Link building plays a vital role in boosting your website’s rank and visibility. In fact, creating backlinks has been one of the most followed SEO tactics ever since search engine optimization rose to prominence. Many people, especially newbies, fail to understand the importance of building backlinks and believe that good content alone can pull enough traffic. While the quality of content is definitely a deciding factor, equally important is the link juice. And in this post, we will discuss 10 simple SEO link building strategies that you must know about.
Guest Post
One of the easiest ways you can get some high-quality backlinks from top-notch websites is by writing guest posts for them. There are numerous websites who will gladly accept your articles and publish them on their websites while providing you with an opportunity to add your website’s link to the article. Do make sure that the article you submit to them is very detailed, to the point, and informative. Only then will your articles be accepted by reputed and authority websites. And when adding your links, make sure that you direct the visitors to a landing page so that you can sign them up for your newsletter or make them inquire about your services. Also, always ensure that the links you get are ‘do follow’ links and not ‘no follow’ links.
Testimonials
Another simple way to get backlinks is to write testimonials for websites. Some companies will invite people to test their new products or services and provide a testimonial for them which will be published on their website. They will also gladly publish your website link along with the testimonial. After all, for just linking your website URL with their website, they will be receiving a positive testimonial from you. This is essentially a win-win for the business. If you have a large number of followers on social media, the companies will happily associate with you. So, if you can find a website that has good authority, then you should definitely approach them for opportunities to provide testimonials.
Mimic Competitor Linking
Building quality backlinks usually takes a lot of time since there are numerous steps involved in it. However, a good way to cut down such time and get high-quality backlinks is by checking out your competitor’s linking profile. There are many SEO tools available which can help you with this. Just key in the URL of your competitor and the tool will show a list of websites which have linked back to the competitor’s site. Now all you have to do is to prepare a list of high authority websites and look for ways to get your website linked to them.
Know the Basics
Above all, have a good grasp on the basics of link building. Blindly venturing into link building without sufficient information about it will only lead to wastage of time and money. And if you don’t know about any good resource for backlink generation, this SEO linking strategy should be of help. Once you have grasped the basics, you will be able to develop backlinks to your website faster, and from more trusted sources.
Resource Links
Many websites will dedicate a page to listing out a few links as resources that will further help the visitors of that website. For example, a website that deals with hacking will list out links that talk about ethical hacking, punishments for unethical hacking, and so on. As such, if you have written any detailed, highly informative posts about punishments for hacking, then the website owners are likely to link your article in their resources list page. So, try to find out some of the most basic questions in the niche you specialize in and write a pillar article about it. When the other website owner finds your article through Google search and see that the information you provide is interesting, they will gladly add a link to your site.
Edu links
Backlinks from .edu domain websites are considered to be of top quality by Google and other search engines. However, getting backlinks from .edu websites is extremely tough. However, some education websites will add a link to your webpage for free if you publish an interesting content which they find useful. Such links will usually be placed in any of the resources pages of the education website. But no matter where the link is placed, getting a link from a .edu website should definitely be on your agenda.
Mentions
Many people will mention your company when they put up a review or talk about your business. And many of these mentions will never be backlinked. This is yet another opportunity that you must exploit. Find out the email of the owners of such websites and send them a message asking them politely whether they would consider adding your link to the mention. Now, most people will happily oblige and link back to your website. However, be sure to first talk about how wonderful their article is. Just sending a one-line message asking for links may not work with everyone. But if you write a couple of paragraphs talking about how useful their article is, and then ask them to link you back, you will have a better chance at getting your link on their website.
Broken Links
When you develop a backlink with a website, there is a good chance that the link can get broken. This can happen due to many reasons, like website migration, webpage change, and so on. But whatever be the reason, the fact remains that such broken links are a wasted opportunity. As such, you should use a good marketing tool to find al such broken links. Then, use a redirect to pull all traffic from such broken URLs to the webpage of your choice.
Skyscraping
Skyscraping is another simple tactic used for link building. In this technique, you provide an authority website with your link as an ideal alternative to their existing links. For example, if your website deals with shoes, then find out top-notch websites that deal with information about shoes. Check out their articles and find those which link to external websites. Look at the information on the external websites and see if you can write an article that provides much more information than the external website. If so, then write a detailed article about that topic. Then contact the website and send them your link stating how replacing their existing external link with your website link will be more useful for their readers since you provide updated, detailed information. This tactic won’t work on every website owner since most of them will be reluctant to waste time changing the links. However, those who do find your article to be more useful for their readers will gladly update their article with your link.
Google Plus Profile
Many people do not know this, but Google Plus does allow users to add in ‘do follow’ links. And this is a big deal since having a backlink from Google itself is very valuable. A good way to use this opportunity is to add the link in the profile introduction section. So, when you are writing about yourself, just add in a line stating that you are also the owner of ‘example.com’. This will give your website a link back directly from Google itself.