Link building strategies have done a lot of changing since they first entered the scene as an Search Engine Optimisation tactic. Gone are the days where it was not uncommon to find many organisations (heinously!) link spamming away without a care. Nowadays, if you even remotely attempt to link spam, you'll find yourself penalised and hanging your ahead in shame, your attempts at SEO victory left hanging in tatters.
A strong link building strategy means stepping away from antiquated, useless practices, focusing on auditing your methods, and making the necessary changes to see you start building links that matter. Many people assume that link building isn't worth the effort anymore, especially when faced with stringent Google standards and the increase in individuals who are pickier when it comes to publishing links. But there's still a lot of worth in linking strategies, when they're done right.
We've put together a few tips to help you take your link building strategy to solid ground.
12 Tips for Creating Better Links
1. Start By Building Better Relationships
A good link building strategy relies on creating and maintaining good relationships. This means reaching and getting involved in online communities, forums and social groups. By building contacts in these areas, and working on your relationships with them, you create an ideal environment for link building. If you're wondering how you go about building relationships like this, you can do so by making relative comments, joining in discussions with useful information and sharing in local news for your industry.
Once you've established these relationships, you'll be able to:
- Ask for backlinks from your contacts within your industry and online community
- Exchange linking opportunities with others (although in moderation, to ensure your linking still retains it's authority and authenticity)
2. Weed Out Your Broken Links
Broken links do happen, and it's important that you follow up on yours. If you don't, you create a situation in which trust is lost. In instances when you find broken links, they'll return 404 errors. What you want to do is redirect broken links to another page, like your homepage. You can use a tool like Link Juice Recovery to reclaim your broken links.
3. Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
By arming yourself with tools like Link Alerts or Competitor Link Detox, you can compare your site's links to those of your competitors, zero in on specific competitors' whose strategies you're curious about and finally, keep an eye out for any new links your they may have created. It's not uncommon to find some handy back linking opportunities you can take advantage of when you do this.
4. Find the Right Sources
If you want to avoid being flagged by Google's Penguin algorithm, you can't go linking like crazy to every source under the sun. You need to select your links with discernment – when deciding on a link source, you need to ensure it's:
- Reputable and respectable. This means it's a place where visitors turn for legitimate information, and find informative and helpful.
- Relevant. If you're going to create links, you need to ensure they're extremely relevant to your business and industry.
5. Got Mentioned? Turn it Into a Backlinking Opportunity
One of the simplest, and easiest ways of generating backlinks is by using your mentions. When people write about your brand, product or services, they don't always remember to link their work back to your website. In instances like this, it's as simple as contacting the webmaster and requesting they convert the mention to a backlink.
6. Create Content That People Want to Link Back to
This one's a no brainer. The content you create has a massive impact on your ability to generate backlinks, and has a huge impact on your linking strategy. It's up to you to create content that begs to be mentioned and shared. There are a couple of ways to do this, including:
- Starting up a blog. If you haven't already got a blog, it's definitely time to do so. If you have a blog, but it's been gathering dust for months, it's time to get the wheels turning again and start capitalising on its potential.
- Sharing more infographics. Infographics have tremendous potential for going viral because they're easy to digest, fun to look at and people love to share them.
- Establish yourself as an expert. Publish case studies, research papers, comparisons and reviews that showcase your expertise in your industry, and up your chances of receiving backlinks by people searching for educational and relevant content relating to your industry.
- Share your content on social media. By doing so, you create more opportunities for your content to be seen and shared, and more likely to be used as links by others.
- SEO. Make sure your content is optimised for long tail keywords and do your on-page SEO.
7. Answer a Couple Questions
There's a multitude of FAQ sites online - Quora is one of the most well-known, and is a great place to build backlinks by answering questions posed by users. Find users asking questions pertaining to your expertise by searching for your keywords. In your answers to questions, try linking back to blogs or pieces of content you've created.
8. Show Decorum on a Forum
There's nothing wrong with creating backlinks on a forum, provided that you don't spam them with your links. The key is to only link to your site when it's absolutely relevant, and only respond in forums when you can give a thorough and helpful answer.
9. Be Generous With Your Own Links
As strange as it may seem, linking to other relevant sites when creating your own content is a great way to gain some reliable backlinks. The way to go about it is to email the website you're linking to personally, and let them know you've mentioned them in your content and suggest they may like to socialise the post. If they do tweet it out, you'll see more visitors to your site. There's also a chance they may link back to your site.
10. Join a Blogging Community
By joining a blogging community, you're opening yourself up to linking and being linked by fellow bloggers, who may use your blogs as references in their own work. Return the favour to them as well, and improve your standing with them by creating relevant and authoritative content. Submit your blogs to these communities.
11. Don't Forget Your Internal Links Too!
When crafting your content, make sure you interlink your blogs to one another whenever you can. This makes your pages easy for search engine bots to crawl, and helps readers on your site navigate from page to page.
12. Use a Backlink Monitoring Tool
If you're a HubSpot customer, remember you can track your inbound links, as well as those of your competitors from within the Reporting tool! If you're not a HubSpot customer, there are a few free and paid tools available such as Open Site Explorer from Moz, Ahrefs or Monitorbacklinks.com.
Don't assume linking is a bygone SEO strategy. It's still a relevant and helpful tool for drawing in visitors to your site, but only if it's executed with care and consideration. Why not review your current linking strategy, and beef it up with a few of these tips?
