As we understand how link building in SEO is essential for our business, the next step to take is to learn what are the various types of link building. We need to be cautious in every link that we apply since not all links are relevant and useful. Some links are out there to distract you and bring about negativity instead of boosting your business to the top.
Let us discover the difference between each type of link so that we will know what to use and what to avoid. Primarily, you need to understand that there are two major categories for each link. The two types of links are good and bad links.
But before dwelling in the difference between the two links, we must first tackle the other types of links.
We have the Editorial or “Natural” Links – this type of link is the most sought after link as it is readily given to website owners editorially. There is no need for you to ask for this type of link because it can be bestowed upon you if you have constantly produced quality content. It is a highly valued link as it often takes time and is quite hard to do.
Another type of link building is the Manual or the outreach link – a more common type of link building, this is applicable to businesses that have just started and are quite small. You need to manually contact bloggers, website owners, and other individuals especially assigned in SEO within your industry and ask them if they can have a way to link to you. You’d also have to give a compelling reason in order for them to trust you.
We also have a self-created, non-editorial link – a rather negative type of link that fools the search engines by convincing them that the contents are relevant and essential as a solution to a query. Often linked to black-hat practices, they are now penalized and devalued by Google.
As we go in detail with the good and bad link building types, we must understand how they differ so we know what to apply and which ones to discard.
Reciprocal Linking becomes a bad link when it is done excessively thus resulting in a negative impact in your results in ranking. Reciprocal links that are on point or one that makes sense is something that you can work well with for your efforts in SEO.
Guest posting or article marketing is good when people write something good that links back to your site while it becomes a bad link when it contains over-optimized anchor texts or press releases that are used and distributed on other sites.
Web directory links work best when they offer significant information to your potential customers. They become bad links when you just basically add your site to any web directory that you can think of.
Forum and Blogpost Comments become bad links or are unhelpful when used in signatures and are optimized towards your own site. A discussion or forum that is relevant to your business, as well as a comment that has a high value, will make it a relevant link.
As we tackled each type of link building, we finally understood how each type works. Now, it is up to us on how we apply them in SEO in order to produce the best result possible that our business can benefit from.
