Link building Strategies

A solid link building strategy is key for reaching SEO success. There are many different approaches you can take towards SEO link building, and we’ve organized an assortment of various link building techniques to help you with your SEO strategy.

Link building, simply put, is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. All marketers and business owners should be interested in building links to drive referral traffic and increase their site’s authority.

Improve your link building strategy with these link building tips and tricks. Read through and follow these guides and you’ll have a full-fledged link building campaign up and running in no time.

Link building is important because it is a major factor in how Google ranks web pages. Google notes that:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Imagine that we own a site promoting wind turbine equipment that we sell. We’re competing with another wind turbine equipment manufacturer. One of the ranking factors Google will look at in determining how to rank our respective pages is link popularity.

Steps.

• Set up a project by entering your domain.
• Add up to 10 keywords that you want to rank for.
• Add up to 10 competitors to look up the best backlink prospects for your website.
• Find prospects. Set up a strategy for each one and carry it out.
• Reach out to the website owner within the Link Building tool interface.
• Track your success.

Simple Link Building Strategies:

There are a number of link building strategies used to get external websites to link to yours:

• Content Creation & Promotion: Create compelling, unique, high-quality content that people will naturally want to reference and link to, and tell people about it. You have to spread the word before you can expect anyone to find your content and link to it!
• Reviews & Mentions: Put your product, service, or site in front of influencers in your industry, such as popular bloggers or people with a large social media following.
• Links from Friends & Partners: Ask people you know and people you work with to link to your site. Remember that relevance matters; links from sites that are in the same general industry or niche as your site will have more value than links from random, unrelated sites.

Step 1: Get to know your audience

If you want your audience to grow, you need to find out how to expand your audience or how to find a new audience. You should, therefore, know two things: who is my audience right now and what does my ideal audience looks like. At Yoast.com for example, we started out with an audience mainly consisting of (web) developers, but we aspired to reach an audience consisting of a more general group of WordPress users (whilst keeping our initial developer’s audience). We adapted our content to this new group of people, but in order to reach these ‘new’ audiences, links from other websites to our new (less nerdy) content were also important. You should do some research in order to get to know your audience.

Step 2: Make a list of websites that appeal to your desired audience

If you have a clear picture of your present and desired audience in mind, you can make a list of websites that could possibly help you in reaching your new audience. Find those websites that already appeal to your desired audience. Links from these websites could help you to reach your new audience.

Step 3: Write amazing content

In order to get other websites to link to your content, your content simply has to be amazing. And more importantly, it should appeal to the audience you’re aspiring to make your readers or buyers. Make sure your pieces and articles are well structured and nicely written.

Step 4: Match content to websites

If you have written an awesome blog post, you should dive into the list you made as part of your growth strategy (step 2). Choose sites from that list that could possibly link to the article you have written. If you have a long tail keyword approach (writing about small and niche subjects) the number of websites that will be fit to link to your blog post will be small.

Make an effort to find those websites that really fit the specific topic of your blog post or article. These websites will probably be very willing to link, as your blog post really fits their content. More importantly, visitors that will come to your website following that link will really be interested in the topic of your article (making chances of conversion and recurring visits much higher).

Step 5: Reach out

If you’ve really put an effort in both writing content as well as finding websites that fit the content of your article, you should contact the website you would like to link to your site. Tell them about the content or product and ask them to write about it and link to it. Most people will be happy to write about your product if this means they’ll receive it for free! You can use email, but in many cases, Twitter or even a phone call is a great way to contact people as well. Make sure to reach out in a personal way, never send out automated emails.

Step 6: Use social media

If your content is original and well structured, you’ll be able to reach new audiences (and get links) by using social media as well. Make sure you tweet about your blog, perhaps send some tweets to specific persons of whom you think they may like your article. Facebook is also a great way to get exposure for your articles (maybe… even promote it a bit?). And as many people like, tweet and share your articles, you’re bound to receive some more links as well.

There are a few key factors to consider:

• Anchor Text: One of the most important things search engines take into account in ranking a page is the actual text a linking page uses to talk about your content. So, if someone links to our Good Guys Wind Turbine Parts site with the text “wind turbine parts”, that will help us to rank highly for that keyword phrase, whereas if they had simply used text like “Good Guys LLC” to link to our site, we wouldn’t enjoy the same ranking advantage for the phrase “wind turbine parts”.
• Quality of the Linking Page: Another factor taken into account is the quality of the page that is sending the link; search engines allow links from high-quality, trusted pages to count more in boosting rankings than questionable pages and sites.
• Page the Link is Aimed at: Many times, when people talk about your site they’ll link to the home page. This makes it difficult for individual pages to achieve high rankings (because it’s so difficult for them to generate their own link equity).

Interlinking your pages in a few easy steps:

• Keyword Research for Link Building: First, you need to utilize a keyword research tool to have numerous keywords suggested to you that are both relevant and popular.
• Assign Keywords to Content: Next, you have to group your keywords strategically, creating a search-friendly information architecture.
• Link Pages Using Targeted Anchor Text: The final step is to apply your keyword research to intelligent inter-linking; you do this by linking to content using the keywords you’ve discovered.