If your business goal is to improve search engine visibility and reach higher rankings in Google, one of the main things to look into is link building.
According to Google’s page ranking algorithm, one of the parameters for determining the quality of your web pages is the number of links that lead back to them. The more links lead to your website—the more your website is seen as authoritative. This consequently drives more organic traffic to your website and increases your business revenue.
This guide offers useful information on some of the most effective link-building techniques to help you improve your SEO game. So let’s check them out!
What Is Link Building?
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. It is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO) as it helps increase a website’s visibility in search engine rankings. Link building is an integral part of off-page SEO strategies in digital marketing, read more about it here. It also helps build relationships with other websites and potential customers by generating organic, high-quality traffic from referral sources.
The best link-building strategies involve creating content that other websites will want to link to, such as helpful infographics or informative blog posts. By building links from authoritative websites and other relevant sources, your website will establish credibility with search engines.
Top 10 Link-Building Tips
The following passages will discuss link-building techniques you can employ to increase your authority and rank higher in SERPs. If you’d like someone else to handle all this for you, you can read more about it here.
Creating Unique Visuals
Creating unique visuals, such as images, charts, infographics, diagrams, etc., is an effective way to build backlinks because other websites are more likely to link to visually appealing content.
Images and charts are easier to digest and catch the eye of the reader more successfully than a text paragraph containing the same information.
Writing List Posts
Posting lists of tactics, techniques, reasons, tips, tools, etc., is another digestible way to present information to your users and quickly build backlinks.
According to BuzzSumo’s analysis of 1 million articles, list posts are linked to more than any other content formats, including diagrams, videos, and images. They are easy to write and read, and their structure is appealing.
The most popular list posts that deal with SEO have generated more than 4k links and rank among the five top results.
Conducting Original Research
Doing your own research and sharing useful conclusions that serve your niche or sharing content that reveals fresh data from surveys or industry studies gets people’s attention.
Statistics are extremely linkable and useful for supporting points in articles and essays. When other websites cite your data, they link to your content and thus promote your website.
Creating Ultimate Guides
To make people want to link to your content, you need to make it irreplaceable. You can do this by compiling all the information about a certain topic and putting it in one place or creating content around a unique angle or perspective.
Write about something that genuinely interests your readers. This could be a frequently asked question on your website forum or in your niche that lacks a detailed answer.
Outreach Tactics
Outreach refers to actually reaching out to people in your field of work and presenting them with your content. The content you choose to introduce them to needs to be linkable.
Choose people who use your target keyword in their texts and those who have already linked to articles on a topic your business deals with. You can use Content Explorer, where you can set your criteria and get a list of websites you can reach out to.
Guest Blogging
This is a well-known tactic in link-building where you write an article for a website in your industry. You provide them with interesting content, and in exchange, they link to your website. This helps gain more website users who are interested in the same or similar topic, product, service, etc.
You can find potential guest post prospects using Google search operators. Make sure you don’t limit yourself to only reaching out to websites in need of guest bloggers. Contact any relevant website and send them a pitch. The chances are they will accept a cost-free, well-written article that can direct more visitors to their website.
Broken Link Building
A simple way to get an opportunity for backlinks is by scouting the web for broken links. You can use broken link checkers for that purpose.
A broken link is a website link that no longer functions. This can be due to issues such as the destination web page being removed, or a URL being invalid.
Once you find a broken link, you can contact the webmaster of the broken link and offer a link to your content instead. The content you offer should be similar to what the website was linking to previously. Most of them will gladly accept your offer.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
It is quite common for people to mention your business but fail to link to you. Don’t let this go unnoticed— search for your brand name and look for pages where you have been mentioned without a link.
You can discover unlinked mentions by using Content Explorer and narrowing them down to high-priority unlinked mentions.
Once you have decided which websites to reach out to, you can ask them to include a link to your website instead of just mentioning you.
Link Reclamation
Just like some links become broken in time, others disappear. They either get removed due to changes in website architecture or other types of website updates.
You can get a lost backlinks report from Ahref’s Site Explorer and decide if there is still room for your link in updated content. If that is the case, feel free to contact the website and suggest they link to you. If the reason for your link going missing is the deletion of the page, there isn’t much you can do.
Paid Promotions
Another way to introduce people to your content is by targeting your audience and promoting your linkable assets to them. These can be tutorials, blog posts, tools, infographics, etc. You can advertise them on different platforms and offer incentives such as discounts and vouchers to encourage people to click on your link.
This type of advertising doesn’t require a large sum of money but will reach your chosen audience and inspire them to share your content.
Conclusion
Link-building is all about creating and taking advantage of opportunities, which is why it can take a lot of time and effort. But when done correctly, it is a highly effective way of driving more traffic to your website.
Creating quality content is the basis for successful link building. When people find value in your content, they will be more likely to link to it and, in turn, increase your website’s authority. From creating list posts and unique visuals to guest blogging and broken link building, there are several tactics that can help you build backlinks. So what are you waiting for?
