No matter how much SEO changes, one thing remains true: Link building is still one of the essential pieces of the puzzle for improving rankings. But with search engines continuing to evolve, the link-building landscape has changed dramatically in the last few years.
In this article, we’ll look at the various link-building strategies you can use to increase your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) while ensuring that your efforts remain within the guidelines of each search engine’s algorithm.
What Is Link Building?
Before we dive into the strategies, let’s quickly review what link-building means. Link building is getting external websites to link to your website. Search engines use links to crawl the web and to determine a website’s popularity, authority, and trust.
Having a good number of high-quality inbound links is essential to boosting your site’s rankings. When a website links to your website, it signals to search engines that it is valuable and trustworthy, so it is essential to choose link-building strategies that are both effective and white-hat.
Main Link Building Strategies
Link building can take many forms, from utilizing internal links to creating guest blog posts. A few of the top link-building techniques that can be used are:
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging involves writing articles for other websites in your industry that link back to your own site. This is a great way to build relationships with other businesses in your niche and drive traffic to your site.
When guest blogging, it’s important to choose reputable websites with quality content that aligns with your business goals. You’ll also want to ensure that your articles are informative and engaging, with a link back to your website included in the author bio or within the content itself.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building involves finding broken links on other websites and offering to replace them with your own content. This technique can help you build high-quality links from authoritative websites in your industry.
To find broken links, you can use tools such as Ahrefs or Broken Link Checker. Once you’ve identified a broken link, reach out to the website owner and offer to replace it with your own content. This can be a win-win for both parties, as you get a high-quality link, and the website owner gets a functioning link on their site.
Outreach
Outreach involves reaching out to bloggers and influencers in your niche and asking them to share your content or link back to your website. This can be an effective way to build relationships and earn backlinks from reputable sources.
When reaching out to bloggers and influencers, it’s important to personalize your message and offer something of value in exchange for their support. This could be a free product to review or an exclusive piece of content that they can share with their followers.
Skyscraper Technique
The Skyscraper Technique involves creating high-quality content that surpasses existing content on the same topic. Once you’ve created your content, you reach out to websites that have linked to the original content and ask them to link to your improved version.
To succeed with this technique, it’s important to create content that is relevant, informative, and engaging. You should also promote your content through social media and other channels to attract more traffic and increase your chances of earning backlinks.
Email Outreach
Email outreach involves reaching out to bloggers and website owners via email to request links to your content. This technique can be very effective if done correctly, but it requires a lot of research and personalization.
To succeed with email outreach, it’s important to identify potential link-building opportunities and craft personalized emails that clearly communicate the value of your content. You should also follow up with your recipients to ensure that they received your message and consider including an incentive, such as exclusive content, to encourage them to link back to your site.
Internal Linking
Internal linking involves linking to your own content from within your website. This technique can help distribute link equity to all the pages on your site and improve your overall search engine ranking.
To succeed with internal linking, it’s important to use relevant anchor text and consider the context in which you include the link. You should also ensure that your internal links are easy to find and navigate for your users.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves creating high-quality content that attracts and engages your target audience. This can include blog posts, infographics, videos, and other forms of content that demonstrate your expertise and provide value to your readers.
To succeed with content marketing, it’s important to create content that aligns with your business goals and resonates with your target audience. You should also promote your content through social media and other channels to attract more traffic and earn backlinks.
Automating Your Link Building
Automating some of the steps can be beneficial once you’ve identified the link-building strategies that will work for your website. You can use a tool like SEMrush to help automate some of the manual work of link building, such as prospecting, outreach, and link analysis.
You can also use link-building plugins such as the ones offered by Moz and Majestic that will help you track your link-building efforts and identify potential sources of links.
Tracking and Measuring Results
Ultimately, tracking and measuring your link-building efforts’ progress is crucial. This can help you adjust your strategy and identify what works and doesn’t. You can use several tools to track metrics like organic search traffic, referring domains, and keyword rankings, such as Ahrefs and Majestic.
Conclusion
Link building is an essential part of any SEO campaign. Choosing the link-building strategies that are most effective for your website and fit within the guidelines of the search engine algorithms is necessary. Additionally, it’s crucial to track and measure your results to determine what’s working and what needs to be improved.
Hopefully, this article has provided a good overview of the different link-building strategies to increase your visibility in SERPs.