Link building is the practice of earning one-way hyperlinks from other websites that connect with your website or individual webpage. In SEO, we call these inbound links backlinks.
Most search engine algorithms check whether prominent websites refer to or link to your content. Likewise, they determine the website rank on the search engine result page.
Backlinks influence your visibility and customer discovery. It fuels your SEO metrics, increases lead generation, enhances revenue prospects, and builds a loyal relationship with your customers.
Content strategists across the world emphasize the importance of link-building strategies.
Not only will it improve your digital prominence, but it’s an essential part of your long-term SEO growth strategy.
This article will focus on five impactful link-building strategies to attract new users and fulfill your digital-reach ambitions.
1. Link Building Outreach
Linking outreach can initiate your SEO success story if done correctly. Quality outreach that creates effective backlinks can trigger organic ranking.
Higher the position on SERP, the more traffic you receive on your website.
So, what’s linking building outreach?
It’s a linking mechanism where you reach out to people belonging to similar industries and introduce your content to them.
In this process, you build valuable links and ask your contacts to link to your website.
The outreach helps in the following ways:
- Enhance brand awareness
- Boost search engine ranking
- Receive organic and referral traffic
- Increase revenue generation
- Focus on the target audience
Remember to be considerate while reaching out to entrepreneurs, startups, and influencers. Keep your messages short and offer valuable assistance.
A few more things you can offer are:
- Essential corrections that stimulate domain authority
- Provide high-quality content that promotes audience engagement or marketing
- Exclusive news about recent updates in the industry
Link outreach often works well with linkable assets. You can put optimized and informative content like long blog posts and infographics that exposes your interests and intentions to your target audience.
Who should you reach out to?
- People using similar target keywords in their content
- People who are linking to the same topics
Following is a list of tools that makes finding contacts, linking prospects, and email templates easier:
Note: A handful of organic and quality backlinks is better than many low-performing backlinks.
2. Guest Blogging
First, guest blogging is still alive, and it’s the oldest strategy in the SEO guidebook.
It’s an underrated strategy that helps to develop authority, credibility, and authenticity. From generating leads to enhancing customer discovery, guest posting does it all.
What is guest posting?
Guest posting is the practice of writing blog posts for websites with high domain scores and relevant niches.
Once published, you link that article to content on your website, social media, or other digital footprints.
Why is it important?
Consider a scenario where you’re an amateur performer. You’re a rising performer, and a few people know your unique style and skills.
Finally, you agree to perform and take part in various concerts. Eventually, you receive more invitations to showcase your skill at famous events.
Now that you’ve impressed the audience, you may ask them if they want to enjoy a private concert.
That’s how guest posting works.
Create quality and highly optimized content for popular and authoritative blog sites. It’ll fetch attention from tens of thousands of followers.
They might consider visiting your site and creating links to your site.
Guest blogging is one of the best strategies to earn backlinks.
Here are some ways by which you can improve your guest blogging game and get natural links:
Know Where to Pitch Your Guest Blogging Ideas
Select a site that shares a similar niche and tone of voice. Furthermore, you must review its site performance before applying for a guest blogging proposal.
Curate an Alluring Pitch
It requires proper research concerning the guest blogging guidelines and the website itself. Be direct with your proposal and address an individual.
Write Compelling Content
Curating organic and quality content can be easier if you know your audience’s needs. Ensure that readers easily understand and skim through it.
Lead Your Readers to The Final Destination
Once you get the author’s bio space, do not embed the direct link to your website. Instead, ask them to sign up for your newsletter or the online store.
Engage With Your Audience
Communicate with your readers since such interaction and engagement increases your conversion rates. Hanging them in limbo can affect your overall performance.
3. Broken Link Building
According to Aira’s state of link building report, broken linking is the fifth most popular linking strategy. Over 250 SEO professionals have confirmed the efficiency of damaged link building.
What do we mean by broken link building?
Also known as the Dead link strategy, it concerns building backlinks by replacing 404 pages with working and active links.
In simpler words, broken link-building techniques take advantage of broken or dead websites.
How?
You can ask the web admin of the dead website about the broken link and offer an active link on your website.
Does broken link-building work well?
Yes, it does. Moreover, this plan changes the linking game when introduced through outreach emails.
Before you seek help, offer help with links from your dynamic pages.
Broken linking is a four-step process, and each function independently creates the linking funnel:
Look For 404 Pages
Use the Check My Links tool to find broken pages on the internet. While you work on this, look for broken pages and links on your competitor’s websites. In addition, search for niche-oriented broken pages about a topic.
Assess The Prospects of The Links
Before you create a replacement page for the dead page, understand the link prospects. Check whether the broken page has good backlinks. Also, comprehend why people linked to the 404 page.
Formulate a Replacement Page
While creating the replacement page, remember you must produce an improved version. Craft a draft of the replacement page. Insert the points that have deep linkable prospects.
Focus on Outreach
The final step is reaching out to the web admins who connect to the dead page. Either you send a generic email to them or personalized emails to everyone.
What are the best practices of broken link building you must pay heed to?
Some of the effective practices to improve broken link building are:
- Spot pages with several links
- Find everyone linking to that broken link or page
- Try the Wikipedia ‘Dead Link’ technique
- Send a close replacement page or link
- Refresh dead content
- Display your help in the outreach mail
- Skip abandoned websites
4. Infographics
Visual data representation is a thriving linking plan and one of the top-performing visual content. Research says it’s responsible for almost 12% of organic traffic.
Statistics also support that infographics enhance your web pages to rank better on SERP.
Furthermore, 56% of companies use infographics. 86% of the users earn numerous quality backlinks and an increase in client base.
Infographics are still effective. It fetches you continuous traffic before you ask for it.
What is an infographic?
Infographic is an illustrative description of data and statistics. Often, marketers and business analysts encourage using infographics to make data seem understandable and attractive to the target audience.
Why are infographic backlinks important?
Infographics bring several linking contributions to the table, and a few of them are:
Increase Audience Engagement
A well-designed infographic attracts users since human brains process visual matter 6000 times faster.
Enhances Conversion Rate
Infographics with visually pleasing aesthetics compel users to share them within the community. Searchers send them through email or various social media channels to their friends and colleagues. It broadens your client base and improves your prospect-to-customer rate.
Build Brand Popularity
When internet users share infographics within their community, the brand logo and link travel with it. It increases your popularity as the netizens get familiar with your company.
How do you create fascinating infographics?
Here is a list of steps you can follow to create compelling infographics and fetch maximum backlinks:
Step 1: Research Your Topic
Improve your chances of getting picked by famous bloggers and news outlets by producing quality and fresh content. Besides creating visually engaging infographics, users notice whether you present original or updated information.
Step 2: Identify Your Audience
Find your target audience who’ll be interested in consuming these infographics. Moreover, if you’re aiming to get infographic backlinks, focus on a specific segment of your audience who’ll share your visual content.
Step 3: Stress on Creating a Narrative
Develop compelling narratives that will engage your readers from the first to the end. Stick to a spontaneous story instead of throwing a bunch of statistics and data on your reader. It enhances the user experience.
Step 4: Create a Wireframe
The wireframe is like a roadmap that allows you to plan where to place the infographics. It saves you time and effort since you know the blueprint of your content.
Step 5: Frame Your Infographic
The final step is to design informative yet compelling graphics. Seek help from infographic design tools like Visme and use their templates for better implementation.
There are a few pointers you must remember:
- Infographics are expensive, and they can cost approximately a thousand dollars.
- Everyone’s making infographics, and thus you’ve to be better at your task.
- Try gifographics, an alternative to animated versions of infographics.
5. Competitors’ Backlinks
One of the best strategies to build your links concerns detailed knowledge of your competitors’ backlinking portfolio.
SEO experts believe that spying on your rival’s link-building strategies lends more insight into link resources.
You learn to analyze your rivals’ link performances. You understand the keywords they used to rank higher, anchor text, their competitive strategies, and also from where the quality links come.
This competitive analysis is necessary to know your preparation and the viability of your linking techniques.
What are the benefits of competitor analysis?
A complete analysis of your competitor’s backlinks produces the following advantages:
Create a Game Plan
Analyzing your competitor’s performance helps you identify the weaknesses and loopholes of your linking or overall SEO strategies. Use this opportunity to work on your linking roadmap and set a goal to improve and outrank your competitor.
Calculate The Referral Traffic
Look for the rate of new referral domains they gained. With this data, strive to get more referral links to catch up with your competitor.
Find Guest Posting Vacancies
You’ll be able to find high-authority domains to guest post. It’ll improve your chances at organic ranking.
Identify Various Linking Tactics
The competitive analysis exposes your rival’s various SEO and linking strategies like unlinked brand mentions, digital campaigns, citation building, and several on-page optimizations.
While you analyze the competitive performances of your rivals and understand their backlinking strategy, research the following two types:
Domain-/Level Competitors
These competitors compete with your entire website. Essentially, their target audience and keywords are the same as yours.
Page-Level Competitors
These competitors compete against one of your website’s pages. They target similar keywords to rank higher on SERP. But your competitors might offer different services. Both focus on different target audiences.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to finding your competitors’ backlinks:
- Step 1: Identify the main keywords
- Step 2: Find your main competitors
- Step 3: Assess domain-level competitors with a backlink checker tool
- Step 4: Check the page-level competitors with a backlink-finding tool
- Step 5: Analyze semantically similar words
- Step 6: Spot the top-referring sites
While analyzing, note the following parameters:
Backlink Quality
Quantity is crucial, but search engines like Google prefer quality and high domain credibility. Make sure the backlinks have an authority that will push your search engine position higher.
Backlink Placement
Pay heed to the placement of the backlinks. Look for potential backlinks that can either be above the fold or hidden within the content. Ensure that the anchor texts of the possible links are prominent and not surrounded by low-performing external links.
Backlink Relevance
Ensure the backlinks satisfy the user intent. They must be relevant to the niche and context. The backlink opportunities must provide additional support to the article.
Verdict
Several SEO experts, like Neil Patel and Brian Dean, inferred that Google primarily cares about the user’s experience, search intent, and interaction with the web pages.
The search engine algorithm transitioned over time. The engines need to concentrate on how many links point to your site.
Instead, their focus lies on how the linking structure supports the searchers in finding the answers to their search query. With this in mind, a website’s link profile is one of the determining factors concerning search engine positioning.
This practice of earning inbound links to your website has transitioned over a long period.
The above five link-building strategies are foolproof and time-tested techniques. Renowned blog owners and content analysts use them to incur organic profits.
Research has shown that websites with an average of 40 to 50 backlinks to their homepage and 50 to 100 backlinks to each webpage help secure high rankings on SERP.
As a result, higher placement leads to more traffic and trust from the users.
Your target audience will rely on you more when they find other websites linking to your pages.
However, the real challenge lies in getting credible, quality, and natural links from high authority domains.
Focus on these strategies that will lead you to beat your competitors and earn several backlinks from reliable sources.
