To get to a good search engine optimization (SEO) ranking, your website doesn’t only need to have original content sprinkled with some keywords. SEO is so much more than just text with keywords, given that it also includes both on-site techniques and optimizing your website with off-site techniques.
SEO does have a learning curve, and it also includes a strategy for getting links—the other major factor in establishing authority for your website.
To build authority for your site, you’ll have to employ link-building strategies that’ll show Google and your readers that the information you share is valuable and trustworthy.
You can do this by getting quality backlinks from other websites, connecting your articles with internal links, and extracting information for your articles from valuable sources. Once you establish authority, getting your content ranking will happen more quickly than you think.
According to WebFX, around 42% of the websites rank high because of links. This shows the value that a quality link-building strategy will bring to your business. And we all know that once you have obtained good SEO results, customers, sales, and profit will eventually follow.
Nowadays, it isn’t just about getting as many backlinks as possible but making sure that those are quality links that you are getting—which means quality is more important than quantity.
Top 10 Link Building Strategies
To give you some ideas, we’ve compiled a list of several effective link building strategies:
Internal Linking
Paying attention to your internal linking will make your website more organized and your sitemap more structured.
If you have a bunch of articles on the same or similar topic, make sure to interlink them to obtain good SEO results. By doing this, search engines like Google will recognize that you have valuable content (both in quantity and quality), which increases your website’s chances of ranking higher. Not to mention that lead users to other blog pages will significantly impact amplifying and spreading your site traffic.
Image Credits: SearchEngineJournalFor instance, if your website is about fashion, you can divide the blog you have into different sections. It can have a section about “current trends,” another about “hot outfit ideas,” and the third one about specific topics related to fashion, such as “sustainability,” etc.
In each of these sections, you’ll probably have several articles to interconnect within the section. This will open up more opportunities and make it easier for your audience to explore articles that are alike and read more of what interests them.
Links from Your Private Blog Network (PBN)
Granted, creating a Private Blog Network (PBN) is a grey hat SEO technique; it still works every time!
What makes a major difference is that by investing in a PBN, you won’t have to depend on anyone to get the needed backlinks. Isn’t that amazing?
So, no more email outreach techniques beg influencers to insert a link to your website or find websites for guest blogging. This is why building a PBN is sort of your best choice when it comes to taking matters into your hands.
A PBN is, in fact, a network of several websites that you own, which you can use to build authority to your main site by having them a link to it. The websites in your network aren’t really “real” websites—they’re created with this exact purpose in mind. So, if somehow search engines discover your network, you’ll get penalized.
Since this is a gray hat technique, you’ll have to choose a quality and reliable PBN hosting provider that’ll keep your network safe, so you don’t get discovered. If you aren’t sure what a PBN is or how to build it, there’s a good guide on the basics of private blog networks over at LaunchCDN.
Guest Blogs
Writing guest posts for sites within your niche industry is a great way to provide your website with a backlink. If you choose to write guest blogs as a link-building strategy, both you and the website you’ll collaborate with will benefit from it.
The website you’re writing for will have potential SEO benefits because you’ll provide them with quality content, and your website will get a quality backlink in return.
To find websites that accept guest posts, look for the “Write for Us” section.
However, many websites that don’t even have a description, as we mentioned, will say yes to an attractive guest blogging offer.
Make sure to reach out to some quality websites that you want your post to be featured in and get yourself a backlink. Once they know that you’ll provide quality content, their chances to collaborate with you will automatically increase.
Commenting on Blogs
If you provide valuable comments on blogs, you can additionally place a link to your website. Even though these links are usually no-follow links because the chances that they will be clicked on are meager, it’s still a great way to start your link-building strategy.
Just make sure you increase the chances that a site visitor follows the link by providing real value for that particular audience.
If you are looking for websites to start with Blog Commenting,
- [List] Top 60+ DA Make Money Online websites for Blog Commenting
- List of 80+ DA websites on SEO for Blog Commenting
The Resources You Use Should Be From Trusted Websites
The links that you have in the content you publish on your website should be wisely chosen. If search engines recognize that you use information from trustworthy websites, they’ll consider the content you offer as legit, which will have a significant impact on your website’s SEO score.
So, make sure that you link to websites that end in .gov or .edu because usually those sites have a higher authority than regular .com sites. Also, before linking to a website, check their ranking on Alexa.
Alexa Ranking for WikipediaThis will give you an idea about how high or low the authority a website is.
Of course, you can use common sense to distinguish trustworthy sites by checking out and linking to the industry leaders—they’re at the top for a reason!
Email Outreach
An effective email outreach technique will increase the chances of getting a positive response from the influencers you’re pitching to. However, getting a backlink from an influencer requires a lot of time and effort, so get used to negative answers or no answers at all.
If you want to be successful in outreach, you have to create a quality strategy that will consist of the right subject lines and personalized messages.
Here are some effective email outreach techniques you should keep in mind:
- Your email subject should be a summary of what your email is about. This means that your email subject is supposed to be short and to the point, with a dose of intrigue, and helps the other person understand what it’s all about.
- Make sure to use a paid email service that will carry your company’s name instead of your email ending in Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc. This way, when an influencer receives your email, they’ll find it more credible since they can Google your company and see that it’s legit.
- Make sure to approach influencers with a friendly tone and skip some of the most common email openers, such as “Dear Sir/Madam.” You know who you’re writing to, so use their first name and some personal details to show them that you’ve done your research and see who you’re writing to.
- Influencers usually don’t have a lot of time to read emails, given that they probably receive a lot daily, so hearing your praises or beating around the bush won’t do. Instead, skip on that and be direct, concise, and straightforward in the request you’re going to make.
- Having a voice that’s different from the rest should be your priority. If you sound like most other email outreach marketers do, influencers won’t even click on the email to see what it’s about.
- You should make the email outreach technique mutually beneficial, both for you and the influencer in question. Let them know what they are getting if they say “yes” to a collaboration with you.
- Write a follow-up message! Sometimes influencers don’t have time to read your email or leave it for later and forget about it, even though it might be of interest to them. So, this is your chance to remind them about your proposition. You should send them a follow-up message to see whether they’ll be interested or not. After the first follow-up message, there is a chance for a second optional follow-up. However, you should be aware that in most cases, if they don’t reply to the first follow-up message, they probably aren’t interested.
There are even tools to simplify your process for creating effective email outreach campaigns, such as NinjaOutreach, FindThatLead, Contactout, or Aeroleads.
Check Out The Links From Your Competitors
Why not look at what your competitors are doing?
Sometimes, if you’re new in the online world, you’ll have to check the techniques your competitors use to learn from them and eventually obtain good results. So how do your competitors earn their links? Do they pay for them, do they use email outreach, or employ another technique?
If you find a good one, you can even replicate their link-building strategy and see if it’ll work for you. You should know that you probably aren’t going to invent anything new by now, and that’s the reason why you should make things easier and check out your competitors who have been in the industry way before you started.
We don’t advise you to copy anything from them, but let them guide you in creating your strategy.
Paid Links
This link-building strategy is the most expensive one of all. Going for paid links means that you would pay another website to place a backlink to yours. However, in most cases, the technique has shown itself to be valuable and practical.
However, it’s against Google’s webmaster guidelines because it’s challenging to compete against websites that use paid links.
Sometimes, when an email outreach technique doesn’t work, website owners implement paid links into their marketing strategy, and they never seem to fail with this one. Trying to see how it goes with paid links is an excellent opportunity to place your website links on some quality websites with already established authority.
Sites that won’t allow you to provide a guest post might say yes to a paid link, so keep that in mind and see if it’s worth a try.
Link Exchange
Link exchange means establishing a mutual collaboration with a website to provide each other with backlinks. By doing this, both sites will benefit, so the only problem is finding a partner website that will take part in this link exchange.
To find an online business that would eventually say yes to a link exchange scheme, make sure you follow these rules:
- Find a business within your industry
- Exchange links with businesses in your field
- Make sure you choose a quality partner website
Q&A Websites
There are many Q&A websites and forums where people ask many questions from every niche. Some of the most popular are Quora and Reddit, where people can ask anything they want. Also, many of the answers that users have answered show up on Google’s first page.
This means that the answers are pretty valuable, and they can even be a perfect match for a particular search inquiry. This is a chance for you to answer their questions and sneak in a link to your website.
However, you have to make sure the content is rich in keywords, well structured, and original—and that readers find it genuinely helpful.
Related Read: 7 Semrush Updates From 2020 You Need To Check (Explained)
Conclusion
Your website SEO dramatically depends on your link-building strategy. You have to pay attention to the link-building techniques your competitors use, write guest blogs, and collaborate with websites for link exchange.
Also, we highly advise you to focus on internally linking within the pages of your site and with the help of your own Private Blog Network. With that said, we do hope that you’ll find the techniques that best suit your business (and your budget) and that you’re all set to get quality backlinks!
If you find this Guide on Link Building Strategy useful, do share it on social media. It will help some bloggers or business owners increase their domain authority and rank their content higher on search engine result pages.
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