Probably no huge surprise here. We’ve been talking about link building for a long time on Legiit because it’s the key mechanism you’ll use to build traffic and rankings on the SERPs.
One nice thing about a really solid link building strategy is that it tends to attract links which can help your business.
It won’t bring you overnight success (and neither will anything else), but as long as it’s a solid, steady strategy, it will increase your influence and authority.
But just as you won’t learn anything by only hearing or thinking about it — you can’t passively build links for SEO. You have to take action.
In this article, we’ve put together a guide that will help you learn the following things:
- What is a link building strategy for SEO?
- What's the most common link building strategy?
- What are 9 easy link building strategies?
Intrigued? Let’s get started.
What Is A Link Building Strategy For SEO?
Search engines use links to crawl the web. The links help search engines to:
- Discover new web pages, which they can then use in their search results
- Understand what is contained in each of the published pages and the connection between them.
- Determine how well a page should rank in their results.
There is more…when a website links to your site, it’s another way of telling Google that your page is somehow important—meaning it can be trusted to help internet users find answers and solutions to their problems.
Why would someone link to you anyway if the content on your page isn’t helpful?
Turns out that’s the primary goal of search engines—to serve much more useful and relevant search results.
That means if your site can get more high-quality links (from other authoritative sites) pointing to it, the higher the chances of ranking high on the search results—and possibly outranking competitors.
The impact of having backlinks on your site is what gave rise to link building. Which is basically a way of acquiring backlinks from other websites to improve the search engine ranking of your own website.
The concept here is to boost the “authority” of your pages before Google so that these pages rank higher and bring more search traffic.
In short, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google.
But you don’t just sit back and wait for people to notice you and start building links to your site, you have to go out of your way and create something that is link-worthy.
That’s what the next section is all about.
How To Build Backlinks For SEO
There are many different strategies for link building, but they can be broadly categorized into four main types:
#1. Adding links
The first option in backlinks building strategy for your SEO (also referred to as foundational links) is where you manually add your link to another website that does not belong to you.
This method is pretty cheap and of low value to your SEO gameplan—that’s because everyone else can build them.
The most common tactics that fit into this category are:
- Social profile creation.
- Review site listings.
- Business directory submissions.
- Posting to forums, communities, and Q&A sites.
#2. Asking for links
This option involves reaching out to owners or editors of relevant websites and requesting them to link to your website.
You may need to offer them some value in exchange, such as a guest post, a testimonial, or a reciprocal link (more about this later).
#3. Buying links
Another way of building backlinks is when you pay money or offer some other form of compensation to get a link from another website.
This strategy (although beneficial for a short time) can be a bit tricky because it is considered a black-hat SEO technique and may result in penalties from Google if detected.
#4. Earning links
Lastly, you can create and promote high-quality, useful, and engaging content that attracts natural links from other websites.
Here are a few things that can make the pages of your website link worthy:
- Case studies
- Breaking news
- Industry surveys
- Thought leadership content
- Your company’s proprietary data
This is the most effective and sustainable way to build links, but it also requires the most time and effort.
Before we look at the most common link building strategy, let’s take a look at some other benefits of building links—in a nutshell.
How Else Can Link Building Benefit My Business?
Truth be told—link building isn’t just about the links—think about the impact it can have on the people it gets to connect with the right information. How it impacts their decisions and actions in their daily life.
In the past, it was easier to just build strategy links and get out of the way without giving a thought to the impact it has on other aspects of your business. Today, you have to be careful and considerate about which links to chase and what not to.
Here is what you should know:
#1. Outreach can help you build long-term relationships with key influencers in your industry, and these relationships can help your business become highly regarded and trusted.
#2. If you place a link to a relevant website, chances are that the traffic will also be relevant and may lead to an increase in leads or sales.
#3. Some link building techniques, such as content creation, can show people the expertise of your business, and this can go a long way toward building your brand.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the common link building strategy that exists.
What's The Most Common Link Building Strategy?
The most common link building strategy is to create something “link-worthy”.
…something that other webmasters and bloggers are likely to link back to and happy to share or recommend to their peers.
This means that the content you create should be of high quality and provide value to your target audience.
It is worth noting that when it comes to link building, there is a strategy and there are tactics. Sometimes it’s easy to confuse between the two—which is perfectly understood.
So what we’ve just talked about is the link building strategy, the rest are tactics you use to gain the actual links.
We won’t actually dwell on this section a lot, as we’re discussing the link building techniques (tactics) in more detail in the next section.
What Are 9 Easy Link Building Strategies?
There are lots and lots of link building strategies. More often than not, the right tactics for you depend on the resources you have as well as the industry that you're in.
That means you’ve got to have a solid plan that can help you secure those links. In our view, this is the most important part of the tips for link building.
Get it right and you’re in for some “dance” or get them wrong and risk your wallet.
You’ve got to be strategic. Here are some of the things that can help you in your link building tactics:
#1. Take time to know your niche and your audience—this will help you think up content topics that could earn you links.
#2. Use SEO tools like ahrefs.com to spy on your competitors’ backlinks. This will give you a baseline of the following:
- Whether you have lost any backlinks or have any broken backlinks
- Which domains are linking to your competitors
- Which pages on your website are being linked to the most
- Whether there are any spam or low-quality backlinks pointing to your own site
Then you can use that information to find new link building opportunities.
#3. Create a list of websites that could be a good fit for your link building strategies and start devising for link building outreach.
#4. Create engaging, helpful, and trustworthy content that your audience can’t find anywhere else on the web.
#5. Promote…promote…promote your content to a wider audience for chances of getting to people who’re likely to link to you.
That’s it. You need to get that right before you can begin engaging in any link building.
Now that you’ve understood it clearly, let’s take a look at 9 link building strategies that work (even if you’re a newbie).
(i). Guest Blogging
This is one of the most popular ways in which SEOs build links these days.
It involves approaching other websites (authoritative and relevant) to see if they’ll publish a piece of content that you write on their site.
Once they accept, you then write an article for them. They publish it. You link to your own site from that article.
(ii). Fixing Broken Links
Broken links can be harmful to anyone’s SEO and user experience. So, for this tactic here is what you need to do:
- Find a relevant broken link on a target website;
- Create something similar to the broken resource;
- Ask the webmaster or editor whose website has a broken link to instead link to your working page.
(iii). Link Reclamation
Broken backlinks pointed to your site are perhaps the “low-hanging fruits” that you can leverage quickly.
It involves finding websites that have already linked to your site, but:
- There are non-linking brand mentions.
- Non-linking images.
- The original page was removed or a technical error is causing a broken link.
From there you can reach out to the webmaster and request them to add the link back to your site.
(iv). Creating Linkable Assets
This involves creating content that is strategically placed to “bait” for backlinks.
Think of the following assets as the right place to start:
- Industry surveys
- Studies and research
- Online tools and calculators
- Awards and rankings
- How-to guides and tutorials
- Definitions and coined terms
- Infographics, GIFographics, and “Map-o-graphics”
Here are some of the ideas that can help you create the assets:
- Can you survey your industry about something?
- Can you calculate some meaningful statistics from the data that your business has access to?
- Is there any interesting experiment, which you could carry out?
- Does your industry need some kind of free online tool?
Once you have created the assets, do not forget to promote them, otherwise, no one will notice them.
(v). Content Promotion
If you truly love what you have produced as content, there is no harm in promoting it to your audience.
Here are three strategies that can help you in the process:
- Advertising
- Influencer outreach through active thought leaders in your niche
- Building a following through email lists and other social media platforms (if you haven’t already)
(vi). The Skyscraper Content
This linking strategy involves researching the top ranking articles (normally resources) in your niche for the keyword you’re targeting, creating content that is better than all of them combined.
After that, you analyze their backlink profile and start reaching out to the pages that have linked to them and offer your page as the alternative “comprehensive” page to link to.
The concept here is that if someone is linking to your competitor, there’s a good chance that they might be open to linking to you too (if you prove to be of value to them).
(vii). Repurpose Your Content
Did you know that your site can earn more value in terms of traffic and backlinks by just repurposing it? That’s right.
For example, if you have a video on YouTube, you can consider repurposing it into a blog. Why? Not all people want to watch videos but instead, they enjoy reading.
Therefore, repurposing your content to various formats can earn you more links (if they have value without doing tiresome outreach) and place you as a trusted expert in the industry.
(viii). Community site link building
Forums, message boards, Reddit, Quora, etc—are all good places to promote your website and, in the process, build some relevant links to your site.
For example, leaving a thought-provoking comment on a blog can help get your content in front of more people who can be your audience.
Although blog comments and links from forums and message boards are largely no-follow and probably of low quality, they still provide hints to search engines, thereby, sending some traffic.
(ix). Help a Reporter Out
Last but not least, HARO can help you land links from highly authoritative sites that wouldn't normally link out easily.
How? By helping journalists and publishers who are looking for sources. They in turn link back to you as the primary source of the information, statistics, or opinion.
Essentially, this is a service that you get to subscribe to (free or paid plan), and from time to time you get emails when someone is looking for information about a topic which you respond to in the hope of getting featured.
Final Thoughts.
Backlinks are powerful signals that can help you rank your site, earn more traffic, and potentially make sales from organic searches.
However, for you to get the links from authoritative sites that make the difference, you have no choice but to create link-worth content.
So, basically, the more helpful content you create and publish, there is an opportunity to use it toward your link building advantage.
Luckily, these are the link building examples that we’ve discussed in this article. So, do yourself a favor, get out of your way, and use them to build backlinks that Google will love and your audience will find helpful.
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