Link building is critical for SEO. Some link-building opportunities can be pretty obvious – other times. Unfortunately, they might seem harder to come by. This video shows you tips for finding high-quality links that won’t break the bank.

Link building has a huge part in SEO and is vital for ranking well on Google. If you wish for a higher ranking in organic search results, you’ll need to build links.

Finding link-building opportunities is not always easy. You can find numerous sites out there where you can signup and try your luck at finding links. But many free tools can help you find good quality backlinks. Are there some ways you can improve your chances of finding these opportunities?

This article tackles ways and means to find link-building opportunities on the Internet.

Here Are Your Link Building Opportunities

Link-building opportunities can be found in many different places. For example, you can access links by creating backlinks through guest posting or by getting published. In addition, you may find out about link-building opportunities from other bloggers or website owners looking to build their online visibility. Here are some more ways to find them.

Acquire Some Content

Content syndication offers other people content on your site without paying them directly. It’s a great way to link back to your site. Don’t forget to get permission before linking to another person’s site. Be careful not to create a link that’s too similar to the original. Search engines may consider this as spamming.

Add Shareable Quotes

A phrase or sentence that can resonate with people. You share the phrases or sentences to get more links. For instance, if we created a phrase like “I love my mom,” it could bring more organic traffic back to our site.

Check your new phrase every week to see how well it’s doing. See if anyone uses it without linking back to you. And gently remind them I invented the phrase.

Add Relevant Images

Most bloggers struggle to find relevant pictures to use in blog posts, especially when visualizations or anything that requires a graphics designer. These images make your content easier for readers to follow. Bloggers and journalists can also use your images and link to you when they use them. This creates passive link-building opportunities.

Add Resource Pages

Resource pages are a link builder’s dream. After all, they’re meant to be linked to useful content. But if you don’t have any useful piece of content, then it’s hard to get links from them. So you need to make sure that your content brings value to the site.

Resource pages are great because you can easily add them to your site. You can also add other resources such as image pages or video pages.

Ask Friends and Family

People who provide information about themselves are likely to provide useful links. Ask your contacts if they can link you to others who might be useful. Your network should grow faster than your use of it.

Your website should only contain links to relevant websites. Don’t give visitors a reason to doubt that you’re trustworthy. This will help them trust your website more easily. Also, don’t include irrelevant external links. Some people may see this as spamming. And if it’s not related or doesn’t make sense, it won’t have many visitors.

Ask People Who Used Your Images to Link Back to You

Try using an online reverse image search SEO tool like Google Images to see if someone else uses your image on another website. Then, politely email them for a backlink to your source if they do. Most people will be happy because it shows how awesome their website is.

Ask Your Outreach Target

Linking to an external website is a polite move, but be careful what you ask for if you do this. People may block your links because they think it is spamming their websites. Be sure to explain why you linked to their site in your outreach email and how people could benefit from it.

Assist College Clubs

Most college students have many different clubs to join. Helping them out by helping their club’s website or organizing events will make your name more visible. Also, use.edu domains when searching for clubs.

Be Featured in Newsletters

Getting links in newsletters is an excellent way of getting free traffic. To get a link in a newsletter, you need to find out who runs that newsletter. You then contact them via email, asking if they’d consider linking to you. Usually, they’ll say yes. Then you send them the article.

When you do this, it’s important to leave lots of space (at least 300 words) after the headline, including some text saying something along the lines of ‘please add a link here. This increases the chance of them adding the link and makes sure it doesn’t end up as spam.

Be the First One to Review a Product

If you’re the first user to review something, you’ll get lots of traffic and links.

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is an effective strategy. It involves finding pages that may link to your site, then looking for broken types of links on those pages. Once you’ve found them, send the web admins a message asking if you could replace the broken link with a link opportunity to your website. You’ll get a lot more traffic from the search engines.

Build Relationships

One effective link-building strategy happens when you go to events or conferences and give presentations. You can also ask other people to share your type of content. This gets them to share your blog posts, and if they’re influencers, they’ll likely follow up with a backlink.

Collaborate with Other Online Businesses

You’ll be finding another eCommerce site that sells complementary (but non-competitive) products. Then, you’ll partner up with them to promote each others’ stuff.

Comment on Blogs

Blog comments aren’t direct leads to do-follow links. But they can be used to get on a blog’s radar screen and start building relationships. This can lead to links down the line.

Compare Products

You can get links by comparing products. First, compare two products and write an in-depth article comparing them. Then, get quality backlinks from other blogs and articles that compare the two products. After the initial buzz dies down, more eyes will be on your content.

Connect with Student Blogs

Students’ blogs are often linked to other colleges’ websites since students usually post interesting topics about school life. Therefore, college students’ blogs are more easily found than a website created by a regular college webmaster.

Contribute to Wiki Pages

By citing your content on related Wikipedia pages, you can automatically earn links on those pages. You can also see what pages other people linked to by hovering over an article.

Don’t sign up as an editor using your email address because editors won’t be allowed to use their accounts to edit posts. Also, if the links don’t make sense or don’t add anything new to the discussion, they will get deleted quickly.

Create a Glossary of Industry Terms

Glossaries are great ways to link up content on your site. We’ve also created various glossaries using other people’s content and getting tons of links.

Create an Expert Roundup

Experts roundups are always useful. They’re curated by people who know what they’re talking about. So you get a lot of great content in one place.

Create Case Studies

Case studies are great for building links. Including an article about your case study on your site makes a lot of sense — especially if you include a link back to the original study. This will help people who want to read up on your subject.

Create Conversational Content

When you write something that sparks a conversation in the comments or on social media, other people might also want to share their thoughts. You’ll often see them link back to the original article. This works best when the topic is controversial. However, any interesting piece of content that sparks a conversation can work.

When you write something that sparks a conversation and then sees other people taking the same topic and starting a discussion themselves, this could indicate that your post was an important catalyst for some sort of change or development in society.

Create Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is great because it ranks well in the search query. You can promote it for years, and if it ever needs an update, you can do it quickly. Evergreen content also tends to get more traffic than other types of posts. As a result, your content will stay relevant for longer, getting more quality backlinks.

Create Icon Sets

Icon sets are pretty easy to do. But if they catch on, you’ll find yourself with tons of links from design blogs. So make sure your icon sets are relevant to your niches.

Create Instructographics

In an instructographic, you show the steps required to perform a task or achieve a goal. As with any infographic, their power lies in people who share them on their blogs and websites. However, they work even better on Pinterest than most infographics.

Create Tutorials and Guides

How-To Guides are awesome for link building because when people mention a topic in a post, they often don’t have room to dive into the details. So they link to a tutorial that explains everything. This is an example of a how-to guide.

Create Personalized Emails to Contact Forms

Contact forms and info@ emails are like black holes. You never know who handles them. So you should treat them as black holes by addressing them as if you were talking to the person you need to reach out to.

Create an RSS Feed

An RSS feed helps link building because it allows readers to subscribe to your site. When new articles come up, your readers will be notified automatically. By using this method, you’ll get more exposure for your website. You should also use internal linking within your posts to make them easier to read. Scraper sites scrape your content, including your internal links. This is bad because you lose control over what is being scraped. You also lose control over who is scraping your content.

Curate Some Content

Content curation is an excellent strategy for link building. You can easily create hundreds of high-quality pieces of content that are worth linking to. The first step is to create a list of awesome resources. Then, publish your list as a post.

Don’t just copy and paste a listing of links. Instead, put together an outline of what these links mean. Explain why you chose to include them. Make it possible for your audience to find the content that benefits them the most. This increases the quality of your curation post.

Find Influencers in BuzzSumo

Influencers are people who create great content and get tons of shares by doing so. Using Buzzsumo, you can quickly figure out what types of influencers are most likely to benefit your business.

Get Featured on Podcasts

Guesting on podcasts gets you noticed sooner and more easily. Your links aren’t devalued. Guest posting links.

Give Some Contest Giveaways

Bloggers love free stuff! So if you want to get links, give away something. You could even try giving away a free ebook as an incentive.

Get Links from Mall Websites

Mall websites often include a listing of stores and shops in malls and links to individual store websites.

Get Listed on Better Business Bureau

The BBB links are nofollowed. While getting listed on their site does not appear to add any SEO value, getting listed on their site could result in more traffic for your site.

Each region has its own rules regarding how listings appear in the regional directories. However, listings should be checked every time submitted, especially those that haven’t been found by a previous reviewer yet.

In the directory listings, a business’ website URL should be either a live link or a dead link. Again, contacting the BBB representative about this would probably get the job done.

Go to Question and Answer Sites

Sites like Quora can build nofollow links that can send you traffic. You should mention your website as a resource in your answer.

Guest Blogging

Only do guest posts on very picky sites. Do not post on sites that do not require high quality. Don’t post on sites that are too loose because you won’t get any links. Also, don’t use exact match anchor text.

Host Webinars

Webinars are great for growing an email list. They can also help you grow lots of links. Have a page dedicated to webinars on your website. You can even host them there.

Include a Signature in Your Emails

A link back to your website is a great way to get more traffic. Therefore, you should include an email signature in every email you send out.

Interview Experts

Interviewing an industry expert can get you some solid links. These can be shared easily via social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. This helps generate traffic for your website by sharing content across various platforms.

Link to Pages That Have Previously Linked to Yours

An undervalued link-building technique is building links to pages that link back to you. People would be more likely to link out instead of linking in. Authority sites are great places to get links because they’re already linked to other authoritative sites. I’d go after those links, then use them as anchors to lead visitors to your website. You could also reach out to smaller blogs that may be interested in featuring you.

Linking out to other sites is an effective way to increase your site traffic. However, if you’re doing this, make sure your content fits within another site’s guidelines. Also, be careful when doing these types of quality backlinks. Some people think they get paid for referring others, but that isn’t always true.

Look into Your Alumni Directories

Most college sites or standalone alumni websites have an alumni section. Some of them link out.

Profile Links

Profile links are still technically a link-building technique.

If you sign up for a site, you’ll get a link in your link profile. But some sites let people put quality content inside their profile, but others don’t. So if you build quality links from your profile, make sure you’re linking to relevant niches within an industry. This makes them more natural and less likely to be flagged as spam.

Provide Takeaways from Industry Events

A great post summarizing the event gets shared by many other blogs. A recap is an introduction to the episode you’re recapping. Use the recap tag to make sure people see it when they watch the show.

Don’t forget to use the hashtag, so the message reaches the right people.

Review Bloggers

Bloggers love free stuff, so if you’re willing to offer some incentive (like a free sample), you’ll probably get a lot more links than if you were asking bloggers to link without offering any compensation.

Revive Dead Content

This takes broken link-building campaigns one more step further. How? With this approach, you recreate what was hosted on the broken links (you can usually find them on archive.org). Don’t just copy the content. Instead, stick to the original format (if the dead content was a blog post, don’t write a case study on that exact topic). That way, you’ll create a 1:1 replacement for your lost links.

Submit to Blog Directories

You can post your blog online for people to read through different blog networks.

Submit to Company Directories

You should submit your site to specific company websites like general web directories. The big thing to remember here is that you want high-quality links so that they’re relevant to your niche.

Submit to Local Listings

Local listing sites are great because you can see what businesses are nearby. There are tons of them, but some are better than others. Make sure to check them out.

Keep an eye out for local listings. There are thousands of them. Some focus on cities or states, while others are smaller niche sites. They’re super relevant and have fewer listings to look at.

Submit to Niche-Specific Directories

Niche directories are often more reliable than general directories because most people know what they’re looking for.

Tap HARO

HARO is an online service that helps reporters connect with expert sources. You can submit requests, and editors review them and choose what to publish.

Tap into Internal Links

Internal links are huge because you control everything about them. You can set the location on the page, the anchor text, etc. Don’t automate internal linking. Instead, go through all your older content and make sure it makes sense before adding links. Mix up your anchor text too. Use different words or phrases than what you used before.

Tap into Niche Communities

Niche communities are a powerful way to get links and traffic. Most community links are nofollow, but some aren’t. Either way, they’re a great source of relevant traffic.

Tap into Your Twitter Followers

Don’t limit your outreach targets to search engine results. Your Twitter followers are an awesome resource of link opportunities. Afterall, if they follow you, then they like your work. This means they’re more likely to link to you than other people who aren’t following you.

Use Scoop.it

A website that allows users to curate content they want others to see. Users can submit content to be curated by other users. For example, this page has been submitted to the user who runs it.

Scoop. It lets you create an account and post interesting articles you find online for others to read. Furthermore, get some quality backlinks by sharing articles from other sites.

It would help if you found Scoop.it articles that get lots of views, then suggest your content to those who run those articles.

Write Seasonal Content

Holiday seasons are great times to publish high-quality content about the current events during those days. In addition, content posted around these holidays usually receives more views than regular posts do because people want to read about the latest news.

This also means that people get excited to see what kind of articles you put up, making your blog more interesting. Creating seasonal content increases your chances of getting links, comments, and shares every week.

What You Should Avoid When Doing Your Link Building Efforts

Don’t Buy Links

Google and Bing both seek to eliminate paid links from their search results. Paid links are considered bad links because they can be used to manipulate rankings. As a result, websites caught paying for links risk losing their rankings.

Excessive Reciprocal Linking

There are several more dead link manipulation tactics than what was previously known. Search engines have developed automated methods for dealing with some of these tactics or bad links, but there are still others that search engine engineers are trying to deal with. These include social bookmarking techniques used as part of an attempt to manipulate results. Engineers are attempting to develop strategies to reduce the effects of this kind of manipulation.

Links to Low-Quality Directories

Pay-for-placement sites are still popular, but they are becoming less effective. This is because search engines are now using sophisticated techniques to identify these sites and reduce their effectiveness.

Crowdfunding

Kickstarter and Indiegogo are both great sites for finding new ideas and getting them funded. Of course, some risks are involved, but you should know what you’re doing.

Links to Donations to Non-Profit Organizations and Charities

Charities and non-profits should use donation pages sparingly. Spammers often use donations pages to generate more backlink opportunities. Google considers these links to be paid links.

To End

Finding link-building opportunities should not be limited to one. It should combine many strategies to improve the business’ chance of ranking better on search engine rankings. ITD Web Design is a digital marketing company specializing in SEO and web development. Do you need help with your online business? Give us a call!