Almost every reliable digital marketing agency business owners wish to work with today has their own unique link building strategies. It shows them how well SEO is working for their brand.
While some are focusing on getting you backlinks from quality websites, others are more concerned with the quantity of unique referring domains. Should you go for quality of links or quantity of links?
Google’s John Mueller popularly known as a Search Advocate during the last Search Central SEO hangout said that the total number of links pointing to a website is not as relevant as the quality of the links.
If you are serious about being visible on search engines for your brand name and product keywords, you can’t do without having actionable link building strategies.
To fully understand how to do link building for SEO, you must first know what links are.
What Are Links?
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Inbound links, external links (or sometimes simply called links) are HTML hyperlinks that point to one website from another. They are kind of an internet currency. In their essence, links from credible sources and high-ranking sites add to a site’s reputation.
Links from credible and popular sources are considered quality links and they can help to increase your domain authority.
The higher your domain authority, the more you increase your chances of attracting more visits, sponsored posts and the more you rank on search engines for keywords that matter to you.
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What is Link Building?
Link building is the process through which websites acquire backlinks from other relevant, credible sites in the industry. It’s still the main ranking factor and plays an important role in SEO for IT and Technology companies. If done correctly, it can push your site to top search results with a lasting impact on the rankings.
Why Are Links So Important?
Is link building still relevant today? The answer is yes. If the content of a website or a page is interesting enough to elicit a response and make people talk about it, it’s a sign of credibility and trustworthiness.
Google looks at multiple mentions of a website link as a vote of confidence. The more a page can get a number of quality backlinks, the more votes they are getting. Ultimately, this is bound to improve that particular site’s ranking.
8 Incredible Link Building Strategies That Can Improve Your SEO
Here are the top link building ideas that can jumpstart your SEO and help you rank high on search engines.
1. Use Strategic Guest Blogging as One of Your Link Building Strategies
Guest blogging is a common and promising strategy to secure backlinks. However, before you start writing, you must do the following:
- Make sure to study the blogger’s audience
- Analyze their most popular posts to get inspiration
- Look into the user experience
You must write according to the audience if you want to create high-quality content that will earn you backlinks. Look out for as many guest posting myths as you can that will hinder your carefully crafted guest post not to convert.
2. Ask People You Know for Links
If you know some friend, relative, colleague, employee, business partner, or client who’s in the same industry as yours, you can talk to them. An increasing number of people are launching blogs and sites.
However, you should be careful to pick only relevant sites to maintain link health. There’s no point posting to a doctor’s site when you’re a jewelry store.
Strategically craft your pitch and read it all over again before mailing it to editors before sending it out.
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3. Get Active on Social Media
Being active on social media is a great way to secure higher engagement and also improve the odds of getting your posts mentioned on other sites. Social media can open your brand and site URL to a huge number of people.
The key lies in sharing quality content so people feel like sharing it. It should give industry leaders a reason to talk about it. In addition to that, you will also master how to make money on social media.
4. Replicate Competitor Backlinking Strategy
There’s a good chance that your competitors are heavily investing in link building as well. This means, they already have a ton of links. Since they’ve already done the legwork, you can simply replicate their strategy thus saving yourself a lot of headaches.
Here’s how to replicate your competitor’s link building strategies:
- Find websites/pages from within your niche. You can use tools like Ahref for this purpose.
- Use industry keywords to find competitors.
- See what kind of sites are linking to them. Note if there’s any apparent pattern to their link-building strategy.
- Once you figure that out, just replicate that strategy.
It doesn’t matter whether you are in a highly competitive industry like e-commerce, travel, real estate or digital marketing, it’s easier to compete for keyword ranking when you’ve been able to acquire more links from credible sources like your competitor did.
5. Get Featured on High-intent Tool List Posts
Tools list is a curated list of top products/tools for a specific category, niche, or industry. They carry an immense potential to drive traffic because they are focused on mid-funnel intent keywords.
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To get your brand featured on one such post, here’s what you have to do:
- Make a list of competitors
- Enter the domain URLs into Ahref Site Explorer. Check out the backlinks report.
- You should now see a list of all the sites your competitors have used for back-linking with do-follow links.
- Look for list posts with backlinking opportunities.
- Export the list from Ahrefs.
- After reviewing and cleaning the list, find out the email address of the author. You can use Hunter.io for this purpose.
- Send a proposal requesting the site owner to include you in the tool list post.
6. Find Customer and Partner Links
If you have an industry partner that you work with, it’s always good to ask them to link back to you. You can do that by sending them partnership badges.
If some loyal client of yours has a website, ask them to write a review on their site linking to your brand.
7. Create Unique Resources
A resource can be anything such as a guide or an ebook that a lot of people are actively searching for. Although, creating one of such resources can be challenging; if you’re serious about link building, it could be worth the effort. Make sure to create high-quality and unique resources.
Also, it’s important to promote your business in the right way so that more people can reach it and feel like linking back to it.
Posts with the following traits tend to do better:
- Posts that elicit emotions of sadness or joy
- Something that is visually appealing. Good examples are infographics like this one and this one.
- Something location-specific (real estate trends in a city or the future of real estate)
- Something that addresses an urgent/timely need
Creating useful resources is an excellent backlink building strategy that not only works for big brands but also for small brands.
8. Blog Commenting Can Become One of Your Most Powerful Link Building Strategies
We know that commenting on someone else’s blog will not earn you do-follow links. But, in the long-run – commenting can be quite rewarding. If you spend some time regularly engaging and interacting with a blog channel by leaving regular comments there’s a good chance that you will get onto their radar.
You never know! A few weeks or months down the road, bloggers may shout out those commenters by mentioning/linking them in one of their posts.
Although it’s not a quick strategy, if you have the patience; blog commenting can be a promising way of generating back-links and establishing relationships with other bloggers.
Blog commenting was a huge part of my strategies in growing this blog when we started Entrepreneur Business Blog in 2016.
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Conclusion
Link building is not going to go out of style from the SEO landscape anytime soon. Therefore, it’s always good to test out different strategies until you find the right combination which works for you.