When it comes to SEO we know that there are multiple factors which contribute to a website’s rankings.
There are On-page best practices, there is website speed, there is content, keyword utilization and more.
However out of all of them, the most important factor identified is backlinks.
7 Effective Link Building Techniques That Will Make Your Traffic Explode Share on XThis isn’t just a one man’s opinion. There are multiple studies & experiments which have concluded that backlinks impact the search rankings most strongly.
In fact links were called to be one of the top three most important ranking factors by Google itself a few years ago. Thus it’s clear that links does matter when it comes to Google rankings.
But the question now is that how do you earn links from other websites?
Let’s face it, link building is hard and a simple email asking for a link innocently won’t get you a link at all. And on the internet there are so many techniques already available and this abundance as a whole confused the beginner or intermediate level SEO services providers.
Thus here I’ll be sharing only those tactics which I personally found working and have drove me real life results.
1. Guest Posting
Guest posting isn’t even close to being a fancy word for SEOs. Every SEO have practiced Guest posting at least once in their careers. The reason that it made to this list today is that it works. All it requires for you is to find a website that is relevant to your industry or niche which you’d like to attain a link from.
Then reach out to the website’s owner, or a better person to contact would be the editor. Simply write who you are and what your website is all about while being professional in your tone. In your email, offer the blog/website, your pitching, free content for their website. An ideal way would be to share some of the article ideas which might interest them in the email’s body and let them choose.
Afterwards the steps are pretty simple;
- You write the article
- You send them that article
- The website publishes your article
- You get a link from author bio or within the article
2. Blogs Outreach
Another popular technique used for link building is blog’s outreach. How this rolls is that you find some blogs that are popular and authoritative in your industry and reach them out with an email offering some sort of value. This value can be anything that you can help the next blog with. And in return of that specific value that you’re providing, you ask for a link from their website pointing to yours.
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For example, let’s say you have a fruit’s home delivery website. Now you need links from relevant food niche websites. This can be a food blog, a recipe making website or a mom blogger who write around cooking etc.
Now let’s consider that you have a good social media following and the other blog doesn’t have that. You can offer sharing their website through your social media and in return you ask a backlink. This would make the other website feel equally leveraged.
3. Resource Pages
Building links is hard because the other website feel like they’re providing you a boost in ranking without them getting anything in return. But what if we find pages which are built just for the cause of giving out links?
Yes, it’s true! They’re called resource pages.
Resource pages are pages which are developed with the intent of gathering specific resources within a specific niche. Considering the previous example as an analogy; this can be a list of food delivering services online.
Now you just have to reach out to the website you want to be a listed on the resource page of and let them know who your website fits in that resource perfectly. The other blog would be willing to do that because you’re expanding the resources which they’ve mentioned for their audience.
4. Skyscrapper Technique
This is a link building technique which got its name burst out by Brian dean a few years ago. It got really popular among senior link builders and the potential of this technique was recognized on an international level.
So what does this technique say?
Let’s say you’re found a website linking to your competitor on an informative piece such as; “How electric motors work?”. Now you know that your competitor acquired this link because the other website wanted an informational resource to refer to.
Now you look into your competitors informational on electric motors and analyzing it you find gaps in the content which you can fill. You cover the same topic (How electric motors work?) on your website but you cover the angles your competitor missed. Now you just have to email the other blog and present your article as an extensive version of what they’ve linked to previously and that’s it.
The blog you’re pitching to would be happy to replace the old link because you’ve given them a way better option.
5. Broken Link Building
This is a technique which is highly underrated compared to the quality and quantity one can drive through it. How this one works is that you find a niche wise relevant website, you’d like a link from and going on one of their webpages (which most resonates to your website’s content) and find the broken links mentioned on the webpage.
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There are multiple browser extensions one can use in order to find broken links of the page. One of those is “Check My Links” extension. With just one click you’ll know which links on the page aren’t active. And onwards you can offer any webpage of your website (which fits in right) as a replacement to that website.
This technique is effective because you’re doing more good to the website by activating one of their broken links.
6. Brand Mentions
Every website owner on the internet owns a brand. The brand can be a business brand or it can be a personal brand. But it’s still a brand. And when it comes to the internet, there is content shared continuously here and there. Which means that on several places your brand could have been mentioned without a link to your website?
You don’t need to be the owner of Nike to have your brand mentioned on some websites. It can be your clients/customers as well. You can use tools like Ahrefs to find where your brand has been mentioned without a link pointing to your website and can reach out to the blog owner asking for it.
This way you can claim hundreds of links which you indirectly already owned around your brand name.
7. Offering Infographics
When we talk about content, almost everyone thinks of articles, blog posts or any other kind of textual content. However, a piece of content can be anything which is helpful for the user. This also includes visuals.
You can acquire backlinks through infographics as well. What you need to do is to create or get created and infographic around any popular topic in your industry which various blogs have covered as a post.
You can hire a freelancer for it and it won’t cost more than a few dollars. Once the infographic is created, you can pitch the blog you want a link from that infographic and they’d be happy to accept it. However when you’re offering them that infographic you can also offer them a short intro to resonate some textual content with that of the visual. This is where you can place your link and there you have a backlink.
Conclusion
Having so many link building techniques out there can be confusing. Determining what to go for and what doesn’t work can be hard. Thus as a rule of thumb to see how valid or effective a link building tactic would be, try to find the value which you’re going to deliver to the blog/website you’re pitching for a link.
Ask yourself if the value you’re offering worth giving out a link in exchange. If the answer is yes, your technique is most probably going to work.
General FAQs
Link building isn’t truly dead, at least in the impact that it managed to cast in the ways we optimize our websites for great search engine rankings. So, for the link building activities mentioned above, you can still use them towards building a great link profile for your own website and make your website rank better.
Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.
One of the best known duplicate content checkers is probably CopyScape.com. This tool works pretty easily: insert a link in the box on the homepage, and CopyScape will return a number of results, presented a bit like Google’s search result pages.