Many webmasters ask these questions because they need clarification about how to build link popularity. In reality, there is no magic wand that gets you into position one day after another. The only way for success to happen is by persistent effort and discipline. But what favorite link building strategies should you follow to achieve better search engine rankings?
Links play an important role in driving traffic to a webpage. They allow Google to see that other authority sites link to yours, improving your ranking and boosting your organic traffic. In addition, 65% of all searches start with relevant links or sources. Finally, since links indicate trust, they can influence user behavior, such as buying decisions.
Here Are the Best Link Building Strategies for Search Engine Optimization
Link building campaigns are essential for every company to gain organic referral traffic from Google Search Engine. If your web pages aren’t ranking well, your potential clients won’t see them.
Copy Your Competitors’ Backlinks
To improve your link-building tactic, you should look at what your competitors are doing. While it may seem daunting, many online tools easily analyze competing companies’ backlink profiles. Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks is one of the effective strategies for link building.
Backlink analysis involves looking up the URLs of your competitors’ backlinks — those links pointing back to their site — and seeing where else those domains link to. For example, let’s say that Company A owns a blog post that mentions Company B. If you look at Company B’s backlink portfolio, you’ll see that it points to Company A’s blog post.
This effective link building campaign works best when you clearly understand what your competitor’s backlink analysis looks like. For example, let’s say you’re trying to rank for “best video editing software.” Your competitor’s backlink analysis might have hundreds of quality backlinks pointing to their authority sites. So, you could copy their entire backlink profile, including the anchor text used, and try to gain authority backlinks too.
However, there are several considerations to keep in mind when choosing this approach. First, you’ll need to know the exact URL of each of your competitor’s backlinks. Second, you must make sure that the authority backlinks aren’t duplicates. Lastly, you won’t be able to use the same anchor text across multiple backlinks.
Never Forget Broken Link Building Strategy
Broken link building is when you try to find 404 links leading to another website. This is one effective link building strategy worth considering.
The broken link building tactic is where you look for dead links on other sites. you’ll contact the site’s owner, explain what happened, offer some help fixing it, and suggest they change the link to your site. You’ll ask them to send us the old link if they agree. Then we’ll update the link scheme on both sides to ensure it works.
Here’s How You Can Utilize the Broken Link Strategy
There are two main ways to find these broken links:
- Manual – Find broken links manually.If you have any relevant replacements, you can suggest them to the site owner. But only do it if you know that the link juice you are offering will lead to something worthwhile.One final thing: be honest about what you’re doing. Be open and upfront with the people you’re contacting because there’s no guarantee they’ll accept your suggestion.
- Automated – Use automated programs to help find broken links.
Automated tools allow you to use software to help you discover dead links automatically. Some of the favorite link building tools include Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs Content Explorer, and Majestic SEO.These tools work by crawling the web to see what high-quality links exist on other domains. They’ll give you a list of URLs that might be pointing to your target URL. Once you’ve found the potential broken links, you’ll want to contact the site owners directly to let them know about the issue. If you are still waiting to hear communication within a few weeks, you can follow up again.
Email the Author About Broken Links
The goal is to convince the site owner that your piece of content is better than what they provided. You don’t want to come off as spammy, though, so keep it professional. For example, include a link juice to your homepage in the body of the initial outreach email template, and make sure to include an image of the broken link.
- Make sure the email address looks legit. Check the sender’s email address against the domain name you’re trying to reach.
- Be polite. Don’t assume the email is spam because it came from an unknown source. Instead, explain what happened and ask permission to use their valuable content.
- Pitch the author. If the email says, “Hey, we found bad links on your site,” offer to write original content for them. This way, you’ll build trust with the site owner and give them free pieces of content.
- Use a template. There are plenty of great templates that you can customize to fit your needs.
- Monitor your inbox. After you send your pitches, check your inbox to see if anyone has responded. Reply to everyone who replied within 72 hours, even if you think you won’t hear anything else.
Check Your Previous Backlinks
Besides obtaining new links, if any existing inbound links (that point to your site) need to be fixed, you might want to take care of them first. For example, there could be a bunch of 404 errors pointing to old blog posts or even dead social media profiles.
To check whether your inbound links are working, use one of the many free and favorite link building tools like Google Search Console, MozBar, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, etc. These tools can crawl your entire site and show you what’s happening behind the scenes.
If you see lots of 404 errors, you’ll want to try to fix those yourself. You can do this manually by crawling your site again and fixing up the bad links. Of course, if you need to learn how to start, you can always hire someone else to help you.
Once you’ve fixed the problems, make sure you reindex your site. This way, Google knows everything is okay and doesn’t penalize you anymore.
Connect with Industry Movers
Having a large number of followers on social media is enough to gain traction online. However, you can still do some things to improve your visibility and boost the traffic coming to your site. One way to do this is to collaborate with opinion leaders. When you partner up with others who already have a large following, you can benefit from their popularity and experience. This gives you access to a larger pool of potential clients and helps you stand out from competitors who aren’t willing to take the same risks.
To start, identify someone who could become an advocate for your brand. You can find these individuals by searching for relevant hashtags on Twitter or Instagram. Use keywords to narrow down the list if you’re looking for a target audience, like a blogger or vlogger.
Once you’ve found a few candidates, contact them directly via email. First, explain why you’d like to partner and ask whether they’d be interested in working with you. Then, offer something for their support, such as free products or promotional materials.
Once you’ve established a partnership, you’ll want to keep communication open. Send regular emails to inform the influencer about your latest product launches, upcoming events, and promotions. Tell them when you plan to post videos or photos of yourself using their product. Most importantly, remember to thank them for partnering with you. Influencers often receive dozens of weekly requests, so showing appreciation goes a long way toward keeping them engaged.
Podcast Collaboration
If you’re looking to build your brand, podcasting is an effective link building strategy. You don’t have to spend hours writing a blog post or crafting a press release; you can show up and discuss whatever topic you want.
While there are many different types of podcasts, the most common ones include interviews, roundtable discussions, and expert interviews. In each case, you’ll usually record yourself talking about something related to your industry, whether interviewing someone else or discussing a particular subject.
You might think guest posting is dead, but it works well when done correctly. If you’ve got an interesting story to tell, why not offer it up to a podcast host? You can find plenty of ways to find money online without selling anything.
Place Them on Business Directories and Aggregator Sites
If you are running a small business for a specific niche or provide local services, placement on local business directories is a must, such as Google My Business, Yelp, and Yellow Pages.
You can add rel=” nofollow” tags to internal links within certain authority websites to send people back to their original landing pages. However, doing so won’t help you get indexed by Google. But if you want to be shown whenever someone searches for something similar, then the nofollow tag may be beneficial.
These directory websites include a listing for businesses to add information about themselves, links to their social media pages, address, phone numbers, email address, etc., e.g., Google MyBusiness, Yellow Pages, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.
The idea is simple: You post something interesting on a blog or forum and ask people to share it. If someone shares it, it helps you gain more visibility and exposure. In return, you give him a link to his site.
This strategy works because it allows you to use another person’s audience. By posting on a relevant topic, you reach a larger audience than if you had posted directly on your website.
Search for Unlinked Mentions
Did you also realize that many domain authority sites may mention you but don’t link back to your website?
This happens because some webmasters use tools like Yoast and AllInOneWebmaster to generate static pages that are often used as references. These pages usually include something other than a natural link to your site. With the “unlinked mention strategy,” you contact the administrators of those relevant websites and request they add inbound links to your posts in their articles, a neat list of blogs, and social media pages.
You create a list of keywords related to your brand and add it to the “Mentioned Keywords” section in the Unlinked Keyword Strategy report.
You can also use the LBT tool to quickly identify the unlinked mentions of brands in the Prospects tab and send a personalized email template to each one.
Reverse Image Search
Google’s reverse search by image feature allows you to check whether someone else is using an image you published online. This can help you identify where your work is being used without proper credit. But, again, coding does not need to make this happen.
You upload a URL for the image and let Google do the rest. When the tool finds a match, it lists possible locations for the photo. You can then choose one or more URLs to send an initial outreach email requesting permission to use the image.
If the person agrees, you can add the URL(s) to a list of places that can use your photos. For example, if you want to show off the work of your graphic designer, you could request that they include a link to your site when sharing the design. You may want to promote your latest infographic. On the other hand, you may want to credit the photographer who captured the great picture. Either way, adding a link to your site is easy.
Be More Engaging on Social Media
Social media sites have changed how people interact socially online, making them an effective tool for your links-based outreach plan. You’ll increase your chances of earning link juice by helping your fans find what they are looking for. You can help them find your piece of content by sharing it in more locations using social media.
By becoming active on social media, you are helping people find things they want to read about. You are connecting with others in your niche and giving yourself a chance to become influential. This helps you rank better in organic search engines and allows you to attract visitors to your site.
You’re not promoting your business effectively if you don’t post regularly on social media. It would help if you started becoming active by sharing new posts and updates.
Then, share evergreen content across multiple sites so your fans can easily access them.
Leverage Your Testimonials
Testimonial marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase and improve brand awareness and customer trust. You don’t have to pay for reviews – you provide a free product or service samples to people who ask for them.
You respond with a short review when someone asks about your product or service. If they like what they hear, they’ll likely recommend your business to others. When customers do this, they tell friends, family members, and colleagues about your business.
This process happens naturally over time without much effort on your part. But there’s another way to leverage testimonials effectively.
You can use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to post your testimonials. These posts appear in news feeds, making them highly visible to potential customers.
You can even continue some more by creating videos featuring your testimonials. People love watching themselves talk. Since many people watch YouTube videos, this is one great way to reach more viewers.
Include a URL to Your Post
The recommended way to use this tactic is by adding a link to your post in your profile or comments section. It’s a great way to strengthen your site’s search visibility and build domain authority. If done well, Google considers this a good practice.
However, there are some things worth considering:
- Don’t do this too much. You don’t want to look spammy, or like you’re trying to game anything.
- Make sure the link is useful for people. For example, if you’re linking to a blog article about how to make money online, include a brief description of the article.
- Be careful with keywords, as you want to stay moderate.
- Keep your messages short and sweet.
Improve Your Branding
If you’re looking to build links organically, you’ll want to focus on creating opportunities for others to mention your name or work. Then, as your brand grows, you’ll find that people will start linking to you naturally.
One of the top link-building strategies is growing your brand. You don’t just want to build internal links to have links. You want to grow your brand. So how does one go about doing that? Well, let’s take a look at what happens internally.
Your brand evolves from your thoughts. Then it begins to express itself externally, whether that’s through social media or even offline. As your brand continues to evolve, so too must your thought process. This is where we come into play. For example, if you’re thinking about starting a blog, you’ll likely start writing about popular topics related to your industry.
But once you’ve got some momentum behind those posts, you begin to think about what else you could write about. You may decide to start a podcast. Maybe you start writing books. Whatever it is, the goal is to continue to expand your brand outwardly.
But wait, there’s more. Once you’ve established yourself as an authority within your niche, you’ll find that people will naturally link back to you as your brand grows. While you may not necessarily be able to control how others perceive you, you can certainly influence how they see you.
For example, if you become known for being knowledgeable about something, people will naturally link to articles you’ve written about it.
So, how do you know if you’ve grown enough of a personal brand? Establishing yourself as an expert means considering creating a book. But if you’re already an expert in your field and want to ensure that people understand that fact, you should focus on creating a video content series. Either way, remember that your brand isn’t just limited to what you say. It’s also defined by what you do.
A few ways to grow your brand include:
- Write about yourself
If you write about yourself, you become an expert in your field. You can use this expertise to help others solve problems.
- Create a piece of content around your passions
This includes things like blogging, speaking, writing books, etc.
- Start a podcast
Podcasting is considered one of the most effective forms of high