There are thousands of words written and published on the internet about backlink building strategies—but very few of them are truly helpful.
If you want to dominate your SEO campaign and grow big on the benefits for your business or that of your clients, you only need to know what works and put your resources into it.
We’ve been testing, and retesting various backlink strategies for a long time now and got amazing results. Then we figured out, that if we keep these strategies to ourselves, they won’t be of any use—but if we share, then tons of people will benefit.
That’s why in this article, we want to present to you some of the best backlink strategies and tactics that you can start using today and get results.
Here is what we’ll cover:
- What is the best link building strategy?
- How to get backlinks: 10 strategies that work?
- What are the top 5 link building strategies?
Ready to learn? Let’s get started.
What is a good backlink strategy?
Let’s be straightforward here. A good backlink strategy follows Google guidelines and helps you to acquire high-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative sites in your niche.
In other words, this is a strategy that when used, almost, always results in:
- An increase in your traffic
- Brand awareness,
- Rankings for your target keywords, and
- Build relationships with the rest of the industry.
…white hat SEO strategies.
That’s not to say, it's always the case, but our argument of the best ways to get backlinks is based on the industry's best practices—which means you don’t expect overnight success.
There are also some bad backlink building strategies that more often than not, result in harming your rankings on the SERPs (but we won’t dwell on that in this article).
For example, if you’re in the local news industry, getting a backlink from leading news sites like MSN, Google News, Yahoo News, and the Washington Post (using a certain strategy),
can be said to be a good backlink strategy for SEO and will result in increased Domain Authority and rankings.
From our experience, the best way to earn backlinks is to create content that webmasters and bloggers are likely to link back to and happy to share or recommend in the industry.
In the next section, we’ll get into such strategies, approaches, and tactics that will get backlinks that Google will love and award on the SERPs.
How to Get Backlinks: 10 Strategies That Work?
Let’s be honest, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy or tactic in link building. You have to look at your objectives and tie them with a strategy that fits them.
For example, these are the most common link building objectives:
- Boost brand awareness
- Increase organic traffic
- Improve rankings
- Build trust and authority
- Better SEO score and site metrics
- Boost online visibility
- Diversification of backlinks
As you read through the following strategies, figure out what your objectives are and pick the strategies you’ll start with.
(i). Guest Blogging
Guest posting has become the most popular way that SEOs build links these days. However, with little to no experience or connections, it’s a difficult process.
Guest posting involves writing and publishing a piece of content on another person or company’s website. Once they accept, you link to your site from that article.
(ii). Content Promotion
This is the second and most important part of a link building strategy. It involves putting your content in front of people who are likely to benefit from it and link back to you.
For example, if you’ve just published an article or video, you can share it on your social media and other platforms to give it a chance to be shared by other people.
Here are some of the strategies that can help you in the process:
- Collaborate with influencers in your industry.
- Advertising.
(iii). Creating Linkable Assets
Linkable assets have a common goal, to create high quality content that is strategically placed to attract backlinks from other websites. You need high quality linkable assets, to attract high quality backlinks.
Linkable assets take different forms but here are examples:
- Industry surveys
- Case Studies and online research
- Free online tools and calculators
- Podcasts and videos
- How-to guides and tutorials
- Infographics
For you to create linkable assets, here is a guide:
- Research your audience.
- Can you calculate some meaningful statistics from the data that your business has access to?
- Finding the right topic for your niche.
- Is there any thrilling experiment, which you can deliver?
- Does your industry need some kind of free online tool?
Once you have the assets, you need to promote them, otherwise, no individual will have a look at them and perhaps, link back to you.
(iv). Fixing Broken Links
Broken links are common and can be dangerous to your SEO because they block crawlers from understanding your pages and user experience.
- For you to identify and fix these links within your content, here is a simple but proven way:
- Find a relevant broken link on a target website;
- Create a replacement page similar to the broken resource on your site;
- Reach out to the webmaster or editor whose website has a broken link to instead link to your working page as an alternative target.
(v). The Skyscraper Content
This linking strategy involves the following:
- Researching the top-ranking articles in your industry for the keywords and backlinks you’re targeting
- Creating content that is evergreen and better than the SERP competitors
- Reach out to those who linked to the original and propose they link to your improved page as the alternative.
The idea here is that if someone is linking to your competitor there’s a better chance that they might be open to linking to you too.
(vi). Repurpose Your Content
Repurposing content increases its chances of getting diverse backlinks from various platforms which increases your backlink profile diversity. Ultimately, it increases your authority, trust, relevance, and traffic.
For example, you can convert your articles into an ebook, video, or infographic all of which will likely attract backlinks to your site.
(vii). Community site link building
Online communities such as Forums, message boards, Reddit, and Quora are great places to build relationships (which are key for link building) and some foundational backlinks.
For example, creating content and submitting it to these sites will increase the visibility of your website and generate more traffic. You’ll get bloggers here who can link back to you and most importantly, Google nowadays shows these forums on the SERPs—double advantage.
(viii). Help a Reporter Out
HARO can help you to build high-quality backlinks to your site.
How? By helping journalists and publishers with a database of resources for their upcoming stories.
If they choose to use your content as a primary source of information, they may in turn link back to you.
Essentially, this is a service that you get to sign up for, [free and paid packages], and from time to time you receive emails in which you respond to the queries from reporters that match your expertise or interest in the hope of getting featured
(ix). Link Reclamation
Link reclamation is the technique of finding and fixing broken backlinks pointed to your site. Aside from SEO, this is pretty helpful because it helps you maintain the quality and power of backlinks.
There are different reasons why your site has broken links and they typically occur when:
- The author had removed your link from the linking page.
- The original page no longer exists or the linking page gets redirected
- Broken image
- The linking page no longer gets indexes from Google
From there you can get in touch with the webmaster and request them to affix the link back to your site.
(x). Influencer Outreach
It involves creating relationships with influencers and sending them your product or providing service in exchange for a review. If this influencer likes your product, they can then link back to your site.
What are The Top 5 Link Building Strategies? (Tips)
Link building strategies are techniques SEO experts and marketers use to earn links to their websites.
Here’s a way to discover hyperlinks that are well worth building:
- Take your time to identify your niche and audience so that you come up with content topics that will earn you links
- Create quality relevant and helpful content that your audience can’t find anywhere else
- Create a list of websites that could be the best fit for your link building strategies and come up with link-building outreach.
Use special SEO tools to identify and reveal your competitors’ backlinks and start out-competing them.
- Running a backlink audit on your site is pretty important because of the following:
- Whether you have missed any backlinks or have any broken backlinks
- Which websites are linking to your primary competitors
- Whether any junk or low-quality backlinks are pointing to your website
- Which pages on your internet site are linked to the most
Then you can use that information to explore new link building opportunities.
That’s it.
Final Thoughts
Backlinks are the backbone of a successful SEO strategy that can help you:
- Rank your site
- Earn more traffic, and
- Potentially make sales from organic searches.
However, you need backlinks from the right sources that are relevant to your niche, reach out to them, and propose linking your site.
Fortunately, these are the link building examples that we’ve discussed in this article.
Go out and start exploring the best link building strategies, and implementing effective tactics to earn backlinks, which can pave the way for SEO dominance and long-term online success.
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