Link building strategies are some of the most talked about and in-demand aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
In fact, everyone wants to succeed at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it’s true that great content is important.
But another key to SEO is to have quality links pointing to your site, which will maximize the search results for your site.
If you have valuable content, people may naturally link to it. But a solid link-building strategy is just as important. Also known as a backlink, an inbound link from some other website to your web content is comparable to a citation.
The quantity, quality, and relevance of backlinks to your web page are among the factors that search engines like Google evaluate in order to estimate how important the page is, and therefore point to your page when people are doing a search.
Google has stated that links are a huge factor in ranking your content, so you need backlinks in order to rank higher on search engines. As well, the more sites that link to your site, the better.
In order to generate high-quality links, you need to be systematic with creating and promoting your content.
You need authoritative sites in your niche to link to your content.
However, link building can be difficult to keep up with, and the rules and techniques are changing every month. As such, you get puzzled by several questions. Why should you do it? How can you succeed at it? What are the best link building strategies that you can adopt?
If you’re tired of using the old traditional link building strategies and you’re looking for free link building techniques, the strategies and processes below will be of great help.
Alternatively, you can register for our digital marketing course (Click here to learn more), where our in-house SEO trainer will teach you everything about SEO for beginners, link building and also furnish you with FREE tools and email templates for reaching out to influencers for backlinks to your website.
Here at Digital Marketing Skill Institute, we have been using these advanced link building strategies to achieve and maintain top 10 rankings for hundreds of competitive keywords!
But first, why should you learn how to do link building and attract high-quality backlinks to your content?
Here’s why…
Benefits of Link Building
1. Link Building Improves Your Domain & Page Authority
When Google determines which pages to rank for a given query, one of its biggest considerations is the quantity and quality of inbound links to the page.
Domain authority measures this for your website as a whole. The higher your domain authority, the higher you’re likely to rank for any relevant search query.
A quality quantity of backlinks to your means a determination by Google that your content is valuable and very resourceful in answering search queries. This would further influence the domain authority and scoring of your web page.
2. Link Building Improves Your Referral Traffic
Let’s set SEO aside for a moment and talk about a more obvious (though sometimes forgotten) benefit of link building. Those links exist indefinitely and can be clicked by readers.
If a user reading your content wants to learn more about your topic, they can follow your link and get back to your site with relative ease.
As you get deeper into your link building strategy, you may find the referral traffic you get this way far exceeds what you earn from higher rankings.
3. Link Building Helps Your Brand Visibility
Every new source you contact for a guest posting opportunity is a new outlet for readers to get exposed to your brand.
These publishing sources are always looking for new content, so you’ll be doing them a favor, but you’ll also be getting free advertising—a free shout-out—with an audience who may never have heard of you before.
Obviously, more visibility is a good thing; it leads to greater brand recognition and a greater chance to earn direct traffic in the future.
4. Link Building Helps Your Brand Authority
Link building is a good excuse to post as a thought leader in your industry.
Publish strong, opinionated, thoroughly researched content on publishers relevant to your business, and gradually, readers of those publishers will begin to see you as more of an authority.
After reading three or four high-quality pieces, even distant readers will be interested in seeing your site, leading to an increase in referral traffic and increased conversion rates (thanks to their extra trust in your brand).
5. Link Building Gives You Exposure to Other Industry Authorities
Don’t forget the guest posting circuit works both ways; you can provide content to the highest-profile publishers in your industry, but you’ll also get to read what other influencers are writing, and you might even attract some influencers as guest posters to your own website.
That means free content for your site, free ideas for content posts in the future, and a greater connection to your industry and audience.
Can you imagine the amazing amount of traffic and first seat position your website can get with SEO link building actions?
If you want your website easily accessible to your target customers and audience, then you need to register for our digital marketing course and learn all the practical steps that you need and smart link building tools you can use to rank above your competitors.
10 Best SEO Link Building Strategies
Now that your SEO link building appetite is wet, let’s dive into all the industry best SEO link building strategies that you need.
Link Building Strategy #1: The Skyscraper Technique
This is a three-step process that is used to build high-quality backlinks to your content.
If you’ve developed great content but don’t get links to it, you will understand why you need to do something different. This technique will generate links and increase search engine traffic to your site.
Here are the three steps that make it work:
- Find content in your niche that is already doing well.
- Make that content even better.
- Get the word out to get links built to your content.
Let’s briefly explore each step.
First, find content in your industry that’s already doing well. Look for content that is generating traffic and generating links.
Second, make it even better by creating a high-value page that you can leverage for links over and over. This is the premise of the “skyscraper” – everyone is attracted to the tallest skyscraper, not the third-tallest one.
In other words, take that high-value, existing content from a site in your niche that is already generating high Google or other search engine results and make it better. To accomplish this, you can do the following:
- Make it longer – a list of 50 instead of 10.
- Get thorough, by providing a complete list.
- Update it – Google’s first page surprisingly has a lot of outdated material.
- Design it better. A better design is perceived as more valuable, for instance with custom banners for blog posts.
Finally, get the word out through an email marketing campaign to encourage link building to your content. To do this, strategically reach out to people or businesses that you think would be willing to link to your site.
As a start, email those who linked to the original content that you have improved, sharing your new and improved content.
Instead of emailing random sites, do an outreach to site owners that have already linked to similar content. After all, links are about quality, not quantity.
Your quality content should generate quality links to it.
Link Building Strategy #2: Leverage on Broken Link Building
This link-building technique is effective and scalable and focused again on your quality content.
In this technique, you find broken links on existing sites and then recreate the content from that broken link.
Once done, you encourage webmasters to replace the broken links with the link to your quality content.
This technique works only if your content is good, and if it replaces and out-values lost content to which webmasters will still want to link.
You also want to be sure you are searching on sites that are relevant and authoritative in your industry.
There are a few ways to find broken links:
- Keywords – search using keywords relevant to your site, or find resource pages that link to content related to your keywords, and then search for broken links on those pages.
- URLs – start with key known sites and check through their backlinks to find relevant resource pages with broken links.
- Targeted URL – Rather than search for sites with broken links, in this instance, you simply want to start a conversation with a specific, targeted site, so you use broken links as an opportunity to contact a webmaster and build a relationship to get your content linked from that site.
After finding the broken link, the next step is creating your own content to match or improve upon the broken page.
Once you’ve created quality content to replace it, you then follow up with an outreach campaign via email to encourage webmasters to replace the broken link with a link to your content. Remember to include your replacement link in the email.
Link Building Strategy #3: Try Guest Posting
Guest posting, or writing and publishing an article on another website, is one of the most powerful ways for you to get a link on an authoritative domain or an authoritative page in your niche with precisely the text you want.
In this instance, you are providing quality content in exchange for a link to your website.
It means you can get your content on a powerful domain, and that domain will attract its own links.
You can also create a link to that domain with your own effective anchor text.
Guest posting will introduce you to new people, new readers, and new customers, and will also allow you to build relationships with the site to which you are guest posting.
But even more importantly, the site on which your content is posted must include a link to your site somewhere in the post, often at the beginning or at the end.
Over time, this accumulation of backlinks will raise the value of your site to search engines, making your content easier for searchers to find.
Link Building Strategy #4: Use Infographics
Infographics are another great way to build links.
Infographics are a visual representation of data, which make them appealing, and they can deliver a lot of content – and impact – in a small amount of space.
They are also appealing to a new generation that is used to visual content, and they are mobile-friendly. This makes them a powerful tool in SEO.
Here are a few keys to having a great infographic:
- Accurate and valuable information or data.
- Effective graphics – how can your information be graphically represented?
- Excellent writing – content is still key, and with few words, every word is important.
- Sharing your infographic and making it easy to link to its jpg or filename.
Once you have a great infographic, you guessed it – email outreach to those relevant and impactful sites where you’d like to have a link to your site.
Link Building Strategy #5: Turning Mentions Into Backlinks
With this tactic, you monitor the web for mentions of your brand, and then take steps to turn that into a backlink.
As with all the other strategies, it’s still important to have great content. Sites might mention you, but be reluctant to build a link if the content is not worth it.
There are several tools you can use to search for brand mentions.
Set aside time to do this on a regular basis.
Those who have mentioned you can be emailed with a thank you, and then a request to link to your content to make it easier for readers. Once again, don’t forget to include the link in the email.
This can actually be a very effective and simple strategy because if people are already mentioning you or your brand, it isn’t a huge leap to turn that into a direct link to valuable content.
Link Building Strategy #6: Resource Page Link Building
Resource pages are simply website pages with lists of helpful links related to a particular topic.
Resource pages are relatively easy to find, and site owners want to have valuable links to make their page more valuable.
Particularly with your valuable content, your link will be valuable to them.
So this tactic basically involves getting your site included on the resource page.
Usually, these are valuable links, not only because they will increase your SEO, but also because resource pages are seen as both helpful and reputable, and are not usually selling something.
The resources are seen as valuable to the readers of that page.
Simply put, run a search using your keyword or keywords (one at a time) + the following words:
- Resources
- Useful resources
- Helpful resources
- Links
- Useful links
- Helpful links
You get the idea.
Once you have filtered to the resource pages you want to be included on, outreach should be straightforward. Oftentimes the page will have a form or other encouragement to email with a relevant resource.
Link Building Strategy #7: You Can Steal Your Competitors’ Links
Finally, an effective tactic for getting more links is to see what your best competitors are doing, and replicate it.
First, identify your biggest SEO competitors based on your industry or site topics. Start by exploring why they have more links than you.
What are the differences in their content, images or other components of their site?
What can you learn from that and perhaps replicate – or do better – in order to generate more links to your site?
Then, look at who is linking to them, and find ways to get your own links from the same reputable sources.
You can usually identify sites that would be willing to link to your site by finding those that have linked to at least two of your competitors.
You can then do an outreach to those sites to see if they would be willing to build a link to your great content.
Link Building Strategy #8: Internal Links Work
Internal links are links that go from one page to another within the website.
Internal linking is often ignored and is actually a great way to help people dig deeper within your site.
For internal links, always look for a good keyword phrase on any of your any pages and link it to an inner page or homepage with more information so the user stays longer and explores the website further.
Benefits of internal linking:
- It improves page authority and helps to pass link juice equally to other pages.
- Helps to decrease the overall bounce rate of the website.
- Smart internal linking improves overall crawlability and indexation of the website.
- Improves older blog posts by sending some traffic and exposure.
- Helps with keyword rankings if your page has relevant content and strategic internal links.
You can go to your site right now and find good keyword phrases where you can link relevant page content with some other content.
Link Building Strategy #9: Local Business Citations
If you have a local business, then local link building is an ideal back-linking opportunity for you.
You can get great links and you can draw additional traffic from the many people who routinely use local searches to find businesses near them.
Local Business Citations are key factors if you want to improve your positions in local search results.
They have the three terms named “NAP” i.e. Name, Address and Phone number.
While creating your local business citation, make sure to add the same address you feature on the website.
These citation links are important for local rankings and help search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) to verify your business location.
Links from Yelp, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Bing Local etc., create authority for your website, build trust and can help improve your rankings in local search results.
Link Building Strategy #10: Use Social Sharing Sites
Social bookmarking sites where users can easily add, edit, and share content across the web help you get high-quality backlinks that drive traffic to your website.
In order to learn how to build links with social bookmarking sites that help you get quality linkage to the next level, we have put together a step-by-step guide in our digital marketing course to help you squeeze out the best juices out of your social media marketing actions.
For now, here are some social bookmarking sites that you can consider:
- Medium
- Growth Hackers
- Inbound.org
- Voat
- Designer News
- Slashdot
- Hubpages
- eLearning Tags
Conclusion
Link building is a powerful tool in SEO.
A proper link building strategy with a link earning approach will always give you better results in terms of SERP position and traffic.
Once you have quality content, put all these link building techniques to action and you’ll get the results you want for your website or blog to become a link-building authority.
Want a step-by-step, 1-to-1 tested and proven SEO backing formula, then register for our digital marketing course (Click here to learn more about our digital marketing course.
Author Bio: Callum Mundine is part of the marketing team at oneegg.com.au, adwords management agency in Sydney. He is an Amazon marketplace & white hat link building specialist and has launched multiple successful brands on Amazon.com. Callum like his eggs boiled.