Efficient Link Building Strategies
Link building can help your rankings if done right. If it’s done wrong, your rankings will disappear. Link building is not easy. Also, there are so many strategies that vary in terms of their efficiency, expertise, and required resources.
You most likely need some insights on what you should do, shouldn't do, and what strategies are available if you are new to link building.
You have to understand that you can’t create incoming links instantly if you’re working on a link building strategy. It’s a gradual process.
The pages where you build links – specifically the quality and authority of those pages – play a key role in determining how high you’ll rank in search engine results.
This is where blogging comes in. When you blog consistently, you’ll get 434% more indexed pages and your inbound links will grow by 97%.
Other than blogging, there are other proven ways to build the best links and scoring the position you want with the search engines. In this blog, We will show you all the foolproof link building strategies that you can put to work today.
1) Use Strategic Guest Blogging
Nowadays, more and more companies and marketers are embracing blogging. That’s a good thing because the benefits are great.
Businesses that blog generate an average of 97% more inbound links and 55% more site visitors. Guest blogging is likewise gaining popularity among blogging businesses according to HubSpot.
But, you might be asking how many of these companies are using guest blogging to their advantage? You’ll generate lots of authority links in the process if you’re strategic about it.
Being strategic simply means that you set a clear goal from the very beginning. Your guest blogging efforts should be targeted at blogs that will send you traffic if you want to drive more traffic to your blog.
Look for blogs that are not only willing to accept a guest post since you want more links but also where the owner and readers will be likely to share that guest post on social media networks (while also encouraging others to do the same).
You want your guest post to be syndicated on trusted platforms. When this is done, your web page will be exposed to people who will most likely link to it.
For example, if you want your guest post to rank in Google’s top 10 results, consider getting your content published on blogs that are already ranking highly.
How do you find out what those blogs are?
All you have to do is just go to Google and plug in the headline idea that you want to write about. Consider pitching your idea to the top resulting Google-friendly blogs for that keyword.
Guest blogging is among the effective link building strategies but if you do it wrongly, it can lead to Google penalizing your blog. Before writing a guest post for a specific site, you should first:
Study the blog’s audience (get to know what they want)
Study the popular posts (get to know the type of content that gets shared the most)
Study the blog’s user experience
Remember that it’s a lot easier to create the content that will earn you links from that audience when you understand the audience that you’re writing for. There are several marketing experts who built their businesses using the power of guest blogging.
For example, Danny Iny started from scratch, but by strategically contributing one guest post after another to authority blogs, he built FirePole Marketing, one of the most popular digital marketing companies around:
Gregory Ciotti generated 70,000 email subscribers, just by contributing regularly to trustworthy sites such as Buffer, Copyblogger and Unbounce.
He tactically focused on getting new subscribers, because having an email list of qualified buyers is the best way to build a thriving business.
It’s very crucial to ask yourself what your goal is before guest blogging. You should know exactly what you really want to achieve with your guest post before you start looking for a blog to pitch. This is why you should be strategic when doing this strategy.
2) Social Media Backlinks
When it comes to brand promotion or presenting yourself as an expert, This strategy is quite effective. Creating a personal profile and dedicated communities can significantly enhance your brand positioning and help you gain trust. It really works perfectly when you need to leverage your branded traffic and make people want to learn more about you.
Presence on social media positively affects your branded Search Engine Results Page (SERP) with new SERP features people typically click, like the example below:
This is the reason why you should become more active in social media by sharing new posts, images, and updates. This is because by sharing it in more places using social media. You are helping your fans to find what they want to see.
You can easily boost engagement, even if you’re new to it when you get active on social media. Consequently, you’ll expose your brand and site URL to more people who could share your best posts with their target audience. By adopting this strategy for your business, this will work towards improving your link profile and bolstering your visibility overall.
Tip: Use SEMrush’s Social Media Toolkit for tracking and posting your content. The tool helps you research relevant topics and audience engagement and track your competitors.
3) Outreach
Almost every good link building tactic revolves around outreach.
What is outreach? It’s where you reach out to people in your niche and introduce them to your content.
This is where it gets interesting. You don’t necessarily need any “content” at all. You just need to have something worthy of a link—it might be your product, service, business, brand, or even personality.
According to Ahref, they mentioned that many people link to ahrefs.com because they’re fans of our tools and find them useful. Here’s one such link that came about because of that:
Ahrefs is listed as one of 300 awesome things for entrepreneurs and startups.
This is AMAZING information for forming an outreach strategy. It tells Ahref that their tools are useful to this demographic of people (entrepreneurs) because they help them with a specific problem (SEO).
Outreach almost always works best with linkable assets. That means reaching out and telling people in your niche about content that is likely to be useful to them such as big blog posts, tools, infographics, etc.
To whom should you reach out to?
People who’ve mentioned your target keyword in their articles;
People who’ve linked to similar articles on the topic.
Content Explorer is the best way to find folks who meet the first criterion. All you have to do is to just type in a word or phrase, and it’ll search almost 1 BILLION web pages for matching results.
Let’s try it for “guest blogging.”
You will get 37,726 results in total. You effectively have a list of unique sites that you can reach out to when you tick the “one article per domain” checkbox. After this, you just need to find their contact information and shoot them an email.
This is easy to do too for people who’ve linked to similar articles on a topic. Use the inbuilt filter in Content Explorer to filter for pages with at least say, 50 referring domains.
Find a relevant page, then hit the caret and select the Referring domains report to see all the sites linking to that page.
These are your prospects.
4) Leverage the Broken Links Strategy
The broken link strategy may be the best way to go if you’re too busy to write content for your blog or a guest post.
It’s understandable to know that you’ve got limited time to write content as a busy marketer. That’s one reason why a large number of B2C content marketers struggle to create engaging content for their customers.
How does broken link building work?
It’s very simple to execute this link building strategy: Find pages on blogs with dead links (links that no longer work) and request that the blogger replaces the broken link with a link to similar content on your own site.
Let’s say If you linked to a particular web page from your blog and you found the links to be dead, you could just easily replace it with another relevant and high-value resource. This makes it both search engine optimization juice and a valuable link.
5) Grow Your Personal Brand
One of the top link building strategies is growing your brand.
Your brand is you. According to the book Designing Brand Identity, author Alina Wheeler says you should “launch internally first, then externally to key stakeholders.”
This is true of personal branding, too. Begin with you. In a nutshell, your brand evolves from your thoughts, then begins to express itself externally.
Recognize that as your personal brand grows, people will naturally link to you when it comes to link building that works.
What do I mean by that? Let’s pause for a moment here.
While different definitions might circle through the marketing world, a natural link is a link that’s:
editorially earned
organic in the context in which it appears.
It shouldn’t be confused by being a part of a sponsorship or anything of the like. Most of the time, a natural link is giving credit where credit’s due–and it’s something every pro blogger should be after.
The power of a natural link can be great and gratifying as it allows people to link to you without you having to ask. Whenever you publish a new blog post, you will usually see new links coming from authority blogs within 24 hours. To encourage a natural link is ideal.
And to earn that comes back to the quality of your content and your brand.
In a sense, your brand represents you, like my brand represents me. So, my definition of a brand is “your representative when you’re not there.” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, puts it similarly:
According to Neil Patel, one of the most effective strategies he used to grow his personal brand was consistent blogging. When you blog consistently, you get more attention.
Other than blogging, public speaking can be an effective strategy to build personal brand because of the potential for personal connection that comes from seeing people physically.
It’s important to get serious in blogging if link building is part of your strategy. You’ll get 97% more inbound links and that will also improve your search engine rankings.
6) Replicate Best Links From Competitors
It’s not enough to know where your competitors earned their links. You should ask yourself this question, how can you replicate their success in your own link building strategy?
While you’re at it, you want to avoid getting links that would raise a red flag.
Social Media can come in handy as if you want to connect with blogs and influential marketing experts, you’ve got to use social media.
In the SEO pyramid, start with a strong base and build your way up if you want your links to be effective and improve your rankings.
Thanks to the tools and resources that are available, replicating success is no longer a difficult task. This makes the best links from your competitors are no longer hidden..
It’s time to take advantage of them once you’ve found these links.
You might be asking how do you know the best links? Well, there are lots of metrics, but the strongest are links from a site with high domain and page authority.
The anchor text used for linking to Copyblogger from Smashing Magazine’s resource page is “copywriting 101: an introduction to copywriting” – that’s natural.
The anchor text is long and descriptive. Here’s how John, founder of Blue 42 Media, sees it:
This descriptive anchor text contains the keyword and other generic words that make it look natural. It’s a partial match anchor text, which should take up about 19% of your total anchor texts, according to Power of Search.
Conclusion
Link building isn’t rocket science. The tactics I shared above will work for all websites. You just need to execute them.
Some tactics might be better than the others. It’s your job to test each tactic and see what works best for you. At which point, you can work on scaling your efforts to build more links with less effort.
Be smart and strategic about blogging, social media marketing, search engine optimization and any other marketing technique that you’re using to make link building possible.
Source:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/13-efficient-link-building-strategies-for-busy-marketers/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/link-building-strategies-professionals-choose/