Link Building

Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to yours. Because backlinks are a strong trust signal, earning relevant, authoritative links can improve your rankings. It ranges from creating content people naturally want to cite, to actively reaching out and asking for links.

Focus on earning links you would want even if search did not exist: digital PR, original research and data, free tools, and genuinely useful resources that publishers cite. Outreach works when it offers real value (a better resource, a broken-link fix, an expert quote), not when it begs. Judge every tactic by relevance and authority, and steer clear of paid links, private blog networks, and mass low-quality directories that invite penalties.

Senior practitioners run link building as a demand-and-PR function, not a transactional one — building linkable assets, earning brand mentions, and measuring impact on rankings and referral value rather than raw link counts. They understand the risk profile of each tactic, prioritise topical relevance over vanity domain metrics, and increasingly treat unlinked brand mentions and entity associations as part of the same authority-building effort in an AI-search world.