The objective of link building is to improve the SEO positioning of a website by building external links, also called backlinks. These links will indicate to Google that the linked content is of quality because another website is recommending it with hyperlinks. Thus, Google increases its authority.
Of course, not all links are good. There are a series of requirements and conditions that you must know to carry out your link building strategy effectively.
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How is link building done?🤷
Link building techniques consist of a series of actions focused on getting your website to be linked by others. In this way, we achieve web popularity, increase our domain authority and domain rating/ranking (DA/DR) and position ourselves better in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions).
The most basic way to do Linkbuilding is to take advantage of your own digital channels and properties across platforms. That is, link pages on the site internally, from yellow pages and from social networks.
For example, a corporate blog article can have multiple links to other related articles on the same blog, and corporate social media posts can (and should) include links to the site and a listing of your business in a local directory also boost citations for local rankings.
Effective 💫SEO Backlinking (To get started)
Remember that the important thing here is to get links from different types of domains and IPs and these domains need to have authority, making it easier for Google to track through natural anchor texts, with words related to your business, the name of your brand or keywords, we do not mess around with spammy links such as irrelevant gaming pages, link generators or porn, I hope you get the idea.
Taking all this into account, here are some effective link building you can do:
1) Guest posting
Guest blogging is the most natural way to get backlinks. Collaborating with other bloggers will help you increase your visibility and improve your reputation.
All you have to do is contact sites that interest you to write a guest article on, create a link with that blogger and start a joint collaboration.
For example, with Ahrefs, by spying on your competition, you can get an idea of ​​which pages accept guest posts. Or if you prefer you can do a Google search, using commands like these:
- Keyword + “guest post”
- Keyword + intitle:”write for us” inurl:”write for us”
2) Link exchange
If the page you contact and your blog share related topics, you can reach an agreement to exchange links. As long as it is done naturally, within an article, and leaving a time between the publication of each link, if you do it at the same time, very often, you can be penalized because Google will see it as something unnatural.
3) Sponsored Links
You can use tools (such as Coobis or Publisuites) that make it easy for you to find sites to buy links through sponsored posts.
On these platforms you will be able to contact blog editors of topics that interest you and give them the guidelines in a briefing so that they write content on a specific topic and put a specific link to your site.
4) Fixing broken links
Another effective link building action is finding broken links from sites that link to another page with relevant content. If that link is broken, you can contact the owner of the site, inform him about the 404 error he has and propose your link to replace it.
5) Optimizing content that receives many backlinks
If you find content on your site that is getting a considerable number of backlinks, analyze if you can optimize it to improve its SEO, expanding it with relevant information and distributing the keywords appropriately. So many more external sites and pages will put a link to your page naturally.
6) Linkbaiting
The content can be tutorials, infographics, solutions to problems, user guides and more. The only condition is that it should be original, relevant and innovative material, a study or report that’s very unique for example.
The important thing about linkbaiting is to get a large number of sites to link to content on your site because they find it interesting. In this way, we get them to share about us and, therefore, increase our visibility and positioning. You can send the finished page to News Sites, Press Release distributors, Social Media sites with Influences, Bloggers and Companies with a dedicated articles section.
NOTE: There are many more strategies out there to acquire links!
I will keep adding more when I get some time!
A few Link Strategies 🪢
The most important thing of all is that the websites that link to us have a medium to high DA (domain authority) and that the links are included in the most natural way possible.
Here are the factors you should take into account:
- Analyze and check external competitors links. A good link building strategy is based on a study of your organic competitors. For this, you can use tools such as Semrush or ahrefs to spy on the link strategy of your competitors. Tools such as Google Search Console or Ahrefs are used to review the anchor texts through which other pages are linking to a site. You will be able to see how many backlinks they have and which sites link to them. Thus, you will be able to contact those pages and make them an offer/proposal to collaborate.
- Look for links on web pages related to your topic. It is very important that the pages which you scout for are actually related to the topic or niche of your blog. If your blog is about elderly diet nutrition, it doesn’t make much sense to ask for a link from a blog that talks about dog shelters. Google will reward you only if you do it properly and only then will your DA improve. If you link to sites unrelated to your topic or sector, you will not be penalized, but you will not benefit from it either.
- Create quality content. By writing powerful and indepth, complete content, will you get other websites to link to you naturally in their content to provide complementary and relevant information to the reader.
- Links must be natural. When they link to you, Google understands that your site is being recommended. Therefore, putting them in a natural way will help Google understand that this content adds value to users.
- The anchor text must be coherent and related to the topic. Try putting different anchor texts. Play with all variations: an anchor text with keywords related to your business (40%), with your brand name (20%), the full URL (20%) and other anchor texts with words such as “this article” or “click here” (20%).
- Find a balance between dofollow and nofollow links. Although dofollows are the ones that pass authority to the linked page, it is recommended to combine them with nofollows links, since these provide a bit more authenticity and natural behaviour to the mix.
- Get links from different sites. It will not seem natural if the same website links to you 300x. It is a better to get a single backlink from 300 different pages even if the authority of all of them is not very high.
BONUS: 2 More good practices in Linkbuilding
- Link to secondary page URLs and not to the Homepage. If there is a page on the site that has specific information that is better related to the anchor text, it is better to link to this and not to the main/welcome site. For example, a backlink to the freelancer recruitment section (site.com/recruitment) of a blog would be more accurate than the home (site.com)
- Link from websites that have a good DA rating. For example, own profiles on social networks and authority pages in the niche.
🙋Need help with Linkbuilding?
Professional link building can be done on request and managed properly on weekly and monthly basis, let us know if this is something that interests you.