This guide explains organic link building.
Below, you’ll find out what is organic link building, the types of organic backlinks you can obtain, and learn about the importance of this digital marketing strategy in search engine optimization (SEO). You’ll also get a list of link building strategies you can use to improve the organic rankings for your website.
By the end of this page, you’ll understand the meaning of building links organically and how you can use this method to increase the organic traffic for your website in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Table of Contents
What Is Organic Link Building?
Organic link building is the process of acquiring organic links without an agreement between websites or the intention of influencing search engine rankings. Organic link building practices follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for Search.
Types of Organic Links
- Editorial Links: These links are acquired naturally based on the merit of the content. Editorial links are some of the best types of organic backlinks a website can receive for off-page SEO.
- Resource Links: These links are placed organically on web pages that have curated lists of hyperlinks to external websites.
- Social Media Links: These links are obtained through organic link building campaigns that encourage people to share a website’s links on their social media accounts.
- Dofollow Links: These are hyperlinks that point back to a website for search engines to crawl. Dofollow links are the most valuable organic backlinks to get because they’re counted as a vote of confidence from the referring site, which can increase the target URL’s PageRank value for SEO.
- Nofollow Links: These are the weakest form of hyperlinks pointing back to a website because they do not always count as an editorial vote. Nofollow links tagged with the rel=nofollow attribute are a hint and not a directive for passing PageRank to the target web page.
Importance of Organic Link Building
Organic link building is important because it increases organic website traffic, search engine rankings, and trust. Organic link building is a major factor in how Google ranks web pages in the SERPs and which content webmasters considered to be important for their users.
Some of the top advantages of organic link building include:
- Increases the Domain Authority for the target website.
- Increases the Page Authority for individual URLs.
- Improves the overall visibility on search engines through higher organic rank in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
- Delivers more referral traffic from other sites that doesn’t have to be paid for.
- Increases revenue from improved search engine rankings and traffic.
- Creates more brand awareness for a business around the Internet.
- Enhances the overall trust for the target website.
- Provides continuous website promotion by other sites.
Organic link building also follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which prohibits link schemes (i.e., inorganic link building practices) that are used to create unnatural backlinks to manipulate a website’s ranking positions in the SERPs.
How To Do Organic Link Building
Publish High-Quality Content
The most effective method for doing organic link building is to publish high-quality content that meets user search intent. If the content is poorly written, not well researched, or leaves the visitor unsatisfied, then other website owners won’t link to it as much.
Write About Trending Topics
Being the first to publish articles about trending topics can help your content rank high in the SERPs for hot topic keywords. This can then lead to other sites creating organic links to your website as a reference (or citation) within their content. This organic link building strategy is also known as newsjacking, which is the process of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to get more media coverage and backlinks.
Create Linkable Assets
Creating linkable assets like free products, services, guides, software, ebooks, PDF files, templates, etc, makes it easier to acquire organic links because the content has built-in shareability. See this related guide for how to build backlinks for free using this method and others.
Post Industry Facts & Statistics
Facts and statistics posts is another excellent strategy for organic link building. People love to cite data in their own articles without having to do the research, so they go to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to find facts and statistics they can add to their content while linking back to the source for credit. This is a popular way to create powerful backlinks from high Domain Authority sites. It’s also one of the featured methods in this other guide with additional tips on how to get high quality backlinks.
Become a Source for Journalists
As mentioned earlier on this page, editorial links are some of the best types of organic backlinks you can get for your website. However, it can take time to build up enough brand awareness and expertise in your industry to get highlighted by major news outlets. That’s why HARO is a good service to join for organic link building. HARO connects site owners with journalists who are seeking expertise to include in their content with sources who have that expertise. HARO makes it easy to obtain editorial links that follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Check out this related guide on how to use HARO for backlinks for more details.
Focus On Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are phrases that are 4 or more words in length and typically have lower SEO competition. This means you can write and optimize an article that can rank high in the SERPs without it needing as many backlinks to the URL, which is an off-page SEO signal that’s needed for competitive short-tail keywords. And if you obtain the top 1-3 ranking positions for your target keywords in Google, Yahoo, or Bing, then website owners who are looking for relevant content to link to will most likely add an organic backlink to your site.
Participate In Industry Communities
The more active you are in industry communities while sharing valuable insights, the more you’ll become trusted as an expert in your field. This can lead to more organic links because other members of the community will feel connected to you and be more willing to add hyperlinks to your content from relevant articles on their sites.
Use Social Media for Organic Link Building
If you’re serious about organic link building, then you should have at least one social media account set up for your business that you actively use to share old and new content. With social media, it’s mostly a numbers game. The more times you post on the platform, the more organic you’ll get with your followers. This can lead to more people seeing and sharing your content which can create an unlimited number of organic backlinks. Check out this social media link building guide to get a list of all the ways you can create links on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.
Get Links from Interviews
If you want to get more dofollow links, then you should use interviews as an organic link building strategy. As mentioned on this other page on how to get dofollow backlinks, you can contact the hosts of industry-related podcasts and YouTube shows and ask them to be interviewed. If selected, you’ll typically get a dofollow link from the episode’s show notes and/or as a contextual link in the body copy of the blog post that promotes the show.
Hire an Organic Link Building Service
If you’re open to outsourcing the process of organic link building and have a sizable budget for the work, then you can check out this list of the best link building services to find a good agency. By working with a professional link builder, you can work on growing other aspects of your website and business while the organic links are being built for you month after month.
Organic Link Building Summary
I hope you enjoyed this guide on organic link building.
As you discovered, organic link building is the process of acquiring organic backlinks for a website without any agreement between site owners or the intention of influencing search engine rankings. Building organic links is the safest strategy in digital marketing for increasing organic rankings and traffic while following search engine guidelines for off-page SEO.
