What Is It & How To Do It – How To Learn SEO
This guide explains organic link building.
Below, you’ll find out what organic link building is, what types of organic backlinks you can get, and the importance of this digital marketing strategy in search engine optimization (SEO). You will also find a list of link building strategies that you can use to improve organic rankings for your website.
By the end of this page, you will understand what it means to build links systematically and how you can use this method to increase organic traffic to your website in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

What is Organic Link Building?
Organic link building is the process of obtaining organic links between websites without the intent to compromise or affect search engine rankings. Organic link building practices follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for Search.
types of organic links
- Editorial Link: These links are naturally acquired based on the merit of the content. Editorial links are some of the best types of organic backlinks a website can get for off-page SEO.
- Resource Link: These links are systematically placed on web pages that contain curated lists of hyperlinks to external websites.
- Social Media Links: These links are obtained through organic link building campaigns that encourage people to share links to the website on their social media accounts.
- follow the link: 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 are counted as a vote of confidence from the referring site, which can increase the PageRank value of the target URL for SEO.
- nofollow links: These are the weakest forms of hyperlinks going back to a website because they do not always count as an editorial vote. Nofollow links tagged with the rel=nofollow attribute are a signal and not a directive to pass PageRank to the target web page.
Importance of organic link building
Organic link building is important as it increases organic website traffic, search engine ranking and trust. Organic link building is a major factor in how Google ranks web pages in the SERPs and what content webmasters consider important to their users.
Some of the top benefits of organic link building include:
- Increases domain authority for the target website.
- Increases page authority for individual URLs.
- Improves overall visibility on search engines through higher organic ranks in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- Delivers more referral traffic from other sites without paying for it.
- Increases revenue from better search engine rankings and traffic.
- Creates greater brand awareness for a business on the Internet.
- Increases overall trust for the targeted website.
- c. providesContinued website promotion by other sites.
Organic link building also follows Google’s webmaster guidelines which prohibit link plans (ie, inorganic link building practices) that are used to create unnatural backlinks to manipulate the ranking position of the website in the SERPs.
How to do organic link building
Publish high quality content
The most effective way to do organic link building is to publish high quality content that meets the search intent of the user. If the content is poorly written, not well researched, or leaves the visitor unsatisfied, other website owners will not link to it as much.
Write about trending topics
Being the first to publish articles about trending topics can help your content rank higher for hot topic keywords in the SERPs. Other sites may then create organic links to your website as a reference (or quote) to your 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 property
Creating linkable assets such as free products, services, guides, software, e-books, PDF files, templates, etc. makes it easier to acquire organic links because the content has built-in shareability. Check out this related guide for how to build backlinks for free using this method and others.
Post Industry Facts and Statistics
The Facts and Statistics post is another great strategy for organic link building. People like to cite data in their own articles without doing research, so they turn to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to find facts and figures they want when linking back to the source for credit. You can add to your content. This is a popular way to build powerful backlinks from high domain authority sites. This is one of the methods featured in this other guide along with additional tips on how to get high quality backlinks.
Be 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 enough brand awareness and expertise in your industry to be highlighted by major news outlets. So HARO is a good service to get involved in organic link building. HARO connects site owners with journalists who are seeking expertise and want to incorporate their content with sources that have that expertise. HARO makes it easy to find editorial links that follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. See the 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 usually have low SEO competition. This means you can write and optimize an article that can rank high in the SERPs without the need for multiple backlinks to the URL, which is an off-page SEO signal that is essential for competitive short-tail keywords. And if you achieve a top 1-3 ranking position for your target keywords in Google, Yahoo, or Bing, website owners who are looking for relevant content to link to will 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 credible you will be 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 more willing to add hyperlinks to your content from relevant articles on your site.
Use social media for organic link building
If you’re serious about organic link building, you should have at least one social media account for your business that you actively use to share old and new content. With social media, it’s mostly a numbers game. The more often you post on the platform, the more organic you will be with your followers. This allows more people to view and share 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 build links on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.
Get Interview Link
If you want to get more dofollow links, you should use interview as an organic link building strategy. As explained on this other page on how to get DoFollow backlinks, you can contact the hosts of podcasts and YouTube shows related to the industry and ask them for an interview. If selected, you will usually get a dofollow link from the episode’s show notes and/or as a relevant link in the body copy of a blog post promoting the show.
Hire an Organic Link Building Service
If you are ready to outsource the process of organic link building and you have a big budget for the job, then you can check this list of best link building services to find a good agency. By working with a professional link builder, you can work on developing your website and other aspects of the business, while creating organic links month after month for you.
organic link building summary
I hope you liked this guide on organic link building.
As you find out, organic link building is the process of obtaining organic backlinks for a website without any agreement between the site owners or with the intention of affecting search engine rankings. Creating organic links is the safest strategy in digital marketing to increase organic ranking and traffic while following the search engine guidelines for off-page SEO.
Stephen Hawkman is an entrepreneur and the founder of SEO Chatter. He specializes in Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing and has been influenced by SEO since 2005. Stephen’s goal is to share the best tips and news about search engine marketing so you can get more traffic to your website.