Link Building Basics
How The Ranking Store approaches Link Building Basics
Start with the page, not the link
When people ask us at The Ranking Store about Link Building Basics, our first move is usually to look away from links entirely and at the page that would receive one. In our blogging guidance we set out why structure matters — a captivating title, a clear path through the post, a reason for a reader to stay — and that guidance is where link work actually begins. A thin page gives another site nothing to point at, and no amount of outreach repairs that.
Look at relevance before anything else
Next we look at where a link would come from. The question we ask is whether that page, and the site around it, is genuinely about the same subject as ours. Relevance is the part of link building we can defend; volume is the part we cannot. Google’s published spam policies treat link schemes — buying links, excessive link exchanges, automated placements — as link spam (Google Search Central, “Spam policies for Google web search”), which is why we don’t build our approach around shortcuts.
Work through it in order
Our sequence is simple: the page, then the source, then the record. We keep a written record of what we have looked at and why, so the pattern of links stays legible to us and to anyone reading it later. That record is what makes the work repeatable rather than improvised, and it is the part most people skip.
Questions we hear along the way
The questions tend to be practical ones. Where do I start? What makes a source relevant enough? What do I do about the links I already have? Our answer to all of them comes back to the same place: write something worth citing, as we argue in Building a Loyal Blog Audience, then describe it honestly to people who cover the same ground, and keep notes so you can see your own pattern forming.
Why we do it this way
Because a link is somebody else’s judgement about your page, and judgement doesn’t respond to force. We would rather have a small set of links we can explain than a large set we can’t. Build the page, earn the mention, keep the record — Link Building Basics is mostly repetition of that loop, done consistently rather than in bursts.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Approach article: Backlink Building
- Reference: Link Impact Timelines
- Reference: Backlink building software
- Reference: Which rank-building SEO tools to use and why
- Approach article: Backlink Building
- Approach article: Link Building Methods
- Guide: backlink building software
