Even though we offer a link building service, if your website doesn’t currently have any links, or very few, then we’d actually NOT recommend starting out with our service! Instead, we suggest that you start by building out some foundational backlinks. There are many different kinds, and I’ll talk about them all in this post.

What Are Foundational Links?

This is a term used to describe links that you should build out before anything else. You might be wondering why it even matters what order you build links in. Surely, a good link is a good link and will always help your SEO efforts? Actually no, that’s not really how it works.

You see, when you consider the factors that make a link a “good” link, you have to consider the context. Let’s say you are a starting a travel blog, and you manage to get an editorial link from Nomadic Matt, who has one of the biggest and most well respected travel sites on the Internet. That would be an absolutely awesome link!

However, if that was one of the first links that your website acquired, and at this point you only had 3 blog posts written and your only social media followers are your family and a few friends, how does that link look now? It looks suspicious!

Trust Is Paramount

Google’s algorithm has advanced massively since the early days of the interwebs. It used to be very easy to artificially manipulate rankings by doing stupid things on your website such as stuffing keywords all over the place, or just blasting your website with hundreds of low quality backlinks with a particular anchor text you want to rank for, but those days are looooooong gone!

Google’s absolute main priority is delivering the best experience to it’s users and in order to do that it wants to make sure that it is delivering not only good quality search results, but that the websites that are ranking are trustworthy. Google is looking for trust signals in many different ways and when you do something that doesn’t look right, it raises a red flag.

Why would a top travel blogger link out to a brand new travel blog that had virtually no content? It doesn’t seem right, and so even though the backlink would normally carry an awful lot of juice, in this case, Google would massively reduce the weight of the link. If you continued to build links of this kind without having first established a good foundation, then you could even land yourself with a penalty!

What we are trying to achieve here is two things:

We want to build trust to our website by creating links on sites that are very high authority or relevant to our website in some way. This establishes a baseline of trust.
We want to create some links that have branded anchor text so that when we start buying those really high quality links, we can maximise their impact by using keyword targeted anchor text.

What Are Trusted Links?

Okay enough background… so what is Google actually looking for? Well, it’s really just commonsense. They are looking for the kinds of links that all websites have. Let’s dive into these now.

Social Media Profiles

Whether you run a restaurant, own a bricklaying firm or have a blog about middle eastern politics, your brand needs to be on social media. In 2024, this really isn’t optional anymore. You don’t have to be on all the platforms, but every brand should have at least one social media account that they work on and actively engage their audience there.

The bigger the brand the more prolific the social media presence seems to be. You want to pick at least a couple out of the following big platforms to focus on, but what we suggest is to at least create a profile with your brand name and imaging on all of them, even if you don’t plan on developing them all. Here’s a few to choose from in 2024:

LinkedIn (good for business professionals)
Facebook (good for groups, but you’ll need to pay to reach your main audience)
Twitter/X (good for short form content, last minute news etc)
Instagram (good for visual content, memes, quotes)
YouTube (video platform, owned by Google!)
Tiktok (good if you have a younger audience)
Pinterest (good for visuals, but lagging behind Instagram now)
Twitch (good for streaming video, especially gaming)

In another post I’ll talk about what I like to call the “social fortress” where you can create a really strong foundation by hammering these socials and strategically linking them all together. For now, create a brand account on all the platforms, and put at least a little content on each.

Citations (Local Businesses)

If you have a registered business address that you either see customers at or you work out of, then you should be building citations. A citation is really nothing more than a listing of your company Name, Address and Phone Number. You can technically write this anywhere online but what is most common is actually creating a listing of your business in specific directories that are just for this purpose.

If your business is online only and you don’t have a physical address (like ours is) then you don’t need citations. So the travel blog is a good example – it’s just a website, and wouldn’t normally have an address. However in some cases (again, like us) you might have an address for administrative purposes – we needed one for our company mail for Companies House in UK. If this is the case you might still want get some citations.

Now I’m not going to link to any citation websites because they change all the time so the list would be out of date very quickly after publishing the post. But think of sites like Yell, Bark, Clutch. The easiest thing to do here is just google it – search for the top citation websites in your country and restrict the results to the past year.

General Profiles

There are a great many websites online where you can create an account and have your own profile and from that you would generally interact with the community of that site in some way. Many of these sites are extremely high quality (and many aren’t!) and allow you to link out to a business and some social profiles in some cases.

This is one of those things that is easy to go overboard with. If you start searching for lists of sites, you’ll end up with hundreds or even thousands and obviously you don’t want to build out profiles on all of them because that would be highly unnatural which is the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.

Focus on sites that are in some way relevant to your business. For example, if you’re into software development create an account with MSDN and GitHub. If you’re into music, create an account on Soundcloud. If you’re a bookworm, sign up to Goodreads. Whatever your niche or your passion, you’ll find some relevant sites.

There are also many sites that are more generic and that anyone could benefit from an account on. Here are a few suggestions which have massively high domain authority:

What I’d suggest here is similar for the social profiles – pick one or two that you plan to actually engage in, but for the others create a brand account, use your logo if you’e able to and of course link to your website and socials if you can.

Cloud Properties

Hopefully your website has it’s own domain and you’re not hosting it on wordpress.com, Blogger or Tumblr! You always want to own your own branded domain name.

That being said, these properties actually allow you to create a website for free and you can do whatever you want with it – create content rich with media and link out to anything you want. This can be powerful when used in the right way.

You see these kinds of properties are very authoritative and as such, the content on them tends to get picked up very quickly by Google.

So what should you use these properties for? What I would suggest is that you build out a small resource for the audience that is beneficial in it’s own right and then link back to your main website from it. As well as linking to the home page, you could link to some of your inner pages, especially if they have not yet been indexed in Google. Use this property as a kind of “pre-seller” for your product or service. Make sure the content quality is high of course.

Like with the other kinds of links in this article, don’t go overboard. What I’d suggest is really no more than a handful of these cloud properties. Also, don’t be tempted to duplicate the content; always make sure it is fully unique. With the availability of AI tools to help you create content, there is no longer any excuse for duplicated content online!

Here’s a few of these cloud properties to consider:

How Many Links to Build?

Like with most things, and link building is no exception, quality trumps quantity. It is better to build 100 good quality foundational links and then stop, than you just continue forever and end up with thousands of crappy links.

What I would suggest is that you start with an aim of building say 20 links in all – have a few in each category and then from there, simply work in this kind of link building with your on-going efforts – just a handful of new links every week. There’s no point rushing and trying to build 100 links a week because firstly, Google will never trust a new site and so time simply has to pass before the site will rank, and secondly it looks far more natural if links are consistently and steadily coming in over time.

The speed at which links are built is known as link velocity and it is one of the trust signals that Google looks for. If you suddenly build hundreds of links at any point in time, not just when you first launch your site, it will raise a red flag to Google. Exceptions would be if a piece of content that you created went viral and organically attracted a ton of links in a short space of time. However, this something that happens naturally and would have supporting factors such as lots of social media activity as well. It’s not something you want to attempt to “fake” in any way.

At some point, your site will begin to gain traction, it’s own authority will rise, it will begin to rank for keywords and attract organic traffic. At this point, these foundational links will have served their primary purpose. Now it still might be worth building some over time as a strategy for diversifying anchor text, but that is a topic for another post another day!

Verifying Quality

In order to find links of the types I’ve talked about in this post, your best friend is simply Google. Search for the top “X” types of sites and restrict the search parameters to show only the results from the past year. This at least will help you avoid old lists with lots of dead links.

What you then need to do is to assess the quality of all of those sites to make sure they are worth building a link on. There are a great many metrics that determine how strong a website is, and these are the criteria that we use to ensure that all the links we sell with our service are of the highest quality, but unless you have access to several SEO tools which are rather expensive, you won’t be able to check these metrics yourself.

However there are a couple of sites that let you do a basic lookup. One of which is Ahrefs that has it’s own lookup tool. This will shows you the domain rating and the number of backlinks. The higher the domain rating the better. It’s up to you what threshold you will allow but I would personally aim for a minimum of DR20 for these kinds of links.

Another tool is the website authority checker which will bring back metrics from Moz. Now we have written elsewhere that Moz DA is the poorest of the metrics as it can be easily manipulated. However, these kinds of sites don’t attempt to manipulate their rankings so it’s not a problem. But when looking at Moz DA, I would be looking for a score of at least 30.

My suggestion would be to start with the best sites and work your way down over time. There are enough high quality websites out there that you should never have any reason to build out a poor quality link.

Happy Link Building