7 Best Link Building Practices in 2025

As the digital world continues to evolve, there is one thing that will remain crucial to your website’s success — its ability to rank high on search engines. Today, we’ll open up the playbook to share the most efficient link building strategies with you.

But before getting started, let’s clarify that you won’t be hearing the same common useless SEO advice like “produce high-quality content and Google will rank you”. What to do with that tip? Everything we’re going to talk about in this article is clear and actionable, so you can start implementing it right after reading. Without further ado, let’s dive in and see what link building practices are these!

1. Perfectly Optimized Articles

Writing search engine-friendly articles should be the first pillar of your link building. How, exactly? First of all, you need to understand that Google has no idea what AI or marketing strategy is. It is a robot, a code to be exact. It has never used chatGPT or tried out any marketing tools. So, if you write a blog on how space agencies across the world utilize AI, for instance, how can you let Google know that your copy is the best one? With the help of references. And it’s called page one of Google.

Search engines compare your content with the existing one at their top to see how you measure up. So, your to-go link building technique needs to reverse engineer what got these articles to the top of search engines. By following the below-mentioned process, you won’t get affected by core updates and double traffic to your website.

How to do it:

Before creating an article, come up with an outline that is superior to your competitors. You can do that by determining the heading structure outlined for your copy as well as the ideal word count. Here are detailed instructions:

1. Go to Google, type in your keyword, and open an article that is ranked #1.
2. Look at the headings and note them down. Why? Since that’s the best article on the topic, that’s the best outline on the topic accordingly.
3. Look at how long this post is. Google thinks it’s the ideal length.
4. Open the second and the third place article to see more headings options and add them to your outline.

Now, your draft is the greatest set of all three of the top-ranked articles. So, it’s time to start writing. Here are a couple of essential things to consider to outclass your competitors: 

• When you write an introduction, don’t fluff around. For example, if someone looks for “Does getting an electric vehicle make financial sense?”, it means they already know what the EV is.
• Use a Google-friendly format to write the answer to a search query. If we take the above-mentioned query, utilize an extremely simple sentence to answer it: “Yes, the electric vehicle is financially beneficial”. Such an answer makes it extremely easy for Google’s algorithm to know your answer to the question. Moreover, it skyrockets your chances to get to the featured snippet.

Further Reading: 7 Best Content Optimization Strategies for 2025

2. Link Building Plan That Google Loves

What can you read in generic SEO blog posts? “Link building is dead”, “You don’t need backlinks anymore”, etc. Well, let us be practical about that. Google “best fashion brands” and see the result. When you think of fashion, cordmagazine doesn’t come to mind, nor does Trend Spotter or FashionUnited. All these pages have one thing going for them — tons of SEO backlinks. DR of the first website is 84, second one — 88, third one — 83. 

So, whether we believe it or not, backlinks matter in 2025, and that’s not going away. They create a strong backlink profile that protects your website from ranking drops due to constant Google algorithm updates. Alright, what kind of links should you build this year? What does a perfect link building plan look like for search engines? 

• 40% guest posts;
• 30% link insertion;
• 15% HARO;
• 10% digital PR;
• 3% business directory citations;
• 2% link exchanges. 

At first sight, it may seem overwhelming to deal with such a large number of link sources, but there are always free solutions that provide backlink builder software and allow users to build backlinks, traffic, and help to generate revenue. But what are the main factors that you need to pay attention to when building links? Quality and relevancy.

Backlinks That Google Count

What matters to the search engines when they are looking at your backlink profile and assigning you a position on the SERPs?

• DA/PA. Vary links with different DA/PA as your goal is a natural-looking profile.
• Pages on your site the backlinks point to. Backlinks to the main page are the #1 sign that you try to manipulate the engines, so send around 50% of the links to inner pages.
• Niche relevancy. The sites you choose backlinks from should be in your business niche.

These are key requirements for backlinks if you want to improve your SEO in 2025. But they are not the only ones, for sure.

Further Reading: What are SEO Backlinks? Why are They Important? And Where Can We Get Them?

3. First Traffic, then Links

The situation when several dozens of domains linking to a site with traffic of 10 to 20 people a day is illogical for algorithms. You should add links guided by this approach: 

• permanently increase traffic to the site;
• post 2-3 links for every 100 visitors. 

Such a link building campaign will be perceived by search engines more organically. For white hat sites, the increase in the number of referring domains should be gradual but not happen occasionally, but constantly. Links to be placed on a young site:

1. Links surrounded by text (contextual links) — they are much more effective than “naked” links on the page.
2. Links corresponding to the subject of the site being promoted.
3. Dofollow links. These are links with the HTML attribute of the rel-tag, which informs search engine robots that this link can be followed. 

To determine how many links to place on a new site, we suggest using the following methodology: 

• find successful competitors in the chosen niche — sites aged three years and over;
• calculate the average number of referring resources over 6 and 12 months. 

How to do it:

1. You can use any website analytics service.
2. Find its growth point and fix the number of referring resources at the start.
3. Count from the selected date for about six months and see how many domains began to refer during this period.
4. Look at this number in another six months from the date specified in step 3.
5. Calculate the growth rate of referring domains for one month. Based on the data obtained, you need to build an approximate growth rate of referring domains on your site. 

Now, let’s discuss other options for promoting your website, getting such needed organic traffic, and boosting your rankings.

4. Broken Links

You may have heard of that approach more than once but it’s never a bad idea to freshen up your knowledge. So, broken link building is a strategy where you find a dead link, create a similar page, and then ask everyone who links to the dead resource to link to you instead. 

It works because webmasters who care about their sites want to avoid taking their visitors to broken pages. So very often, they replace a dead link with yours. There are several ways to find dead backlink pages. The quickest way is to search for a topic in Ahrefs Content Explorer and filter out broken pages. After that, set the referring domain filter to a minimum value of 10. It will show pages with backlinks from at least ten unique websites. 

You should check the content previously presented on the dead page, which will help you determine the direction of the content on your page. Finally, click caret and go to the Backlinks report, which shows all the referring pages you need to link. The tactic is effective since it’s a path of less resistance. Site owners eagerly cooperate with you. They want to keep the reputation of their resource high and publish only working links. It makes the method one of the best backlinking strategies.

Further Reading: Technical SEO: The 15 Technical Aspects of Search Engine Optimization That You Need to Know

5. Right On-Page SEO

It’s important to understand one essential point: links are not a panacea. If you have a really weak technical and on-page optimization, then any kind of off-page optimization will not help but kill your business in the long run. You should switch to external website optimization only after you have made sure that your site is worthy of the audience’s attention. We recommend using this SEO checklist before thinking of “how to build links?”

1. Keyword Analysis

First of all, benefit from the Google keyword planner, Ahrefz, and Semrush tools to search for the right keywords in your niche. After that, examine your competitors’ keywords with Ahrefs and Semrush to extend the core of queries. That’s how you’ll get the whole picture of keyword analysis as well as the largest and most relevant number of keywords.

2. Structure of the Website

When it comes to optimizing a website’s structure, start with responsive design and pay attention to different types of devices (different models of phones, tablets, screens, pixels, etc.) Talking about the page speed, it should be up to 3 seconds. The other important point is to use caching, asynchronous loading, lazy loading, and modern image formats (webp., avif). Also, you need to focus on simple and clear site navigation (nesting level).

3.  Technical Audit

The first step here is to configure HTTPS. You can get the SSL certificate that is needed for the HTTPS protocol to work by using let’s encrypt or Cloudflare. It’s absolutely free of charge. The other point is optimization of site indexing. So, make sure that the site doesn’t contain extra pages open for indexing (search pages, admin panel, sorting and filtering). Last but not least, use reliable hosting in the country where you expect traffic from.

Further Reading: On-Page SEO: How to Best Optimize the 4 Main Factors to Increase Search Engine Rankings

We’ve looked through main on-page and off-page SEO strategies, is there anything else you can do to get more traffic, convert more leads, and earn more revenue? Of course.

6. Media Presence

The media can be an excellent tool for getting unique links. The essence of the method is as follows. Journalists often need an expert opinion to write material from a specific area of knowledge. On the above resource, you can register as an expert in a particular field of expertise, mainly where the site is being promoted. At a journalist’s request, an SEO specialist provides him with a comment or an article, a link to which one will publish in the material. 

As practice shows, search engines perceive links to reputable journalists very well. Moreover, links from such sources are exclusive since competitors cannot buy the same ones, unlike those sold on exchanges. It means that the weight of one link on such a resource can be higher than in the case of guest posting. 

The other side of the same method is interviewing experts. You contact famous people in your field and interview them, which you then publish on your website. You also provide your interlocutor with a link to his interview, which they post on their resource. Thus, you kill two birds with one stone: you get unique and exciting content and a link to a reliable resource. So, this method combines two effective techniques and brings you the benefits of both.

7. Data-Driven Infographics

The last method we’re going to cover today is visual. Infographics have a number of advantages when it comes to link building. Firstly, they are much more likely to be shared on social media than plain text content. Secondly, they are easy to copy and embed on other websites, meaning that you can get links back to your own site without having to ask for them. Thirdly, infographics are often used as visual aids in blog posts and articles, which can lead to more links being generated naturally.

How to Create and Promote Effective Infographics?

Creating effective infographics requires careful planning and attention to detail. Firstly, you need to identify the key message that you want to convey, and then choose an appropriate visual format to communicate this message. Secondly, you should use high-quality images and graphics that are visually appealing and convey your message clearly. Finally, you should ensure that your infographic is easy to read and understand, and that it is optimized for search engines. 

Once you have created your infographic, you need to promote it in order to generate links back to your site. There are a number of ways to promote your infographic, including sharing it on social media, submitting it to infographic directories, and reaching out to relevant websites and bloggers to ask if they would be interested in featuring it on their site.

Wrapping Up

You’ve learned the most effective methods that will help you increase the effectiveness of link building in 2025. The reason for the difficulty in execution is that people focus on the end result: getting backlinks to their pages. But the process itself is very social. People build relationships, not patterns borrowed from videos and blog posts.

Users and partners will appreciate quality content and your expert opinion. However, turn link building into something other than link chasing. Remember and take into account the interests of other people. Therefore, be creative and find an individual approach in each case. Your efforts will pay off handsomely if you approach this process responsibly.

Further Reading: 9 Best Ways How To Improve Your SEO in 2025

Author Bio

Mary Hunter, a full-time link builder and an SEO expert at LinksManagement with 6+ years of experience in building backlinks for a variety of businesses. The key areas of SEO expertise include technical SEO, keyword research, local SEO competitor research, SEO audit, and content strategy. Providing all the above-mentioned backlink services at LinksManagement, credibility and effectiveness remain the main factors to boast of.

Hero photo by Babatunde Olajide on Unsplash