What is Link Building? Beginner’s SEO for 2025

Link building is a common term in the marketing world. You may have seen online guides discussing this, or maybe your web designer or marketing team has suggested it, but what is it? Why do you need it? Most importantly, how do you ensure you do it correctly? Whether you know a little or nothing at all about link building, this guide is the most useful one out there for a beginner. Let’s jump right in, starting with the basics: what is link building?

Link building is an SEO technique that helps websites earn backlinks. These backlinks boost your authority and assist you in rising through the rankings of the search engine result pages (SERPs). The more quality links you have, the better your chances become. There are multiple types of link building techniques out there, and we will go through them further down the guide. You can gain these links naturally, particularly if you have outstanding content that provides a lot of value to its readers or if you have published your own research that people need to source. However, this isn’t always guaranteed. Link building can ensure you get these links and, therefore, that authority.

As touched upon above, link building is great for boosting your authority, which can go on to improve your rankings. However, link building isn’t just great for this. There are many other reasons it is so important to your SEO efforts. Moving up through the rankings means you could become exposed to a lot more traffic. This traffic is an opportunity for an increase in sales. It can also improve your website metrics, including Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), and PageRank (PR). When we discuss link building boosting your authority, there are two angles you can look at this, too. One is that you gain authority in the eyes of Google (authority is one of their ranking factors), with the reward being to move up the rankings. However, you also gain authority from potential customers. Link building will help your website stand out amongst the competition and instill trust in those who come across you, seeing you as a familiar brand.

The reason you should pay attention to your backlinks is that just like good links can help you, bad ones can harm your SEO. Low-quality, spammy links will impact your authority and trust and even result in penalties. The key is to avoid these types of links.

To successfully build links, you need a bespoke campaign that is perfectly executed. A link building campaign is a strategic plan that details how you will get backlinks. While goals will be slightly different for businesses, most will involve increasing the number of backlinks and/or improving the quality of backlinks associated with them. No matter what goal you have, it will always be SMART (Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Once you have goals laid out, the campaign will also detail the content you will be creating, potential link sources, and the plan of action for reaching out to these sites. As the campaign comes to life, regular monitoring will take place.

To give you an example of some of the elements that might be in your campaign, take a look below:

• Competitor analysis
• Audience research
• Sourcing potential link opportunities
• Content creation
• Blogger outreach
• Link types (research and summary of what link types you need to be gaining)
• Backlink analysis

An expert can put together a campaign for you quickly, but if you want to build this yourself, be prepared to do more in-depth research on this and understand it might take a little longer to come together.

After reading this guide, you may feel confident enough to carry out your own link building campaigns, but you would benefit more from reaching out to a link builder. A link builder is a specialist in SEO who builds links to improve a website’s backlink profile and, ultimately, their ranking on the SERPs. While many experts can work in a freelance capacity, you’ll find the best place to reach a link builder is an SEO agency. Their skills range from content creation and SEO to communication and outreach – which are vital for managing relationships with websites. The best link builders are also creative and adaptable, with a good dose of strategic thinking up their sleeves.

By going to a link builder for all your link building needs, they will be able to tell you the correct techniques so you can stay on the right side of Google. However, even if you do go to an expert, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit you to learn more about all of these. To kickstart this, let’s look over what techniques you should and could be doing as part of your link building campaign.

White hat link building is the only legitimate SEO technique to get the best and highest quality links. If an expert can’t reassure you they are using white hat techniques, it’s time to look elsewhere. Using anything else will get you penalized. Usually, the most popular strategy within white hat link building is manual link building, but you also have broken link building and HARO.

• What Is Manual Link Building?

Manual link building is the act of actively building up your backlink profile with quality links on websites that are highly relevant to your audience, brand, and industry. For example, a tech company selling software wouldn’t benefit from having a backlink on a gardening blog. With manual link building techniques, you can secure a technology-based website for your content and link. As well as relevancy, it gives you greater control over the quality of the website linking to you. A website with a lower DA (domain authority) score won’t bring nearly as many benefits as a DA score of 50+. Manual link building will involve you utilizing techniques such as blogger outreach, a marketing technique that builds relationships between link builders, agencies, or businesses with bloggers and web admins. When relationships are developed, both parties can benefit. They get great quality content, and you get a backlink.

You don’t just have to build links on websites with this technique. Forum link building is a popular technique used when manually building links. With this, you find the relevant forums that are active – there’s no point targeting one that isn’t. Once you’ve created an account, you can upload posts on new or existing threads that contain your links. You could even add your link on forum blogs. However, this type of manual link building should come with a warning. Post too many times, and you risk spamming the forum, so this won’t work in your favor.

• What Is Broken Link Building?

Broken link building involves sourcing links that don’t work and securing the spot from your competitors. Once you’ve found the broken link opportunities, you need to recreate the content – just better! You need to give plenty of reasons for the blogger to use your content. Remember, you might not be the only one finding broken links. Once you have your content ready, you need to contact the webmaster, informing them about the broken link and that you have even better content with working links to replace it. Why it works is simple. Web admins and bloggers don’t want to provide resources for their readership that lead nowhere. If you are offering a replacement and it is of better quality, they aren’t going to say no.

• What Is HARO Link Building?

HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out and is a powerful technique that brings together business owners, journalists, reporters, and bloggers. With this, you can gain high-quality links from extremely reputable and authoritative publications if used correctly, increase your DA, and become viewed as an expert in your industry!

It works this way: Journalists and reporters are seeking expert sources for their content and stories to add credibility, and if you can provide them with a fantastic quote, in return, they’ll link to your website. Using the HARO platform, reporters can submit queries that require an expert source. You can set up emails to notify you if anything relevant to you crops up. Once they do, you can respond with a helpful quote. You might not be the only one who replies, so it isn’t a guarantee that you will get a link, but if you have provided the most credible and relevant response, it is a great way to build up your backlinks and authority.

Before we explain what black hat link building is, we want to make it clear that you should not be using this form of link building. Black hat link building is a technique that brings quick results, but it is a spammy SEO practice that “cheats the system,” pushing up sites higher than they deserve and will only provide short-term gains. In the long-term, it will get you a one-way ticket to penalties, as it violates search engine guidelines. These penalties include a drop in rankings, being removed from indexes, or being banned entirely from results pages. This all impacts your credibility, trust, user experience, and, of course, traffic. Coming back from this can prove to be a lot of work and investment. While you may have earned links quickly, if you get a penalty, it will take much longer to return to make any progress, let alone get back to where you were previously to building these links.

One method people use is automated systems that create a huge volume of links with no effort required and in a short time. The other main method is PBNs, which will be explored below. Search engines are constantly on the lookout for websites using these methods and work to improve their algorithm to identify this much faster.

• What Is PBN Link Building?

PBN is short for private blog network. This is a network of websites that have been created for the sole purpose of improving another website’s authority and online visibility within the SERPs. As every link you receive is effectively a vote of confidence that your website provides value, if you begin creating links artificially by using PBNs, you are manipulating the algorithm and violating search engine guidelines.

• What Are Link Wheels?

Like PBNs, link wheels are networks of websites linked together to help improve another site’s rankings – often referred to as the hub or money site. Your website would be the central site. Then, around this, you would create other websites (made for the sole purpose of providing backlinks) that connect to the main site and link to one another in a circular pattern. The main difference between link wheels and PBNs is that PBNs do not link to each other; they are only connected to the main site. However, they work in the same way to falsify backlinks.

• What Are The Signs Of Black Hat Link Building?

If you aren’t sure whether you have been a victim of black hat link building in the past or want to reassure yourself that you’re only doing the right techniques, whether this is you, your team, or an outsourced company, these are the signs to look out for:

• Poor quality content – Content that doesn’t offer value could be a sign that it was created solely for links.
• Hidden links – Noticing you’ve got hidden links in your content? It’s time to disassociate yourself from this content as quickly as possible.
• Duplicate content or article spinning – If your content is the same across multiple sites or is extremely similar, you are at risk of being penalized.
• Sneaky redirects and cloaking – This is harder to spot, but check that you aren’t showing different content to crawlers and search users. These techniques are designed to gain better rankings and more traffic, but Google will detect this.
• Keyword stuffing – Is your content packed full of keywords that make it appear spammy and unreadable? A penalty could land your way if it contains keywords of more than 2% of your total content.
• Low-quality websites – Getting spammy links from low-quality sites and at such a high volume could be a sign that you are part of link farms or PBNs, resulting in penalties.

To confirm that your website hasn’t been impacted by black hat techniques, assess your traffic flow. If your traffic has suddenly changed without warning, the reason could be that a black hat link building method is at play, and you have been penalized. Assess if any of the above could be the cause, and if you can’t spot any of this, ask your team or SEO agency to provide a breakdown of how your budget is being used to reassure you that you aren’t paying for links or exchanging them – both of which are black hat techniques. You can check whether you have a penalty using a checker tool. If you have, it’s time to find experts who can help you remove this and come back stronger than ever, only using the right techniques.

Link building can provide a website with fantastic benefits, from more authority and improved credibility to higher rankings and more traffic, but not all link building methods are equal. When putting together your campaign, only use white hat techniques, including manual link building, broken link building, and HARO, making sure to avoid any of the black hat methods. Doing the latter could result in penalties that are difficult to come back from. Remember, you don’t have to go about this alone. Link building services are available at some of the best agencies and are ready to help you build links successfully and properly.