One of the most significant and challenging aspects of search engine optimisation is link development. Link building encompasses any strategy that encourages other websites to include links back to your own.
There are several methods people use to try to acquire new links, but even the most reliable ones can need a lot of time, effort, and failure before they provide any noticeable results.
Common link building tactics can be effectively implemented once you have some high-quality content on your website and a solid foundation of relationships with various people and companies in your field.
Five Common Link Building Strategies
Promoting Specific Pieces of Content
The bulk of your content promotion efforts should be focused on reaching as many members of your intended audience as possible. This strategy is distributing your content more directly to a selected group of people who you believe are more likely to engage with it by liking, sharing, or linking to it.
Tagging them when you share the post on social media may be enough to attract their attention if it’s someone you already know and like. If it isn’t, you might send them an email explaining why they should be interested in what you have to say based on previous posts they’ve shared or articles they’ve written about the same or comparable subjects.
This strategy runs the greatest risk of being perceived as annoying by the target audience. Since you’re effectively asking complete strangers to help you out, it’s important to focus on how your information might be useful to others rather than on how it can help you. Building relationships beforehand will make this strategy much more effective.
Promoting Your Name in Conversation
A link opportunity exists whenever your brand is mentioned. You can find online mentions of your company’s brand and any executives who might be considered thought leaders by using a link reclamation tool, Google Alerts, or Google’s more advanced search commands. Create a pitch to the website owner for every mention of your business, CEO, or founder that doesn’t include a link back to your website.
You should not send the same email to every website without first seeing each one individually. When people complain about your business, you run the danger of irritating those who already dislike you. In addition to looking lazy to the recipient, you will waste your time if the reference has nothing to do with your business but is a different use of term you use as brand name.
However, if the website is praising your brand favorably, they may be willing to take the extra few minutes to add the link at your request.
Contents of a Skyscraper
One of the first things you should do is check out the SERP for a variety of keywords related to your brand to see what comes up. You’re seeking for stuff that ranks highly but isn’t all that great or is out of date. These are the goals of the skyscraper content strategy if you are convinced that you can develop superior content (or have already done so).
Make sure that the content you’ve already made or are planning to make fits the identified terms perfectly. Make it some of your greatest work, and make sure it’s better in every way than what’s now ranking at the top of Google.
Once your material is up, use an SEO tool’s backlink auditing functionality to identify pages that link to the low-quality content you’re trying to replace in the SERP, and then reach out to those sites to suggest they link to your content instead.
Invited Blog Posting
One of the main challenges of link building is convincing others to put in effort that will ultimately benefit you more than them. When you produce a helpful guest post for another website, you’re providing them and their readers with something of value, making guest posting a worthwhile strategy. They won’t have to do anything more to include a natural link back to your site in the post, and if you do it well, you’ll be adding value to their audience in the process. Everybody benefits.
You should start looking for blogs that accept guest posts in your sector and any adjacent or complimentary fields. You can use Google for this purpose, searching for terms like “guest post” or “guest post submission guidelines” in your business, and then checking out the sites that show up to learn more about the themes they cover and the general format of their pieces.
Repairing Weak Connections
This strategy is similar to the one before in that you offer something of value to the website owner while simultaneously requesting a link. Visitors will leave a site that has broken links because they think it is unprofessional or out of date. You’ve identified a link building opportunity if you can find websites that have broken links that used to lead to information that is related to what you cover on your website.
You can either try to locate broken links on previously covered topics or provide new content that covers the same issue as the defunct link.
Formulating a Plan for Link Construction
When dissected, the term “link building” can refer to a wide variety of activities. To begin establishing your backlink profile, you need not implement each of the aforementioned strategies. Each company is free to employ whichever strategies it thinks would be most effective. However, engaging in some type of link building is essential if you want to compete in the search engines.