with?

Clients will be considered on a case-by-case basis to see if it's a good fit for us to work together. In general, we do not work with websites promoting anything of an illegal, exploitative or offensive nature (for example, involving: gender, race, religion, sex, politics).

What industry sectors do you serve?

We've worked with a wide variety of industries. For example: health, business, financial services, e-commerce, utilities, construction, entertainment and travel. Some niches are more difficult than others.

Do you offer a white label link building service?

Yes. If you're a marketing agency or an in-house SEO team, and require a non-disclosure for your clients, we're happy to sign an agreement.

In simple terms, you will need good quality, useful content that will earn links.

One truth we need to establish at the outset. Useful content will get linked.

The less useful your content is, the less likely you are to receive a link.

A 'useful' site is one that provides rich quality content on a specific subject where the content has been published by authority's or leaders in their field.

Take the World Cancer Research Fund website, for example. It has research articles backed by comprehensive data, case studies on treatments, practical cancer prevention guides, and more. It has many thousands of links. All earned naturally.

Of course, most sites will not have that type of long-form content. This is even more challenging when dealing with legitimate websites about topics that may seem to many people as 'not very interesting' (Ok, boring!).

For example, say you had an e-commerce store selling shoes. If your only content were shoe product pages, then the opportunities for generating links would be extremely limited. So it would be difficult to find high-authority websites that are willing to link to e-comm stores.

But WAIT!

Get your creative juices flowing...

What if, alongside your shoe products, you created a searchable database of information on shoes (brands, types, sizes, colours, etc.)? What if you had a section devoted to shoe world records, or a glossary of shoe related terms. What if you had biographies of over 99 famous shoes makers? What about an interactive tool that showed you the shoe making process, or even a shoe fitting guide. Or a directory of shoe retailers for every single category possible? What about a community, guides, reviews, forums, etc.

The more that your site provides rich, deep and useful information on a specific topic, the more likely it is that editors will feature it in their own publication.

Why? Because valuable content gets links. And products don't.

It's all about that link-worthy content!

We have awesome content, how easy will it be to get links?

If your organisation has linkable assets like: thought or industry leaders (yes, actual people), your brand, your interesting story/history, your free widgets or tools, unique (data driven) and insightful/informative content, or great resources useful for your audience, etc., then you'll have a greater chance of success when running a link campaign.

Also, your industry's definition of "linkable" is likely to differ from other industries. e.g. if your competitors all have free web tools or visual content, this will not be a strong enough differentiator, so will not incite enough interest to generate links.

Having great content is the fuel that will drive your link prospecting.

I have no useful articles on my site. How much content can you produce?

We can perform content audits and content ideation. This will give you an idea of the type and amount of content required for your niche. The content itself, will need to be either produced by the client themselves or by a writer. We can source reliable writers who can create high-quality content at the required level. As well as the content promotion campaign, first you will also need a budget for content production. This can be anything from several hundred pounds, upwards.

At the very least you'll need a budget for off-site content creation, for instance, writing articles for guest blogging.

Also, any suitable pieces of content must be approved quickly by the client. 24-48 hours is the maximum time for content approval, to ensure we get the placements required.

Before acquiring links, your site (ideally) needs a strong foundation, including:

• Technical Optimisation: all of your site's technical issues have been identified and fixed.
• Keyword Research: you've identified keywords your site is capable of ranking for.
• Page Level Optimisation:
  • you've optimised web pages from a keyword placement perspective
  • you've satisfied searcher intent
• Site Architecture: a well developed site architecture can help search engines crawl your site more easily and improve user experience.
• Content Asset Development: you have suitable linkable assets that are either already published or you're willing to create them.
• Conversion Rate Optimisation: your pages have been optimised for converting the traffic into for example, sales, leads, email subscribers.

Domain Authority (DA) was developed by Moz, as a measure of a website's authority or power. A number of factors (over 40) are used to calculate the overall strength of a site. Page Authority (PA) is Moz's measure of the strength of each individual page on a website.

Why do people use DA and PA?

Using a metric like DA is so appealing for a number of reasons:

• it's tangible and concrete: scoring your site out of 100 with a solid figure; comparing your site against the competition
• people respect authority: having a higher DA than your competitors, means you're seen as the dominant and most trustworthy voice in your industry
• domain authority has 'some' weight in ranking (and also link authority and value).

What's wrong with using DA or PA?

Domain Authority (DA) can actually be a useful metric, in certain situations. Many site owners seem to think DA or PA is THE most important metric for them to track. Which is simply not true.

While DA has some benefits, it should never be the determining factor when pursuing a link. DA cannot determine the relevance of your site over another.

In the past, Google's PageRank (PR) was one of the most popular tools for measuring the quality and authority of specific pages. But, even then Google were telling people not to focus on PageRank so much. This became a reality with the deprecation of the public version of PageRank (it was last updated in November 2013).

DA has become the latest HOT metric, that people look at. It's simply not a long term strategy to rely on a measurement that:

• could be manipulated, or;
• could be de-valued (like Google's PR), at some point in the future, or;
• is run by Moz, whose link index is a mere speck of the actual total links pointing to a domain, so not the most accurate data.

The most important factor is relevance (to the client's niche).

Other criteria include:

• the quality of content (are they actually good?)
• are they a leader in their industry?
• does it have an active community (is it a social hub, with comments etc.)

What matters most, a target placement page's Domain Authority (DA) or Page Authority (PA)?

The ONLY factor that matters is RELEVANCE.

Every single time.

A domain with a super high DA, but is irrelevant, has nothing against a site that's highly relevant to your niche.

Yes, it could be possible there are high DA sites that are very relevant to a given site. But, these are like golden nuggets in vast space of the Internet.

Authority does matter. But it's not the be-all and end-all. So, both relevance and authority should be evaluated during a campaign. Ultimately, relevancy is chosen over DA.

If the target site is relevant to my site, has amazing content and it's run by real humans, then that's where my link belongs..

Can you get a link on a DA 50+ site?

Let's say you were given the choice of obtaining a link from a relevant site with a DA of 37, or one from an irrelevant DA 51 site.

DA 51 is no doubt great score. The site has been certainly been around a while and is trusted.

But, the best choice would still be the DA 37 site. Every time. The relevant link makes more sense, not only for users, but for the search engines. It will be a high quality placement, irrespective of any DA score. If a user clicks on it, they'll be happy with the results; because they'll land on the page that matched their query.

That is after all, our goal in earning natural backlinks. To connect pages of the internet to create a better experience for users. Effectively, we should be aiming to build relationships (links), as if the search engines don't exist.

I only want links on DA 20+ sites..

Making metrics based decisions is short term thinking.

Metrics are only a guideline. Nothing more.

A site with low metrics is potentially just new. Let's say you're working towards increasing your site's authority. So, getting relevant links have more potential to become authoritative over time.

Missing out on quality websites just because they're DA 19 seems a little short sighted. Look at it this way, if your link is on a relevant, newish DA 19 website, it will grow with that site. In about 3 years time, that DA 19 could be DA 60 and you'll have a lovely aged, editorial backlink.

Can you guarantee us an increase in Domain Authority (DA)?

DA sure is a cool metric. Seeing what a website scores out of 100 can be exciting.

But, DA is not a metric that should be used to determine the success of a link building campaign. It doesn't always tell the full story. For instance, one recent DA update brought down multiple websites across the board. But, we saw increases in both their rankings and traffic for these very same client sites.

The increase in traffic is much more important metric to measure the success of your SEO efforts.

How would you choose links in an ideal world?

The real litmus test is "Would you want the link if Google did not exist?"

Your answer must be "Yes".

For instance, let's say a site is selling garden gates. How would people find out about these gates, if there were no search engines like Google?

The web master would need to build 'real' relationships with gardening clubs, DIY centres and higher education centres with gardening courses, for example.

In the real world...

Yes, there will be some links you go after because you know they're going to help your organic search rank. They likely will not be viewed as black hat link building techniques or any form of manipulative link scheme either.

What types of relevance matter?

Link to page relevance: this is the relevance of a link in relation to the content around it. e.g. you linked to a house insurance company, but have no useful on-topic content surrounding that link. It would come across as manipulative, unnatural and make no contextual sense!

Page to page relevance: the destination target page should be related to the page you're linking from. It would make no sense from a user experience and SEO perspective, to link to a page that's not related to yours.

Domain to page relevance: Every single page linking to your site may not be relevant to the site as a whole. It does not mean it's necessarily a bad link, as it can be relevant on another level. The least the domain should be is relevant to the actual page linked to.

Domain to domain relevance: this refers to 2 sites being in the same niche or industry. This type of relevance isn't absolutely necessary.

Although all these four layers of relevance aren't created equal, you should strive for relevance across the board.

Why does relevance matter so much?

When building links, relevance is the predominant factor, as these are genuine links, in their natural habitat. So, if the link is on a site that sends real visitors, then we will approach them.

Relevance results in targeted referral traffic (and conversions) because when a user clicks an external link, they have a specific intent and expectation the destination page will satisfy that. Domain Authority plays no part here. Remember, it's in Google's best interest to rank the most relevant content (i.e. what a user finds most useful to their search query) at the top.

By having a relevant link, ensures the user receives information that's useful to them, and undoubtedly a more click-worthy link. User interaction is crucial not only for SEO, but for conversions. If the destination page isn't relevant, a visitor will leave (or 'bounce' off).

It's simple. Post your links on relevant websites.

That's it. Forget about all these metrics.

Relevancy is king. And queen for that matter.

The only link building 'tools' we regularly use for client's sites are Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

What's wrong with using tools?

Using tools can be misleading, as they're based on data that have varying degrees of accuracy.

For example, Moz (originator of the Domain and Page Authority metrics) tools are commonly used in SEO circles. While Moz's metrics are useful, they don't tell the whole story and aren't 100% accurate.

To determine a site's Domain Authority, Moz take account of the number of inbound links to the site. But, this is an unreliable figure.

Why?

Moz's link index contains such a small sample size of sites, it will only reveal a tiny fraction of the inbound links to a site. Which means they can't possibly give a reliable quality score.

This is the reason for large discrepancies between Moz data and the information coming from other sources or tools, like Ahrefs or Google's Search Console.

Would you seriously consider relying on one single tool for link building? Another reason not to seek links from sites that have a not-so-magical DA number attached to them.

What tools do you use to check backlinks?

You could use Majestic SEO, Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer, but tools will not give you the full picture. Each tool will be limited by their link index database. In most cases, this will only be a tiny fraction of a website's total inbound links.

What tools do you use for tracking keyword rankings?

Using tools will never provide 100% accuracy. If you really need to track keyword ranking, just use Google Search Console, and get the average position.

We focus on tracking traffic increases not ranking positions. Ranking is hard to accurately record. It changes depending on location, device and user. Whereas, traffic is traffic. You can then compare that with your conversion goals, to ensure you're getting the right type of traffic. And, whether it's increasing, month on month.

In order to ensure your link building campaign's success, see the section below: 6. Reporting, for the metrics we track and report on.

How do you track individual organic keywords?

Tracking specific competitive keywords can be misleading.

Over 70% of search terms typed into Google are new, and have never been searched before. Both this, and the increasing uptake of voice activated search indicate the future of search is in topical relevance, not individual keywords.

Also, a lot of traffic comes from long tail keywords, which are not being monitored. A better metric to track would be the increase in organic traffic.

Our reporting metrics are:

1. Number of links built (inbound links)
2. Rise in organic impressions
3. Rise in organic traffic
4. Rise in referral traffic from links gained

* 'Rise' refers to the increases in organic impressions or clicks in the last month compared to the previous period as numbers (e.g. 500 last month to 1000 this month).

Can I see a link report?

You will have your own live link reporting page. Links can be viewed in real time, 24/7. Monthly reports are also available to help you see the full benefits of your link building campaigns.

Here are examples of these link building reports.

If you have any questions, you can contact us by email.

What level of support do you provide?

Both phone calls and email support will be included in your monthly service. For more information, see:terms 1.6 Support levels.

Can we have a meeting?

We can have an initial telephone call and later a live video meeting, if suitable.

You will not be bound to any long term contracts. There are no lengthy terms and conditions. If you're satisfied with our backlinking work, you can continue on a month to month basis.

Your partnership with us simply means we treat your project as if we'll provide at least 6 months of services. If we prove the value of our work, you can partner for longer as required.

As your campaign will be fully customised to your website, we ask you sign an initial 3 month contract. After this initial period, payments can be made on a month-to-month basis. So you will not be locked into a lengthy contract.

All work comes with a risk free guarantee. That is, if we don't deliver on our proposal as agreed with you, then you'll be refunded for every target you don't receive.

For instance, we can guarantee to deliver on pre-agreed metrics. For outreach and link building campaigns, this will be the number of link targets we reach out to. For example, we approach 200 targets, which on average results in 15-20 links. This will vary month to month, as we're building relationships with real people. For 200 targets, we would typically guarantee a minimum of 10 links.

This work will result in a steady increase of highly targeted referral and organic traffic. Providing your site is optimised for conversions, these visitors will lead to more sales and more revenue, and also; an increase in the site's rankings.

Can you guarantee a top 5 ranking position of my keyword in the search results?

If you mean for example:

"Can you get position #1 rankings of keyword X by next month?"

Keyword rankings may give 'some' indication of traffic. But rankings do not give you a complete picture of your website's organic traffic increases.

Also, there are many other variables. For example, your online competition may be increasing, on-site factors may come into play and the search engines' algorithms are constantly changing.

For that reason, we do not make any guarantees for specific ranking results. No decent SEO would guarantee ranking results either.

Additionally, the number of new search queries are increasing. i.e. people are typing in new search terms into google every day. You may want to rank for "my fave keyword". But someone may be searching for "higher converting keyword" - which you may never have heard of before, and may well be more profitable for you. And, of course, voice search is set to become much more prominent.

Yes, keywords themselves are important. But, using keyword ranking as a metric is flawed (for the reasons above, among others). Far better to track increases in organic and referral traffic.

Our primary goal in building links is to drive highly targeted traffic to your website. Over time this organic traffic will hopefully grow. Any ranking increases are a welcome benefit. If your website is optimised for conversions, this traffic growth should in turn, mean more leads or sales.

There are a number of variables that need to be taken into account, in order to assess costing. This may include: your requirements, niche/business, website, content strategy, etc. All these factors can dictate the amount of work required to get powerful links.

If you wish to increase your search engine ranking (and gain more search traffic) by acquiring high quality links, investing in an ongoing marketing budget is recommended.

For example, if your website does not have relevant or suitable content, a content budget will be required, in addition to a link building budget.

There is no 'one size fits all' approach here. We handle each enquiry personally.

More details on pricing are here.

Why are payments made in advance?

There are costs for the initial foundation work, which must take place, before any links are built.

This work may include (but is not limited to): website audit (assessing a website for relevant content and checking current link profile), researching the niche or business sector, competitor analysis, preparing a content strategy, creating a structured, long-term link building strategy and finding suitable targets.

This all needs to be completed, before we run an email outreach campaign.

In its simplest form, "a link is a connection from one web resource to another". This definition comes from the World Wide Web Consortium.

The reality is the web in it's entirety is huge and complex.

But at it's core, the web is made up of only two things: content and links.

Lots and lots of links.

It's these backlinks between pages and websites that are the main way web users navigate from one place to another. A simple mouse click takes you from one site to another, or from a search result to a specific page, or a picture, or to a video, or a song.

But if you have a website, then links have a whole new meaning. It's backlinks that help determine how successful your site will be on the web. Because, every major search engine uses some form of link analysis when determining search results.

What is a backlink in seo, with examples?

A backlink is a link on a website's page that, when clicked, take the user to another page. This page may be on the same site or another site.

For example, here is a link to a page on the same site (these are internal links like this one!): FAQ.

Inbound links are ones that are placed on another website, and directed towards your site. These backlinks affect your search engine rankings more than anything else. The position that your site ranks in the search results is largely determined by the number and QUALITY of links pointing towards your site.

Why are backlinks important?

The number of backlinks give an indication of the popularity or importance of your website.

Backlinks are important for SEO because search engines, like Google, give credit to sites with a good number of high QUALITY inbound links (IBL's). That is, for a given search query, one site will be more relevant than others in their results pages, due to the number of backlinks to that site.

Highly relevant IBL's, i.e. links from reputable websites with content related to your site, are deemed by the search engines as being more valuable.

What is a no-follow link?

A no-follow backlink is one that has had the rel="nofollow" attribute. It tells Google not to use that link when determining the authority or trust of the page that's linked to.

What is a do-follow link?

Do-follow links (have no attribute applied to them). They are used by Google in their ranking algorithm. Although they may be seen as more valuable than no-follow, a link profile with few no-follow links will appear unnatural.

What are the different types of backlinks?

There are two main types of backlinks:

1. Internal backlinks: These are hyperlinks that point to another page on the same website. That is, the source page (where the backlink resides) and the target page (where it points to) exist on the same domain.
   These links are useful because they help users to navigate a site, establish a site's information hierarchy and spread link juice (ranking power) around a site. For example, you may have seen a section with links at the bottom of a blog post which says: "Related articles". Those will all usually link to posts on related topics on that very same site.
2. External backlinks: These are outbound links that point to any domain other than the domain where the link exists on. So, whether you're linking out to another site or another site links to yours, they're both considered External Links.

What do you mean by anchor text?

Anchor text is used to create the clickable part of a backlink. It can be a branded, a URL variation (http://www.domainname.com, domainname.com, etc.), a brand name variation (your name, your business name, etc.), phrases include the exact keywords you're targeting, or phrases not including the keywords you’re targeting.

Previously, it helped if the backlink's anchor text matched your target keyword, but this has now been de-valued due to being abused.

For instance, it's more natural for a website's backlink profile to have mainly branded links (like 'Business Name' or 'www.businessname.com').

What are bad back links?

Whilst it's true you need other sites to link to your site to improve your search engine rankings, getting backlinks from certain sites can also do more harm to your site than good.

Here are a few categories of websites that should be avoided: sites not indexed in Google, sites with little authority or trust, sites which are in link farms, websites consisting of just pages of links, sites which link out using over optimised anchor text or with poorly written content.

What type of backlinks should I have?

Backlinks aren't all created equal in value. One high quality backlink can be worth 100 times a low quality one. You should aim for each backlink to be from a relevant, trusted (preferably high authority) source that sends traffic.

There are multiple ways you can use to find websites to get links from. How many sites you need to find, depends on the number of inbound backlinks you'll need.

You can easily discover as many sites as possible using these Link Building Strategies.

How many backlinks do I need?

How many backlinks you will need really depends on what you are trying to achieve. For instance, if you have more keyword targets, want greater rankings and a higher number of visitors, then you'll need more links. One indication of how many links you’ll need to rank, is your level of competition and the quality of the backlinks.

There is no fixed number of links to target, as this will vary from business to business. But, a small business should be aiming for 25-50 quality backlinks per month, to start their SEO campaign on the right track.

Setting exact backlink targets is not a good idea though. A better approach would be to consistently and naturally build links. Link building should continue to be an on-going process - even when you reach the top of Google's search results. If you stop building links, you're giving your competitors' a greater chance of overtaking your rankings.

What backlinks does google count?

Backlinks still remain the strongest indication of authority for search engines like Google.

Google's own ranking algorithm consists of more than 200 components, or signals. The primary ranking factors are:

1. Link score: this is based on the incoming link's individual quality score and the number of links to the site. Link quantity is an important part of this score. Remember, spammy, low-quality backlinks should be avoided and links from the same domain carry very little weight.
2. Anchor text relevance: it's best to keep your anchors diverse and natural; all about having the right balance.

Why are my backlinks not showing in google?

There are several reasons why this may be happening:

• The pages containing your links may not have been indexed (or discovered by the search engines). Google may not able to access the pages which containing your links.
• The pages containing your links may have a 'nofollow' directive which prevents Googlebot from accessing your links
• The links may use some form of redirect, which means search engine crawlers cannot follow it
• The links may have been crawled but Google is not listing them in Google Search Console. They have acknowledged it's normal that not all links to your site may be listed.

Link building is THE most important skill in SEO.

But, it's also the most challenging part.

You will need to master several different skills. If you want people to link to your website, then you'll need creativity, content, sales, programming and good old-fashioned psychology. A budget will help too.

No two link building campaigns are the same. The way you build links really depends as much upon your website as it does your personality.

If you want to get more search engine traffic, then the bottom line is that link building is a must.

There are many different ways to build backlinks.

How to build authority links?

There are 3 basic types of link acquisition:

1. Natural editorial links: There are given naturally by sites that want to naturally link to your content. You will need to either create or have link worthy material and also have the ability to create awareness about it. Links from authority sites are the best type, but also usually the hardest to acquire.
2. Manual outreach: usually by reaching out to relevant bloggers and creating a value proposition. For example, creating a useful article to be placed on a related site to yours, or convincing a University academic your resource is good enough to be included on the public syllabus page.
3. Self-created (non-editorial): SSites that allow anyone to to create links through e.g. blog comments, user profiles or forum signatures. These will often be low value links. In general, search engines continue to devalue these types of links, as they're often considered spammy so should not be pursued as part of your core link building strategy.

Where to build quality links?

The main factors which determine the quality of your link are:

• Authority: The authority of the page (and site) linking to your site matters. A lot. So links from authoritative pages will pass more authority to your site. A link from theguardian.com will have a greater impact than one from a random, nameless blogger with a one month old site.
• Relevancy: you want to acquire links from authority sites which are closely related to your site.
• Link Position: A link placed in the main body of a page's content is worth more ones placed in footers or sidebars.
• Anchor Text: This clickable text section of a link should include words that flow naturally in your content, rather than only using keyword-rich anchor text, which has been abused.

Off-page (or off-site) search engine optimization (SEO) refers to any actions you can take outside your own website to impact on your rankings in the search engine results. This involves improving search engine and user perception of your website's relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.

The main method of achieving this is through other reputable places on the web (other sites, pages, people, etc.) that link to or promote your site; they are "voting" for the quality of your page's content.

At the heart of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Backlinks are used by search engines as indicators of content (that they are linking to's) quality. For instance, a site with many high value links usually ranks better than a similar site with fewer links.

Whilst earning links from external sites is the main way to implement an off-site SEO strategy, it's also true that almost any activity that occurs outside of your site to help improve your search ranking position could be thought of as off-page SEO. For example: social media marketing, unlinked brand mentions, influencer marketing, pay per click (using PPC advertising platforms include Google and Facebook).

This is an on-going process. It's not a one-off job, that you can simply set up once and forget about it. The best off-site SEO approach depends on which industry you operate in and your budget.

Improving the off-site SEO of a site involves getting links from other (reputable and trustworthy) sites, mentions of your brand, shares of your content, and "votes" of confidence from places outside of your own website.

What are on page SEO techniques?

On-site optimisation is the process of making your website appeal to both visitors and the search engines. A search engine will evaluate a site very differently to a human visitor. A search engine like Google can't really understand how nicely your site is designed, or the true value your products offer. It can only judge a site from a purely technical perspective. After all, it uses machines (computers) to review sites.

There are many factors which are part of the on-site optimisation process, from checking the meta tags, content to ensuring the correct backlink profile. These can vary greatly from site to site.

Having a solid on-site optimisation in place, is the foundation for building links (off-site optimisation). Without it, off-site optimisation efforts may go largely to waste.