The importance of netlinking for SEO

 Netlinking is one of the pillars of natural referencing (SEO).

It is an essential lever of digital marketing to optimize the authority, visibility and notoriety of a website. What is netlinking and why is it so important for the SEO of a website? We provide answers to his questions.

Definition of netlinking

Still known as "external linking" or "link building" in the field of web marketing, netlinking is a strategy that consists of implementing techniques to acquire backlinks or backlinks.

As a reminder, a backlink is a hypertext link present on a website and when the user clicks on it is directed to your website. It therefore promotes the passage of the user from site A to your website. There is an increase in traffic.

In the sphere of SEO, netlinking is one of the main areas to work on to have a better ranking in Google's search results.

Indeed, search engine crawlers and indexers take into account external links that point to a website to reference it.

The influence of these inbound links on the natural referencing of a website explains why netlinking constantly appears in the speeches of web referrers. In addition, search engine algorithms evolve with each new update.

Promoters must therefore keep themselves informed of the new features they bring to adapt their netlinking strategy.

Why is netlinking important for SEO?

Netlinking is essential to improve your visibility on search engines. In fact, links from other sites indicate that yours is relevant to users, since they are referring to it.

They increase the amount of traffic on your website and improve the quality of navigation for your visitors by making it easier for them to access information. Thus, a good netlinking strategy offers you many benefits such as:

1 Better visibility. To rank higher on search engines and stand out from your competitors, you must:

• optimize your on-site SEO,
• produce quality content,
• have an effective netlinking.

In other words, link building is essential to increase the popularity of a website and to improve its positioning in the search results pages.

2 More qualified traffic. ➕ you have links pointing to your site, the more traffic you receive and the more clicks you potentially get.

3 More authority on the Internet. Backlinks improve the value of your site in the eyes of search engines by increasing the frequency of crawlers visiting your site. As soon as the robots notice that a site makes it easier for them, they increase its positioning on keywords to congratulate it.

What Google says

Google's indications about netlinking are very clear:

The position of a site in the search results displayed depends on the analysis of the sites that display a link leading to its pages. The relevance, quantity and quality of these links play a role in ranking. The sites that link to your pages provide information about the orientation of your site and can indicate its popularity and relevance.

From these words, we can remember that: the more qualitative and relevant backlinks your website has for Google, the more likely you are to have a better ranking in search results.

The more traffic you are likely to receive, the more you can increase your return on investment (ROI).

What is a quality backlink?

We have just seen that Google attaches great importance to the quality of links pointing to a website.

But what is the basis for judging the quality of a backlink? Several criteria are taken into account:

• The origin of the backlink. The site your link appears on defines the strength of the backlink. The authority, notoriety, semantic and thematic coherence as well as the PageRank of the site are important.

• The anchor text. The link anchor should contain keywords related to the subject of the landing page. The words surrounding the link must also have a semantic link close to these keywords.

• The position of the link in the text. Ideally, the backlink should be placed above the fold line in the content. The text of the article should also be on a page close to the homepage.

How to improve your SEO with netlinking?

There are different methods of acquiring links to boost the natural referencing of your website.

But setting up an effective netlinking strategy is not done in a day. You must take care to remain as natural as possible by finding the right balance between the different methods adopted.

The natural acquisition of backlinks thanks to link baiting

Link fishing or "link baiting" is a netlinking technique that consists of pushing other sites to create links to the web page to be referenced.

If the method is difficult to set up, its returns are very beneficial over time. Keep in mind, however, that you have no control over the quality of anchors, link recurrence or targeting.

Content creation

More concretely, it is about creating viral, unique, quality content with high added value.

It is indeed the richness and relevance of the content that will push market players to share it and cite it as a reference on their sites. With this in mind, being positioned in a niche or in a growing sector can make your job much easier.

The main advantage of link baiting is to get regular backlinks in addition to having quality content on your site. It is therefore necessary to choose competitive keywords and optimize the content for SEO.

You are spoiled for choice when it comes to the type of content to produce:

• videos,
• infographics,
• surveys and studies,
• interviews,
• rankings or lists, etc.

The production of Premium content is not enough to obtain natural backlinks. You also need to optimize all other aspects of SEO to ensure your content is visible.

Product content promotion

Once the content is published, it will have to be promoted by distributing it on different channels such as your website and/or your social networks.

This takes time, which is why many promoters opt for faster solutions. Indeed, it is possible to go through media such as:

• newspapers, government pages (if relevant),
• blogs, influencer sites…

These media have a high value for Google and therefore represent strategic places to place your links. Content of general interest that sheds light on a world event can, for example, arouse the interest of a newspaper.

However, the latter strategy is difficult to achieve due to the high cost of sponsored articles.

Writing guest articles (Guest Blogging)

Guest Blogging or creation of guest articles is potentially very beneficial for SEO.

This involves contacting a site with notoriety, that of an influencer for example, and offering to create content that will be published on your site.

The content produced must contain a link to their website and you will do the same on theirs. It is a win-win partnership, but for it to really pay off, the two sites must address complementary or at least similar themes.

Sponsored articles and link exchanges

Quick and effective, buying sponsored articles is a quick and potentially very effective technique to improve your SEO.

But it costs more or less depending on the popularity of the targeted site. Buying a link costs between €100 and €3,000, but it will not be useful if you have a recent site.

It is possible to directly contact the owners of sites that have authority and popularity in your sector of activity to offer them a collaboration. If this method does not inspire you, you can solicit platforms specializing in the sale of sponsored articles.

Apart from buying links, you can also get an arrangement to exchange backlinks with other websites. This not only allows you to save money, but also to have content on your blog.

In any case, make sure that the conditions correspond to your needs: number of words, number of links, tone, editorial line… But be careful, neither of these methods is appreciated by Google. These strategies become ineffective in case of massive link exchange and you run the risk of being punished by Google Penguin.

Netlinking SEO -> use PBNs

Today, Private Blog Networks (PBN) are still used by many SEOs in their SEO strategy despite the evolution of google algorithms.

These are blog networks (20 to 300 sites) designed by SEO professionals to improve the ranking of money sites in search engines.

These sites are built on expired domain names which generally already have backlinks. By correctly choosing the domain names to buy, you also obtain their notoriety and all their backlinks. Then simply redirect links from these blogs to your site (the money site) to improve its positioning in the SERPs.

While this technique is powerful and effective, it requires:

• strong technical knowledge,
• time,
• good organization,
• and a substantial financial investment.

💡 Also be aware that this technique is now considered a Black Hat method that Google strives to detect and severely punish.

The good habits of an effective netlinking strategy

The ranking of your website in search engines depends in part on the quantity and quality of your backlinks.

You must therefore adopt good netlinking habits to ensure the quality of the link profile you are building. These habits apply to all the link acquisition methods that we have mentioned above.

• Target only relevant and consistent sites for your backlink acquisition. The backlinks thus obtained reinforce the semantic relevance of your site, while inconsistent backlinks are useless and can harm your SEO natural referencing.

• Avoid reciprocal links and triangular links as much as possible, as they are easily detectable by Google. Always go for a complex trading scheme if you have the option. You will be able to easily benefit from the SEO juice of all your referring sites.

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• Always favor quality over quantity in your netlinking strategy. Collecting low quality backlinks can actually wipe out all your efforts to improve your SEO.

• Take the time to analyze the Citation Flow and Trust Flow of your future referrers with Majestic SEO and their Spam Score with Moz before starting any link acquisition process.

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• Avoid link farms. To place your link on a directory, make sure that the latter has at least a Citation flow of 30 and a Trust Flow of 20.

• Constantly check your backlinks with suitable tools (Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc.).

Improve your SEO with netlinking

Netlinking is one of the key vectors to use to optimize the SEO of a site, whether it is a showcase site or an e-commerce site.

SEOs must therefore adopt good netlinking practices to obtain the maximum number of quality backlinks while avoiding search engine penalties. But SEO is not just about collecting external links.

💡The quality of the content of the page to be referenced, the link anchors, the internal mesh and the technical aspect of the site are among other criteria to be taken into account to take full advantage of the benefits of netlinking for your natural referencing.

It is tedious work that takes time. Might as well start early!