Link building refers to the process of using the hyperlinks of other websites to one’s own website. These hyperlinks, also commonly referred to as links, are used by people to search things online. They are crawled by search engines between individual web pages and whole websites.
Best Website Link Building – Then and Now
Many years ago, the best website-link-building was all about quantity. So, the more links you have on your website, the higher your chances of getting crawled by the search engines. Today, however, quality has become the requirement. So, if you want your website to rank highly on the search engines, you need to use good-quality hyperlinks.
If you are developing a link-building strategy, you have to keep in mind that growth is exponential. Do not expect to succeed in an instant. The entire best website link-building process is gradual. If you do it correctly and you are patient enough, you will surely get the results that you want.
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Keep in mind that the web pages in which you put the links play a crucial part in determining the ranking of your website on the search engines. You have to pay particular attention to the authority and quality of these web pages.
Blogging is one way to increase the chance of your web pages getting indexed. If you write blogs on a daily basis, your inbound links can grow by ninety-seven percent. Aside from blogging, however, there are many different website link-building strategies that you can try.
These strategies will be discussed later in this article, but first, let’s find out why link building is so important.
The Importance of Link Building
As mentioned previously, link building is all about using links on websites so that these websites can have a better chance of ranking highly on the search engines. You know that your website has a good ranking if you search for a keyword and it pops up on the first page of the search results. It is even better if your website is on top of this list.
In essence, link building is a factor that search engines utilize to determine the rankings of websites. So, if you want to be on the top part of the first page of the search results, you need to use search engine optimization or SEO properly.
When you decide how you want your website to rank on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you have to consider the links that lead to your website, as well as the quality of these links. Take note that links with better quality, authority, and trustworthiness can boost the ranking of your website.
So, if anyone uses a keyword or key phrase that is relevant to the content of your website, your website would appear on the search results. This is great for sales and blog pages that showcase your product and/or services offered.
Now, let’s go back to the recommended best website-link-building strategies that you can use for marketing purposes. Check out the following guide:
Best Website Link Building Strategies
- Collaborate with guest bloggers.
Surely, you are not the only one who writes blogs for websites. In fact, there may be lots of other bloggers who are more popular and have more followers than you. So, instead of competing with them, you can collaborate with them. This will be a win-win situation since both of you can gain exposure to each other’s followers.
Guest blogging may be an old strategy, but it is still effective. Just do not focus solely on getting backlinks. You have to avoid posting articles on websites that are not relevant to your niche and do not have any authority. This is not worth the backlink. In fact, it can do more harm to your website.
The search engines nowadays are much smarter. They are powered by artificial intelligence, so they can tell if your guest blogs have real value. You have to be authentic and strategic when it comes to guest blogging. You have to create unique content that is relevant, informative, and authoritative. Case studies are great examples of ideal guest blog content.
- Create infographics.
If you want to get organic traffic, you should try incorporating infographics on your website. Infographics are ideal for communicating various ideas and concepts. Findings, statistics, data, and research all work pretty well.
According to statistics, articles that contain infographics generate 178% more links. So, creating infographics for your blog posts is an effective link-building strategy. Just make sure that your infographics are also shareable so that you can maximize your exposure.
It is alright if you do not know how to create infographics yourself. You can always hire a graphic designer to help you out. You can also check out websites that offer infographic services.
- Use social media platforms.
Social media marketing is huge these days. Perhaps, everyone you know has social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users are all over the world, except probably in countries that do not allow them. Nevertheless, that’s still a huge percentage of the world’s population.
So, if you go on social media, you will have a huge chance of getting known by other people. Social media platforms have greatly revolutionized marketing. They can be highly advantageous to your link-building plan. If you are not yet on social media, you better get on it as soon as possible.
You have to share updates, posts, videos, and images with your followers. This would generate engagement and make your business more visible to the public. Encourage your followers to share your posts by communicating and rewarding them. You can give promos, discounts, and giveaways to entice them.
- Use trusted resource links.
Resources are like guides that you compile or create for your target audience. You can get these resources from websites that are credible and well-known. These authority websites contain resource pages that you can use.
For example, if you find blogs from a popular website in your niche, you can use them to create resource articles and get backlinks. Make sure that you have good headlines too.
This resource type may be ideal for marketing because once the blog is written, you can obtain links via email outreach. You can simply send an email to individuals whose blogs you used on your website. So, if you sent out twenty emails to bloggers who collaborated with you, half of them might link to your resource page.
Take note that email outreach works better than usual broken links or link request emails because you have linked to them first. This shows your appreciation and trust in these bloggers. As a result, they would be more encouraged to reciprocate the generous gesture.
- Use broken links.
If you do not have a lot of time to create blog content, you can use broken links. Even though, as mentioned above, it is not as effective as email outreach, it can still help you attain your link-building goals.
To make this strategy work for you, you have to search for pages on blogs that have dead links or links that do not work anymore. Then, you have to replace these links with links to similar content on your website.
Essentially, broken link building is a strategy where you search for broken or dead links, recreate the broken or dead content, and then tell whoever links to such dead resources to link back to your recreated content instead.
This strategy is effective because no person likes to have broken or dead links on his website. These links can only have unpleasant results. So, if you tell other website users that they have broken or dead links on their website, they would immediately replace these links with functional ones. Hopefully, these links would be your own.
- Build your own brand.
Your brand represents your business. So, you need to grow your brand in order to successfully build links. As your brand grows, more people would link to you naturally.
Natural links are links that are either organic in texts that appear or earned editorially. These links are neither paid nor sponsored. They also tend to give credit where it is due. So, you have to focus on them.
If you have been blogging for quite some time now, you may notice that each time you upload new content for your blog, you will see links that come from authority blogs in just a few hours.
Blogging is actually a good way to build your brand. Consistent blogging will guarantee that your website will get traffic. In fact, statistics show that you can get 97% more inbound links if you post blogs on a regular basis. You will also boost your chances of ranking highly on the search engines.
- Look at the backlinks of your competitors.
It is alright to check out your competitor to see if they are ranking highly on the search engines. If they are, then you can learn from them and look at their backlinks.
If you know where their backlinks come from, you can find out which keywords they rank for as well as what they do to help them maintain their high ranking. A little competitive analysis will not do you any harm. In fact, it can greatly benefit you.
To find out more about the backlinks of your competitors, you can use an SEO tool to analyze their domains. Once you see the lists of websites that link to them, you will be able to find out where they generate their backlinks from. Hence, you can now focus on the websites that actually yield desirable results rather than start from scratch.
- Replicate the best website link building of your competitors.
Once you discover the origins of the backlinks of your competitors, you have to find out how you can copy their style. For instance, if you found out that the best links of a competitor come from blogs, you can do guest blogging. If the best links of another competitor come from corporate websites, you can do networking and outreach.
Then again, your competitors might be engaged in paid placements if their best links usually come from highly valuable websites such as CNN, Forbes, and Huffington Post.
You have to focus on natural backlinks that come from highly valuable websites. This way, your website can be viewed by major search engines as a highly valuable resource.
- Focus on the best website link building roundups.
Refrain from solely linking posts to internal pages. You have to learn how to link out to other valuable blog posts as well. For instance, link roundups are actually powerful networking methods and can be used to build links effectively. You simply have to make a list of the blogs that you like.
Find out which blog posts are relevant to the topics on your website. Say, you wish to come up with a list of blogs about writing headlines. You can type “in the title: roundup “KEYWORD” as your search string.
Do not forget to focus on your link profile and traffic. A lot of blogs might be linking to your content. So, when you write roundup posts, you have to begin with blogs that already gave your website traffic.
Keep in mind that when you create roundup posts, you should not merely link to your internal web pages. Otherwise, the other website owners will not be encouraged to link their posts back to your website. This is because you did not use the reciprocity principle.
In other words, if you want other website owners to link their content back to your website, you have to link your resource page to their posts as well. It is basically a give-and-take situation. If you give, you will also receive.
- Watch the backlinks that you have on your website.
Keep an eye out on your backlinks to see where you currently stand. If you do not keep track of your backlinks, you will not be able to know if you have to take a pause or build more backlinks.
You have to realize that the number of backlinks you have today might be different tomorrow, the next day, and the following week. Some of them might still be there while others might already be gone.
You simply do not have any control over the authority websites and blogs that link back to your own website. So, if the owners of these links decide to withdraw them, there is basically nothing you can do. Website owners can choose to remove their links from their resource pages and posts without giving you a notification.
- Create pillar content.
By now, you already know how important content is to a website. If you want the search engines to index your website and you want your traffic to increase, you need to upload interesting, helpful, and valuable content.
See to it that your content is something that your target audience really wants to see. It has to make them want to see more of it. If you keep uploading great content, you can count on backlinks to follow suit.
If you want your business to thrive, you need to have an online presence. You can maintain a good presence on the Internet if you have good content. Whatever your business is about, you can make it known to more prospective customers by creating online content on a regular basis.
Ideally, you have to post content on a weekly basis. It is alright if you do not post every single day. Actually, some people think that daily posts are too much. You can post every two to three days to keep your target audience engaged and interested in your content.
Then again, you can also just create pillar content. Rather than post new blogs regularly, you can post pillar content every now and then. Pillar articles, for instance, are generally tutorial-style articles that aim to teach something valuable to readers. They usually consist of at least five hundred words.
When you create pillar articles, see to it that they contain practical advice or helpful tips. How-to guides are also ideal since a lot of people are constantly in search of instructions or directions on how to do things. A highly valuable pillar article can have a long-lasting appeal to your target audience.
With pillar content, there is no more need for you to struggle with creating new content on a daily basis. Thus, you can give your mind and body a rest. The pillar content you have on your website will continue to generate traffic.
Moreover, your pillar content will increase your referral and organic traffic, as well as your conversion rate. It will also boost the chances of your website ranking highly on the major search engines.
- Use social mentions to reclaim links.
It is possible to reclaim broken links that do not link back to your blog. You can check out the Google Analytics page of your website to see which 404 links are broken yet people still link to. You can redirect these viewers to other relevant and active pages on your website as you fix your broken links. Likewise, you can fix the broken pages and reclaim the links.
As for reclaiming links via social mentions, you should focus on this strategy. If you have been building your brand and monitoring your mentions on social media platforms via Google Alerts yet you do not use such mentions, you have to change your method right away.
When you upload infographics that contain attribution codes below such graphics, you have to get others to embed these codes on their blog sites and then link back to your own.
Then again, how can you find out if these people really used or coded, or linked back to the main source? If you created the blog post, then you deserve to be credited. What if some people merely saved your graphic and uploaded them on their own website without crediting you? How can you reclaim your links?
Well, you can use Google Images and look for the full title of the infographic using the right keywords. Click on the infographic that you own and check out the page where it is being used. You should be able to tell if your link is rightfully credited to you.
Aside from infographics, you should also find out who mentions the URL of your blog or website. Once you find out that your URL or name has been mentioned yet your web page was not linked to, you may ask for the link.
- Obtain editorial links.
You can only have editorial links if you can create something valuable. Editorial links are actually the most sought-after and valuable links since they are given freely by websites that do not ask for anything.
In essence, you need to have compelling content before you can expect other people to click on your posts. If your links are manually created or acquired, you may experience difficulty in retaining them. Google might also penalize you if you are not careful with these links.
So, in order to avoid such negative consequences, it is best to just create your own content. This would assure you that your content is truly yours, original, and unique. When people see your content and they like it, they would naturally want to share it.
Link building is indeed beneficial to every website owner. Creating blogs, uploading valuable content, taking advantage of social media, using SEO tools, and collaborating with other people can help you achieve your business objectives. When backlinking to other websites, however, it is alright if you do not ask for permissions anymore. You just have to give proper credit where it is due.
Remember that the link profile of your website is among the most important factors you need to consider if you want your website to rank highly on the search engines.
At this time, Google no longer cares about the number of links you have on your web pages. It is powered by artificial intelligence, so you cannot try to trick it. Google can tell if your website truly provides a good experience to online users. Thus, you need to focus on quality rather than quantity.