Backlinks are the second most important ranking factor as stated by Google. These rankings play a vital role in driving traffic to your website, grow readership, and increase the audience base. An important element in building your website authority to improve ranking in search engine results pages is through strategic networking and links to your websites from other well-known sites.
What is Link Building?
Link Building is an SEO strategy that involves getting links from other websites that can be included in the content of your website. The main goal of link building is to increase the search visibility of your website on search engines. These links work to boosts the SEO as they send signals to search engines about the helpful information being a part of the content on your website and the site is high quality.
There are many ways to devise a robust backlinking strategy. Let us understand these in detail.
- Resource Link Building – One of the most effective ways to build links is through resource link building. This requires identifying where the business can add value to the audience by creating a good resource page. To use this method, a thorough analysis of your competitors needs to be done to see who links to their website and not yours. This will help in devising a content strategy that will attract the attention of the businesses that link to your competitors and make them shift to your website to link with. Some of the examples include universities, travel, and tourism boards, etc.
- Turn Your Mentions Into Backlinks – This is one of the easier ways to gain new backlinks as someone has already written about your brand. This may be on a website, on social media, or any other channel. To get the backlinks, these mentions need to be converted to links that require getting in touch with the publisher of the content who usually has no issues doing the same.
- Broken Link Building – It is about finding informative webpages in your industry or niche with external links to dead pages. You can offer an alternative piece of content for the broken link to the webmaster and build new links. This is a lengthy and time-consuming method and requires special tools to find broken links.
- Benefits Of Guest Blogging – It is an effective way to reach a new audience and gain more exposure. The process requires publishing blog articles on other popular websites. This not only helps in gaining backlinks but works in your favour in building your online reputation.
- Supplier Links – If you are in the business of selling products of others, then it presents an excellent opportunity to earn some very authoritative links to your website.
- Business Association Links – Very similar to supplier links, here you need to compile a list of all associations that you are a member of and their websites. Look for a member page on something similar on their website and if not listed, get yourself listed. Another way to gain links is by approaching organizations in your industry that offer links to its members as a part of their membership. Getting membership in such organizations can benefit you in gaining more links.
- Writing Testimonials – Offering to write testimonials for brands that you have worked with is an excellent way to earn high-quality backlinks. Get in touch with brands that you work with and offer to write a review about your experience which they can post on their website. Brands are happy to receive positive feedback that they can share with others and link back to your website.
- Consider The Authority Of The Website Or Linking Page – A link acts as a vote of confidence in the website it is being linked to. A backlink from an authoritative website sends a signal to the search engines that your website is a credible source for the content it is being linked to. The higher the authority of the referring domain linking to the website, the more value you will gain from that backlink.
- Analyze Competing Sites – It is important to analyse the backlink profiles of competing sites to get an insight into their link building strategies and explore ways to replicate their links. The main focus here is to understand the reasons behind your competitors gaining those links and determine if the same can be done by you. Some easy links that can be replicated are user-generated, guest post links, and links from resource pages.
- Digital PR – A good way to build quality backlinks to your website is by using the power of Digital PR. It can help build relevant links on topics from well-known publications in your industry. These links help in positioning you as an industry expert which can majorly contribute to driving referral traffic. To obtain these kinds of backlinks you will need to provide linkable assets and promote them to journalists using PR tactics.
- The Skyscraper Method – It is a link building technique which involves
- Finding content that has many links
- Create better content
- Promote your content to those who have links with the original piece.
This method works well as you build upon content that is already proved to be successful. It will help you build links that contribute to generating organic traffic and help to rank the website for competitive search terms and keywords. Do keep in mind that this method is all about creating the best piece of content available on the web for the chosen topic.
- Roundup Posts – It is a great way to build links to the content that is being created as a part of the content marketing strategy. Many people publish a roundup post regularly and are looking for content that they can include. All you need to do is get in touch with them and let them know about your content.
Many different ways can be used to get backlinks to your website. Which method works for you will depend on how you carried out link building in the past, the industry that you are in, and what the competitors are doing.